Why are we so obsessed with morning routines? (2024)

Of all the pillars of internet content, surely one of the strongest is the genre where people outline their morning routine in grave and sanctimonious detail. They exist in every medium, in every platform, among every internet subculture.

TikTok has its Get Ready With Mes, where influencers chat over their plethora of skin-nourishing unguents and artful makeup products. Beauty YouTube has the more glamorous cousin, Vogue Beauty Secrets, in which dewy-skinned celebrities walk us through the many things they do to their faces every morning.

Artist blogs swap tips about the best way to keep Morning Pages. Powerful women, titans of their respective industries, tell the Cut “How I Get It Done.” And on LinkedIn and YouTube, lifehackers share their morning tricks for maximizing productivity.

The productive morning is the one really taking off these days, beloved by the wellness world and the rise-and-grinders alike. The reigning king of the productivity ritual is Andrew Huberman, the controversial Stanford neuroscientist and podcaster whose routine is always being described in vlogs as “scientifically perfect.”

Huberman’s morning routine straddles the thin line between sounding idyllic and torturous, depending on your proclivities. He awakens within an hour of sunrise every day, and then he goes outside for a 10-minute walk (30 minutes if it’s overcast) for optimum morning light exposure. He drinks electrolytes (for hydration) but abstains from food or caffeine while he performs 90 minutes of deep work (no emails, lots of in-depth research). Then he caffeinates, exercises vigorously, and cold plunges. (Cold showers will work too, he says). He doesn’t eat until lunchtime.

Huberman’s ritual is intense, but the fascination it commands is not uncommon or new. Human beings have always been fascinated by the right way to spend a morning, and how everyone else is (allegedly) doing it. At the beginning of the day, the strict capitalist clock demands forward momentum, but the soft animal of the human body wants nothing more than to doze comfortably in bed. Perhaps because getting up is so difficult, it has become powerfully associated with virtue.

The association is telling. After all, how we spend our mornings determines how we intend to spend our days, and consequently our whole lives. Our aspiration for those sacred early daylight hours gives us a glimpse into what we actually value.

The idea that sleeping late is sinful has deep roots in Western culture. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius spends much of The Meditations — the notes he wrote to himself across his second-century reign, newly popular among tech bro enthusiasts — chastising himself for his flaws. Those include having trouble getting out of bed in the morning. “In the morning when you rise unwillingly, let this thought be present — I am rising to the work of a human being,” he instructs himself. While it’s true that lying in bed “is more pleasant,” after all, “Do you exist then to take your pleasure, and not at all for action and exertion?”

Jonathan Edwards, the influential early American theologian, agreed with Aurelius. “I think Christ has recommended rising early in the morning, by his rising from the grave very early,” he wrote in a diary entry in 1728; he himself got up at 4 am to devote 13 hour days to the study of Christ. When Benjamin Franklin plotted out his ideal schedule in his 1771 autobiography, he recommended waking up at 5 to pray, wash, have breakfast, and plan the day well.

You can see why so many of us have come to believe that mornings are more virtuous than afternoons or evenings and that it’s more important to spend the morning correctly than any other time of the day. The hours have a strict moral ranking — kind of like the old saw that breakfast is the most important meal of the day (which, it turns out, was a myth propagated by cereal lobbyists and religious sects).

That’s more or less the logic behind the never-ending deluge of modern morning routine content, too: You have to optimize your morning, not your afternoon, because the morning is when it’s essential to (some would say ostentatiously) flex your discipline.

“A morning routine is one of the most powerful ways of impacting your long-term success,” a blog post for the AI productivity coach Rize explained in 2022. “Morning hours are when you have a clean slate and are yet unimpacted by the day’s events. This means you can pick actions more consciously, deciding what serves you.”

“Many of us are busy, have a lot of responsibilities and obligations, and often feel strapped for time,” admitted the wellness site VeryWell in 2023. “Having a great morning routine can make all the difference in being productive, achieving goals, feeling organized, and doing all of this with confidence.”

Or, as one Redditor put it, “I want to have some productive routines I can follow to give me a reason to be up every morning.”

There is some evidence for the idea that the way you spend your morning will influence the rest of your day. A 2024 Stanford Medical School study found that going to bed and rising early is associated with better mental health than going to bed late and rising late. Meanwhile, a 2016 study in Harvard Business Review (HBR) found that customer service representatives who started the day in a good mood usually stayed that way throughout the day, even when they had to deal with terrible customers. (Horrifyingly, the HBR takeaway is that managers should send their employees “morale-boosting messages in the morning.” Was there ever a surer way to kill a good mood than to hear that Steve in the C-suite wants you to have a terrific morning crushing those numbers?)

But do we really have to optimize the morning to maximize wellness so we can be better at business? Is being scrupulously healthy productivity machines what we actually want?

The routines of famous artists, which get repeated over and over again like little myths, tend not to be focused so much on cheerfulness as on cultivating intense emotional states. As such, they typically involve either monk-like asceticism or the ingestion of many, many stimulants. The idea with this sort of routine was to either discipline yourself into creativity or to evoke it by any chemical means necessary.

In his 2013 book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Currey reports that author Patricia Highsmith, to make writing as pleasurable as possible, would begin her day writing in bed, supplied by cigarettes, coffee, vodka, donuts, and a saucer of plain sugar. Proust, he says, fueled his own work with opium, coffee, caffeine tablets, and then barbital sedatives to counteract the caffeine.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, Currey tells us that the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope would awaken at 5:30 am and knock out three hours of work at his desk before he had to go to his day job at the post office. Beethoven woke at dawn, counted out precisely 60 beans from which to make himself a cup of coffee, and then sat at his desk to work until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, periodically reviving himself with walks outside.

Today’s most famous morning routines have landed in between the Beethoven and Highsmith camps. They focus heavily on wellness and self-care: the elaborate ritual patting in of skin care, the daily workout that has become as universally mandatory as bathing.

The morning wellness routine is rhetorically positioned as both indulgence and capitalist virtue. By taking time to tend to your physical body and mental health first thing in the morning, the theory is, you will be able to do more later. That, in fact, is why Andrew Huberman does all that stuff: to optimize his productivity. (Could it be that some of these people are not being 100 percent transparent about their perfectly plotted morning routines? The thought has crossed my mind.)

“A lot of times, people say, ‘How can I lift more, focus better, remember things better?’” Huberman explains in one video. “And it’s like, ‘Well, let’s think about the foundation of that.’” His morning is set up to make him better at lifting, focusing, remembering — which is to say, doing work.

Ten years ago, morning routines were also about the “rise and grind,” but differently so. CEOs would report getting out of bed at 4 am and getting right to their emails. “​​I can’t stand having any not done!” one CEO told the Guardian of her email routine in 2013. At the time, there was no mention of the wonders of screen-free mornings, the meditation, and the journaling that have become fundamental to today’s high-productivity routines.

Perhaps our current moment is what rise and grind looks like a few years after the combined traumas of the Trump era and the pandemic sent everyone in search of new ways to cope, without betraying the capitalist imperative to achieve ever more. White-collar workers spent the better part of two years not allowed to do much of anything besides work and obsess over their health. Now we obsess over our health in order to work more.

Our morning priorities show us what we value. And what we value right now, it seems, is trying to keep our harrowed minds and bodies together, and to still give as much as we can of ourselves to the work our world demands of us. What more can we manage in a single morning’s work?