5 Habits of Authentic Morning People You Can Easily Borrow

Science shows there’s a strategy behind becoming a morning person.

I’ve never been a morning person and honestly, it had never been a real issue until recently. When I worked a corporate job, I could more or less chug through work without too many complications. I hated my mornings, but thought everyone did.

When I went fully freelance, it suddenly became imperative to give myself a reason to wake up well in the morning. Good days and bad days started making a huge difference in my income and my enjoyment of my job. Like many freelancers before me, I found that how my morning started dictated how my day went.

I tried a lot of different tricks before settling on these five habits I stole from “real” morning people that helped me have better mornings.

While it’s true certain people’s circadian rhythms favor more of a night mode, many of us could benefit from poaching the habits of authentic morning people. These habits are scientifically backed and can help just about anyone be a morning person, from the moment you wake up, to boosting your mood, to increasing productivity in those early hours.

The best part of these habits is that there are no radical changes, cold showers, or big asks. These are all simple shifts that helped me and can help give you a better morning.

1. Set up your circadian rhythm for success.

Life of all kinds — trees, bugs, and humans to name a few types — evolved to use the sun as a source of information and timing, guiding our circadian rhythms. Recently, humans moved indoors, installed electric lights, and closed the curtains on the sun. This means our rhythms are a little off-kilter — research shows that electric lights and reduced exposure to sunlight delays our circadian timing.

If it’s an option for you, consider welcoming both the sun’s rising and falling into your routine. In the evening, reduce screentime and electric light as much as possible to get your body to recognize a “true dark.” In the morning, try waking up with no or light curtains. This will help your internal clock wake you up when it gets light out. Alternatively, especially if you live in darker parts of the world, you could look into investing in a sun lamp that can gradually lighten up your room.

I found it easy to leave my curtains open — my street is dark, and it gets light at a decent hour. My challenge was more in setting screentime restrictions at night. As a freelancer, it’s really tough for me to switch off and not check emails, notifications, and other little pings that would be a new source of income. What worked best for me wasn’t restricting, but replacing: I started checking out audiobooks from the library and listening to those at night, instead.

Morning people look forward to their mornings partially because their body rhythms are working for them, not against them. Instead of trying to block out light with curtains or eye masks, take a leaf out of the page of authentic morning people, and use the sun as an ally in your morning instead of a dreaded enemy.

2. Carefully select the noise that will wake you up.

You know what the worst part of my morning used to be? Jolting awake to the latest Taylor Swift bop playing at top volume, then lying awake in bed for a few seconds while my heart rate returned to normal. But science shows there’s actually a two-step process to wake way to wake up.

First, pick the right noise. Music is a solid bet, as research shows that people who woke to sounds with a strong melody were less susceptible to sleep inertia, the groggy state that tends to persist in the transition to wakefulness. However, if you’re tired of ruining your favorite song by using it as an alarm, you can turn to nature for inspiration, by using birdsong or other melodic natural noises.

Second, modulate the volume. Research has shown that a waking cue that gradually builds is less stressful than one that abruptly jars people out of sleep. (This mimics how humans woke up until fairly recently: by the growing light of the sun.) Set your alarm to start quiet, and gradually build up.

While I miss Taylor Swift’s dulcet tones waking me up, it’s actually a lot easier, not to mention a heck of a lot less jarring, for me to wake up to a melodic birdsong that starts quiet and gradually gets louder.

This two-step selection process is one morning people all over the world use to wake up on the right side of the bed every morning.

3. Start your day proactively, not reactively.

Most of us are guilty of this: we start our day by checking our phones. Notifications, emails, alerts and more pile up overnight for us to wade through first thing in the morning.

Dan Dowling writes in Entrepreneur that the best morning routine is one that starts with proactivity, rather than reactivity. That is, morning people don’t immediately start their day by reacting to stimuli, but rather by setting up their day for themselves. “[I]f you’re constantly reacting to external stimuli — whether those be messages, social media, or news — you don’t have the opportunity to direct yourself in the way you see fit,” he says.

What he recommends is including three elements in the first few hours of your day to start building proactive habits: gratitude, planning and exercise.

The way I do this is by asking myself every morning what I can do for the people I love, creating a five-bullet to-do list, and doing a 30-minute circuit set with my family. The whole thing takes me about 50 minutes and it’s a great way to start my day proactively. Yours will look different to mine, but there are tons of ways to look at the things you can actively address instead of checking your phone first thing.

The temptation is there to spend our day reacting to what happens to us because it takes less mental effort. However, true morning people make the most of those early hours by setting themselves up for success.

4. Make the most of your productive “ultradian” hours.

It’s a lie that we have 8 productive hours to our day, despite what our 40-hour workweek would have you believe. Instead, most of us cycle through what’s called the “ultradian” rhythms of productivity, where there are certain blocks of time that our brains are naturally supercharged for.

Morning people aren’t necessarily those who have their productivity peaks in the morning; they’re just the ones who have successfully identified when those hours are and make the most of them. They don’t try to get hard stuff done when they’re at an ebb, and they block themselves time to focus when they know they’re fired up.

A lot of us believe that mornings are our most productive times, and so we sabotage our chances to be real morning people by shoehorning in difficult work in those early hours. Instead, collect data on yourself and figure out when those peak hours are.

Personally, I discovered that my day starts best when I start with easy wins early on in the morning, and work through to my bigger projects in the late morning. I’m very unproductive in the afternoons, so I try to schedule my admin for then — answering emails, replying to comments, editing videos, and cross-posting content. I was much happier doing that rather than trying to spend the whole morning either indulging my lack of inertia or trying to shoehorn in 5 productive morning hours.

Morning people enjoy their morning in the best way for them, no matter if that’s crunching through big projects or relaxing and checking small items off your to-do list.

5. Sync your brainwaves to the right music.

Morning people benefit from being extremely energetic in the morning. Some of that is attitude, but some of that is knowing the right tricks to get your brain into the right state. Certain music has been demonstrated to serve as a carrier for beta brain waves, which scientists associate with everyday alertness, critical thinking, socialization, learning and cognitive processing.

If your annoyingly perky coworker starts his morning by jamming out to Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off, that’s not a coincidence — songs with beats of between 140–180 beats per minute are ideal for this kind of beta wave synchronization.

I find it’s best to time these music sessions with short breaks, too. In my morning routine, I space out 5–10 minute walks around the neighborhood and play 2–3 songs on a playlist I created especially for that purpose.

While you can’t do this all the time — brains need downtime to function properly — morning people harness the power of music to have fun, productive, upbeat mornings.

Our bodies aren’t built for the environment we live in. Morning people make the most of it.

Part of the reason so many of us aren’t morning people isn’t laziness, lack of motivation, or hard-wired night owl mode. It’s because we’ve moved away from the natural sources of stimuli that help us manage our days and nights. By stealing habits from real morning people, I found I could reset my system.

“Today’s environment, however, is very different from our ancestral past…This has produced a mismatch between our adaptive traits and today’s environment,” write Fitzgerald & Danner in their 2012 paper on the evolution of the workplace. And that’s what morning people are truly best at — creating as much of a match as possible, given the circumstances.

For me, it was paramount to become a morning person very quickly because my fledgling business depended on it. But I wish I had started much, much sooner. Enjoying my mornings the best way for me has genuinely been a lifechanger.

To become more of an authentic morning person, you don’t need to undergo a gene transplant or funnel gallons of coffee in the morning. You just need to go back to the basics our bodies were built on, using circadian, ultradian, and even musical rhythms to have not just a good morning, but a great day.