One of the most powerful pillars of internet content is the genre in which people describe their morning routines in solemn, sacred detail. This genre exists across every medium, every platform, and every internet subculture.
TikTok has videos like Get Ready With Mes, in which influencers discuss nourishing salves and clever makeup products, while beauty YouTube has the more compelling Vogue Beauty Secrets, in which dewy-skinned celebrities show off the various facial treatments they use every morning.
Artists on their blogs swap tips on the best ways to stick to morning pages, leading women from every industry tell the Cut how they get their work done, and on LinkedIn and YouTube, lifehackers share their morning secrets for maximizing productivity.
Productive mornings have really taken off in recent times, beloved by wellness and morning people alike. The king of productivity rituals is controversial Stanford neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman, whose routines are regularly described as “scientifically perfect” in his vlogs.
Huberman’s morning routine walks a fine line between idyllic and torturous, depending on your inclinations. He wakes up within an hour of sunrise each day and goes for a 10-minute walk outside (30 if it’s cloudy) to maximize his morning light exposure. He drinks electrolytes (to stay hydrated) but abstains from food and caffeine during 90 minutes of focused work (no emails, just intense research), after which he consumes caffeine, exercises intensely, and jumps into cold water (cold showers also help, says Huberman). He doesn’t eat anything until lunch.
At the start of the day, the strict capitalist clock demands forward momentum, but the soft animal that is the human body wants nothing more than a comfortable nap in bed.
The routine has become an internet hit. Social media is flooded with videos and essays documenting the results of following Huberman’s routine for a day, a week, a month, or a year. In one video, Huberman tests his testosterone levels before and after the month-long experiment to prove that his protocol boosted them. (At this point, it’s important to note that not all of Huberman’s ideas stand up to scrutiny.)
Huberman’s ritual is intense, but the fascination it evokes is neither unusual nor new. Humanity has always been fascinated by the right way to spend the morning, and (allegedly) how other people do it. At the start of the day, the strict capitalist clock demands that we move forward, but the soft animal that is the human body wants nothing more than to snooze comfortably in bed. Perhaps it is because getting up is so difficult that it has become so strongly associated with virtue.
The connection is profound: After all, how we spend our mornings determines how we spend our whole day, and ultimately, our entire lives. Our longing for the sacred hours of early morning offers a glimpse into what we actually value.
The idea that staying up late is sinful is deeply rooted in Western culture. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: meditation — a note he wrote to himself during his 2nd century reign that has recently become popular among tech enthusiasts — berates himself for his shortcomings, including the difficulty he found getting out of bed in the morning. “When you unwillingly rise in the morning, bear this thought in mind: I am up for a man’s business,” he tells himself. While it is true that lying in bed is “more comfortable,” after all, “do you not exist for pleasure, and not for action and effort?”
Jonathan Edwards, the influential early American theologian, agreed with Aurelius. “I believe that Christ rose so soon from the tomb that he counsels us to rise early in the morning,” he wrote in his diary in 1728. He himself rose at 4 a.m. and spent 13 hours a day studying Christ. When Benjamin Franklin outlined his ideal schedule in his 1771 autobiography, he recommended rising at 5 a.m. to pray, wash, have breakfast, and plan the day.
You can see why many of us have come to believe that mornings are more virtuous than afternoons or evenings, and that it’s more important to get it right in the morning than any other time of the day. There’s a strict moral hierarchy of times of day. It’s like the old adage about breakfast being the most important meal of the day (which turns out to be a myth spread by cereal lobbyists and religious sects).
This is pretty much the same logic behind the endless deluge of modern morning-routine content: You need to optimize your mornings, not your afternoons, because that’s when (some would exaggerate) it’s essential to flex your discipline.
“Your morning routine is one of the most powerful ways you can impact your long-term success,” explains AI productivity coach Rize in a 2022 blog post. “Mornings are a time when you have a clean slate and aren’t influenced by the events of the day, which means you can more consciously choose your actions and decide what will serve you.”
“Many of us are busy, have a lot of responsibilities and obligations, and often feel pressed for time,” wellness site VeryWell acknowledges in 2023. “Having a great morning routine can make a big difference in helping you be more productive, achieve your goals, feel organized, and do all of this with confidence.”
Or, as one Reddit user put it, “I want to have some kind of productive routine that gives me a reason to get up every morning.”
There’s some evidence for the idea that how you spend your morning affects the rest of your day. A 2024 Stanford University School of Medicine study found that going to bed early and waking up early is better for your mental health than going to bed late. Meanwhile, a 2016 study from Harvard Business Review (HBR) found that customer service representatives who started their day in a good mood typically maintained that mood throughout the day, even when they had to deal with a terrible customer. (Scary as it may be, HBR’s conclusion was that managers should send employees “morning morale-boosting messages.” What better way to ruin a good mood than hearing C-level Steve tell you he wants you to have a great morning crushing the numbers?)
But do we really need to optimize our mornings to maximize our health in order to perform better at business? Is becoming a scrupulously healthy productivity machine really what we want?
A morning with an artist and his boss
The routines of famous artists, repeated over and over like little myths, tend to focus more on cultivating intense emotional states than on cheerfulness, and so usually involve either monk-like asceticism or the ingestion of large amounts of stimulants. The aim of these kinds of routines is to exercise creativity, or to awaken it with the necessary chemical means.
In his 2013 book Daily Rituals: How Artists WorkMason Curry reports that author Patricia Highsmith would start her day’s writing in bed with cigarettes, coffee, vodka, doughnuts, and a bowl of sugar to make writing as enjoyable as possible, while Proust, he claims, fueled his writing with opium, coffee, caffeine pills, and barbiturates to counteract the caffeine.
At the other end of the spectrum, Curley says, Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope would rise at 5:30 a.m. and work at his desk for three hours before starting his job at the post office. Beethoven would rise at dawn, count out the exact 60 beans needed to make a cup of coffee, then work at his desk until 2 or 3 p.m., occasionally taking a walk outside to rejuvenate.
The morning health ritual is rhetorically positioned as both a luxury and a capitalist virtue.
Today’s most popular morning routines fall somewhere between the Beethoven and Highsmith schools: They focus on health and self-care, with meticulous skin-care rituals and daily exercise as universally obligatory as bathing.
Arianna Huffington, Oprah, Steve Jobs, and Jack Dorsey all combine meditation with gratitude journaling. Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Aniston drink lots of water. Everyone exercises. (Seriously, everyone exercises: Arianna Huffington, Oprah, Jack Dorsey, Tim Armstrong, Karen Brackett, Hans Vestberg, Vittorio Colao, Tim Cook, Barack Obama, Jennifer Aniston, Kim Kardashian, Martha Stewart, Giorgio Armani, etc.)
Morning wellness routines are rhetorically positioned as both a luxury and a capitalist virtue. The theory is that taking the time to take care of your body and mind first thing in the morning will allow you to get more done later. In fact, Andrew Huberman does all this to optimize his productivity. (Are some of these people not 100% transparent about their perfectly orchestrated morning routines? That thought crosses my mind.)
“Typically, people say, ‘How can I lift heavier, focus better, or remember better?'” Huberman explains in the video. “And it’s like, ‘Okay, let’s go over the basics.'” His morning schedule is designed to improve his ability to lift, focus and remember — in other words, get work done.
Ten years ago, morning routines also consisted of “wake up and get to work.” But they didn’t do it the same way. CEOs reported getting out of bed at 4am and diving straight into email. “I can’t stand not doing at least one email!” one CEO told The Guardian about their email routine in 2013. Back then, there was no mention of the wonders of screen-free mornings, meditation, and journaling that are foundational to today’s high-productivity routines.
Perhaps the current situation is a picture of rising and striving after a few years in which the combined traumas of the Trump era and the pandemic have forced everyone to seek new ways of coping without betraying the capitalist imperative to achieve more. White-collar workers spent the better part of two years obsessed with their health, with little room for anything other than work. Now we are obsessed with our health in order to work more.
Our morning priorities reflect what we value, and right now, it seems, what matters is keeping our wounded minds and bodies together and doing the best we can to do the work the world needs us to do. What more could we possibly get done in just an hour in the morning?
