The inspiration for this comes from one of my recent clients, who was struggling with the right getting up time as we were calendaring together.
That is, she’d automatically picked her pre-kids, super-early-wake-up time, thinking she’d love to do that again now that she was past the baby season.
Buuuut, it just wasn’t happening. She was hitting the snooze button.
So of course I asked her, why not? Why are you choosing to sleep longer? What’s going on in your evening that you aren’t getting to your rest sooner?
(‘Cause there’s always a reason – and you can get your rest on one side of the midnight line or the other. But it’s got to come from somewhere.)
And then I asked, do you want to shift your identity as an early bird in this season? Not make 6am yoga a performance? Do you *want* to be back to that early morning time for you?
So, what it turned out, is that she really did still want to get up early in the morning to have that quiet time to herself. She was missing that.
(Great; now we know what to work with. Because it’s *your* deepest needs and wants that are my drivers for specific scheduling advice.)
But instead of going off to morning yoga like she used to – where people would be looking for her and kind of checking up on her – she really thought it sounded nice to “have mornings at home.”
Just completely remove the performance aspect, no other people around to impress or justify sleeping in to, and simply springboard herself to where *she* wanted to go.
Which was having her cake and eating it too, I pointed out – she got to keep that early morning identity, AND skip the performative aspect! (Neat trick there.)
Then that’s what we’ll do, I told her. And congratulated her.
Because she already knew what she wanted to do. Now she just had to give herself permission to do it.
So what about you? What fears, worries, doubts about other people’s opinions are coming up around *your* morning wake-up time?
Are you getting sucked into the “good moms get up early, so I’ve got to push myself out of bed so I don’t get scolded for setting a late alarm” mode?
Do some journaling around what’s beneath that. How you would answer that theoretical scolder. See where you’re afraid that your justifying yourself wouldn’t hold water.
Because when we get to the root of *that*, *then* you’ll be able to choose (and hold to) your own start time for the morning.
But we’ve got to excavate that mindset gunk first.
