Waking up Early

I had a thought this morning, as I was getting ready at 7:30am for a morning class:

I think that waking up early makes me happy.

Then, I corrected myself:

I think that waking up late makes me unhappy.

I think that’s the distinction.

I don’t really enjoy the act of waking up early, but I know that if I lounge in bed for too long I’ll start to feel guilty. The day starts draining away and I haven’t even gotten ready yet.

So the good thing about waking up early is that I avoid that feeling — not that I feel good, but that I avoid feeling bad.

But still, it’s so hard to convince my brain that this is true. Every morning that I don’t have a morning class, my brain tries to convince me that this day is different. That I can stay in bed and scroll through TikTok and that I won’t regret it in an hour.

But it always turns out that that’s not true. My past brain knows that, and my future brain will rediscover that, but my current brain fights to stay lazy.

It’s a constant struggle to get my current brain to believe what my past brain knew. In this case, that’s to get out of bed earlier. It beats the alternative.