Morning people

There are some people who just bounce effortlessly out of bed, refreshed, bright eyed and bursting with energy, absolutely raring to go, at 6am.

I am not one of them.

Unfortunately my husband and two daughters are. I say unfortunately because as a non-morning person living in a family of early birds, my days of lie-ins and morning procrastination are numbered.

I really love the idea of being a morning person. Noel and the girls are always so full of life and energy as I stumble around bleary-eyed hugging my mug of tea. (Incidentally I am the only one of us who drinks tea - Noel doesn't do hot drinks and I sometimes wonder if his reduced caffeine intake is one of the reasons for his early perkiness)

A breakfast picnic

The morning is without doubt the most beautiful part of the day. All of the lovely, life-enriching things I am so drawn to - meditating, yoga, exercise, journal-writing - are best done in the morning. Morning people are said to be more productive, more energetic and more creative. Morning routines are a 'thing', a statement of intent at the start of each day, said to set the tone for what is to come.

Despite my AM sluggishness I'm no night owl either. 10pm is a 'late night'. (Children are tiring, OK? I don't know what my excuse was before that!)

I also don't really like being out of sync with the rest of my family, yawning along behind. Everybody waiting around for me to get on with it, or always being one step behind, chasing my tail from the moment I get up.

It's easier to change one person's habits than three people's, and it's probably easier to turn water into wine than it is to get my children to 'go back to sleep' once their eyes spring open at WTF o'clock.

So I had a bit of a trawl online for tips and tricks on becoming a morning person.

None of it was rocket science - go to bed earlier, no screens in the bedroom, keep the room dark and cool, but let natural light in in the morning, and so on.

Which leads me to suspect that actually there's little a person can do to turn into a morning person, you either are one or you aren't, and if you're not you have to rely on the one tip that's repeated over and over and over again….

…just GET UP and GET ON WITH IT.

It does make sense that the more you lie in bed longing for ten more minutes, the more you press snooze, the more you lounge about looking at Twitter and procrastinating, the more cups of tea you drink in bed before you get up, the longer it will take you to get moving.

As brutal as it is, just getting up and getting moving straight away is pretty much the most effective way to turn into a morning person. It might be tougher for me than it is for the morning people - or who knows, maybe the morning people just make less of a fuss about it than I do.