Should You Get Up Earlier Than Everyone Else?

We Take A Look At The Real Benefits Of Waking Up Early

 

“The early bird gets the worm.”

“Early to bed, early to rise.”

“What time do you call this?”

“Bill Gates chalks success up to 5am starts.”

Whether it’s from parents, colleagues, or a favorite magazine, late risers will have heard one or all of these phrases countless times during their life.

People who wake up early are strangely emphatic and vocal about its benefits.

We’re sure some of you can’t enjoy a sleep in while visiting your parents without them commenting on how long they’ve been awake, how much they’ve already done with their day, and so on. 

A lot of you probably have a colleague who always manages to be first to the office. We’re all heard their unsolicited reports before; “it’s 9am and I’ve already cleared my inbox!” Good for you Tim.

Even if you don’t know a fastidious early riser yourself, it’s hard to avoid articles crediting the success of business tycoons, athletes and over-achievers to their habit of getting up before dawn.

For all this noise, it’s easy to think that everybody needs to start setting their alarms for 5am if they are to stand any chance of getting ahead.

 

 

But is there actually any truth in this?

Is an early start a pre-requisite for academic and entrepreneurial success?

Does an early start help with productivity?

Will waking up at 5am help you achieve more.  Or will it just leave you feeling exhausted for the rest of the day?

Is it better for everybody to get up early? Or are there any people who should keep burning the midnight oil instead?

We’re going to take a closer look at the scientific literature to see if there really are any benefits at all to getting up early.

We’ll look at what a range of highly productive people have to say about getting an early start. We’ll also look at the benefits of staying up late and rising late to see which approach is best suited to you and your goals. 

In the end, we’ll tell you who really stands to benefit from getting up early and who should stick to whatever sleeping pattern works best for them. We’ll also give you some tips and tricks to help you make the most of your ideal sleeping schedule.

 

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The Benefits Of Getting Up Early – Successful Early Risers

In most cases, peer reviewed papers are a much better source than individual reports or stories. 

But when it comes to productivity, something that a very accomplished person has found useful is probably going to be helpful to you too.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that plenty of successful business people, entrepreneurs, and athletes swear by an early start. Many of them credit a large part of their success to the fact that they get up well before the majority of the population. 

One of the most notable examples of a successful early riser is Apple CEO Tim Cook. Tim famously rises at an eye-watering 3.45am.

Yes, we said 3.45am.

He will typically get up at 3.45am to get a head start on his emails (matching many ‘early risers’ doing the same on the east coast, where it is by that time already 6.45am). He then works out for a while, before heading to Starbucks for another hour of correspondence. Only then does he hit the office, long before most people have begun their commute.

Oprah Winfrey and longstanding PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi both share Tim’s 4am start time. Indra claims that she usually gets up at the crack of dawn and she is reportedly in the office no later than 7am. 

Followers of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson on Instagram will already know that he is no stranger to an early rise. The most electrifying man in sports entertainment is often in the gym for 4am. He sees this as his way of getting a jump on the competition. 

This is straight out of the Mike Tyson playbook. Mike’s training schedule apparently started at 4am with a 5 mile jog. Admittedly, he would then return home for a nap before getting up again at 7am to start his day in earnest. You don’t become Iron Mike without putting in some grueling work!

Howard Schultz, the Starbucks CEO and Chairmen for much of the past 30 years, is already out and walking his dogs by 5am. He likes to start his day with exercise before making a pot of coffee to really get things going (we don’t know if he uses the same beans as Starbucks, but we hope not). 

Virgin Group founder Richard Branson lags a little behind Indra, Tim and Oprah, but not by much. He will typically get up at about 5am. Like Tim and Indra, he uses this time to get a jump start on the day. He states that he likes to get through all of his important emails before half the world has even logged on for the day. 

 

 

These are some of the most well-known examples of successful people who get up extremely early.

But these aren’t the only examples of successful people who rise at dawn.

It isn’t hard to find evidence for there being a general culture of getting up early in high pressure, competitive, high performance environments.

Partners at law firms and investment banks are known to be in the office by 8am at the latest.

Senior executives trying to make a name for themselves on Wall Street will probably be at their desk by 7.30am, when most of us are just getting out of bed. 

Most traders will start even earlier. This is in part because they need to be at their terminals as early as possible to react to market moves elsewhere in the world – and forex markets never sleep. But it is also in part because of that culture of hyper-productivity which keeps those places ticking.

Some people might think this is just a cultural quirk that doesn’t necessarily mean they are productive people. But we’re arguing the exact opposite – spend some time at a major law firm and you’ll see that the best people are almost unbelievably productive.

There is a culture of starting early precisely because that is what these extremely productive people decide to do. 

 

 

The creative fields are also replete with examples of people who achieve a great deal in the early hours of the morning. Like many of the executives listed above, Haruki Murakami begins his day at 4am. He writes solidly for much of the day, and ends it with either a 10km run or an almost 2km swimming session. He then reads and listens to music until 9pm, when he turns in for the night. 

Ernest Hemingway began writing at dawn. He would sit down at his typewriter and churn out pages until he was satisfied with what he had produced. Once he was happy, he would call it a day until the next morning. 

So it is with athletes too.

It isn’t just Dwayne Johnson and Mike Tyson who are known to get up early. For every football player, boxer, tennis pro and serious golfer that gets up at 11am, there’s 9 who are adamant that they benefit from getting up early. 

It seems that we can make a pretty convincing case for getting up early then, assuming our goal is to be more productive and, as a result, more successful in our endeavors. 

But these are just positive examples. 

Aren’t there any highly successful people who don’t value getting up early?

Yes, lots of them.

 

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Successful Night Owls

People usually rattle off a list of extremely accomplished, successful people when trying to convince you to get up early.

But they are usually, without knowing it, selecting examples very carefully to fit their agenda.

There are plenty of examples of extremely successful people who do not prioritize an early start whatsoever. 

For example, Warren Buffet claims to wake up at about 6.45am – just as Indra Nooyi is getting to the office! Warren says that he has no desire to be at the office for 5am like some of his peers; he values his sleep more than the bragging rights of an early start.

Elon Musk is best known for his insane working habits. At the time of writing, a few articles are circulating the business press about how he is sleeping on the SpaceX factory floor some nights to save time. In the past, while working on early versions of X.com (which was joined with Confinity to become PayPal), Elon slept at his desk for a few hours each night, waking up to immediately start coding again. 

But Elon does not have an insane sleeping schedule. He claims to get an average of 6 hours every night, and he sleeps from about 2am to around 7am. A night owl Elon most definitely is. 

 

 

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos values the amount of sleep he gets over when he gets up. As a result, he says that he usually starts his day some time between 7am and 8am. He will begin with some time on the treadmill reading the newspaper, before showering and starting his work for the day at around 9am. 

That’s a pretty normal day for a lot of people. If it’s good enough for Jeff, then it’s probably good enough for you too, right?

Then there are the dozens if not hundreds of prolific writers, filmmakers, designers, and creative professionals who famously burn the midnight oil and sleep their days away. 

Many giants of Western literature and philosophy, such as Immanuel Kant, Jean Paul Sartre and Friedrich Nietzsche kept fairly normal sleeping and waking hours. What allowed them to produce so much high quality work in such enormous volumes was not the timing of their work, but rather how much of it was actually dedicated to working. 

Likewise, Stephen King, Gunter Grass, Kingsley Amis, and a host of other prestigious, prolific authors do not credit their output with the time they begin writing. It seems that their consistency, work ethic and dedication are behind their success.

 

-How Sleep Deprivation Kills Cognitive Function-

 

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What Does The Science Say?

That’s enough anecdotes. 

Time to see what the scientific literature says.

Let’s not beat around the bush. We’re going to just give you some of the most notable studies and tell you what they say.

Getting up early has been shown to improve your mood and mentality in various ways in multiple different studies. 

In this paper, for instance, researchers discuss how your sleeping schedule affects your temperament. They found that early risers tended to be more persistent and more co-operative than their late-sleeping counterparts.

Another similar paper discusses how a person’s orientation to either morning or evening either affects or is affected by their personality type. The authors note that people who tend to rise early in the morning are much more conscientious and agreeable than those who stay up late at night and sleep in during the day. 

While the direction of causation is unclear, one thing needs to be pointed out. Of the Big Five personality types, conscientiousness is the best predictor of future life success. It promotes orderliness, diligence, hard work, and attention to detail.

If it is just that conscientious people tend to get up early, then getting up early won’t make you more conscientious (necessarily – some aspects of this trait can be learned). But if causation here is going the other way, then getting up early can directly lead to greater chances of future life success. 

The implications for your career or your academic pursuits should be obvious; more persistence and more co-operative skills will directly lead to higher rates of success, more productivity, a better use of resources, greater diligence, and if nothing else, a much easier life for you!

 

 

It has also been shown that people who get up early have greater focus and drive than those who stay in bed for longer.

As this trial found, early risers will typically procrastinate less than other people. The researchers focused on two distinct types of procrastination; avoidance and indecision. They found that people who are ‘morning-oriented’ will procrastinate by avoidance A LOT less than people who get up late. 

In our experience, avoidance procrastination is the most common form of work dodging. We all drag our feet when it comes to a big decision – whether due to the stress of being in the hot seat, a deep fear of potential downside, or just a desire to not be in control, most of us hate calling the shots. 

But avoidance procrastination is a SERIOUS problem for all of us on a day to day basis. 

Even if you have no major decisions to make, it is so easy to just waste 30 minutes on Reddit instead of writing that important article on getting up early – especially if you’re a late riser, apparently!

 

 

Quite worryingly, getting up late has recently been associated with chronic negativity.

We’re not trying to sound like hippies here; we actually mean a chronic case of having a serious negative outlook.

This study, published in Cognitive Therapy and Research in 2015, examined the relationship between the timing of sleep and incidences of repetitive negative thinking.

Now, as many of you probably know, a relationship between negative outlook, low mood, and sleep deprivation has already been well established. But the authors here wanted to see if the same relationship existed when sleep timing was used as the variable. 

The researchers found that “delayed sleep timing was associated with more obsessive–compulsive symptoms. Further, extending this prior work, the transdiagnostic measure of RNT was associated with shorter sleep duration and delayed sleep timing. Individuals who endorsed a preference for later sleep and activity times also reported more RNT.”

So it seems that any bouts of repetitive negative thinking or obsessive compulsive behavior may be tied to your late nights and long lie ins!

 

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Late Nights & Sleep Quality

One thing that is not often discussed is the relationship between sleep timing and the quality of that sleep. 

We all know that sleep deprivation is absolutely ruinous to your health, cognitive function, and emotional stability.

It can be fatal if it carries on for a long enough time.

But what time you go to bed is often treated as a different thing altogether.

Well, we think that for the vast majority of people the two things are intimately related.

The time of night that you go to bed has an enormous impact on the overall quality and length of your sleep.

That in turn has a profound impact on your cognitive function, your mood, and your health.

Let us explain. 

Your sleep occurs in cycles. There are 5 distinct cycles of sleep, but for all intents and purposes, it is more like 2: non-rapid eye movement sleep, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.

Non-REM sleep is the deepest form of sleep. Your brain is least active during this time, and this is probably the most restful stage of sleep.

REM sleep is a lighter stage of sleep. It is nowhere near as deep and restful as non-REM sleep, but it does play a serious restorative function. We aren’t certain right now, but it seems that REM sleep is when you codify memories.

While both have vital purposes, it is non-REM sleep that leaves you feeling truly replenished and awake afterwards.

 

 

The above graph shows an example sleeping pattern from a phone app designed to track sleep quality and night movement. It is a fairly good representation of a normal, healthy, sleeping pattern.

As you can see, sleep comes in waves, or cycles, spaced apart by roughly 90 minutes. This person spent between midnight and 1.30am in a very deep sleep, then again from roughly 1.30am until 3am in a seriously deep slumber.

Then from 3am, their sleep became lighter. Between 3am and 4.30am, they went from being in a mid-stage of sleep to being practically awake. They did then fall into a deep sleep again, but it lasted for only about an hour. They spent a large amount of their time practically awake.

This 90 minute cycling stays fairly stable for most people throughout the night.

But while you tend to fall into 90 minute cycles regardless of when you go to sleep, the ratio of REM sleep to non-REM sleep changes.

As far as we can tell, your REM sleep cycles do not just follow on from deep, non-REM sleep cycles. They happen at roughly the same time for almost all of us.

The vast majority of your non-REM sleep cycles take place in the earliest parts of the night.

This is when your sleep is deepest, most restful, and the most rewarding. 

People who go to bed at 3am will usually follow similar sleeping cycles to the person in the above graph; they will spend a LOT longer in REM sleep and a lot less time on average in the deepest stages of sleep.

This is a big reason why shift work is so ruinous to health and cognitive function over the long term. People like bartenders, nurses, and other people who keep strange hours might tell you that they’ve learned to sleep when they can. Yet studies show that they exhibit both higher rates of death and more rapid cognitive decline over a lifetime. 

But we can’t just learn to be nocturnal like that; our body clocks still reserve our deepest stages of sleep for the hours between 8pm and 3am. REM sleep has its uses (which we don’t know completely yet), but nothing is going to leave you feeling fresh and ready in the morning like 4 solid hours of incredibly deep sleep. 

 

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Quantity Or Quality?

Obviously, the answer to the above question is ideally “both”.

Or more specifically, “both, as and when you need”.

But that’s not very helpful.

The entire article above has outlined why getting up early is so potentially powerful. It can have an enormous impact on your cognitive performance the next day, as well as your long term health. This will obviously in turn both increase your productivity and lengthen your productive career. 

But obsessing about sleep timing isn’t healthy either.

The truth of the mater is that, if you currently get up “late”, but you don’t always feel tired, you get 7-9 hours each night and your cognitive performance is adequate, there’s no need to do anything drastic.

The benefits of getting up early can be enormous and extensive, but the most important thing at the end of the day is that you get enough sleep.

Jeff Bezos manages to run (arguably) the biggest company in the world while getting up at about 8am. 

It isn’t a disaster if you start your day at 9am. 

It is a serious problem though if you don’t get more than 6 hours of sleep a night for a long period of time. We’ve explained why in this article, which we advise you to check out.

Early risers may find that they are more productive and ultimately successful, but getting enough sleep is the first thing you should work on if you’re currently struggling with it.