The 5am club has a lot to answer for. Not because early rising is wrong, for some people, it is genuinely the best time to work. But because the productivity industry has turned a chronotype preference into a moral position. Wake early, the implication goes, and you are disciplined. Sleep in, and you are soft.
I want to make a different case. The question is not what time you wake up. The question is what physiological state you wake into, and whether you are designing your morning to build on that state or fight against it.
Chronotype Is Biology, Not Character
Chronotype, your body's natural preference for the timing of sleep and wakefulness, is largely determined by genetics and shifts across the lifespan. Teenagers are biologically predisposed to later sleep phases, which is one reason forcing them into 8am learning is an act of institutional convenience rather than educational wisdom. Adults distribute across a wide range, with genuine early birds and genuine night owls at each extreme and the majority somewhere in between.
Forcing early rising on a late chronotype does not produce the benefits of early rising. It produces sleep deprivation, which produces cortisol dysregulation, which produces exactly the cognitive impairment and emotional reactivity that productivity culture claims to cure. The early morning productivity advice almost never mentions that the people it celebrates are often operating on genuinely appropriate chronotypes for that schedule. When you replicate the behaviour without the matching biology, you get the external form without the internal function.
“The productive morning is not the earliest morning. It is the one designed for the nervous system state you are actually in.”
What the First 90 Minutes Actually Do
In Somatic Productivity, I argue that the first 90 minutes of your waking day are not primarily an opportunity to get things done. They are a window in which your nervous system transitions from sleep to regulated wakefulness, and the quality of that transition shapes your cognitive and emotional capacity for the hours that follow.
Cortisol peaks naturally in the first 30-45 minutes after waking, this is the cortisol awakening response, and it is not a stress response. It is your body mobilising energy, sharpening alertness, and priming systems for engagement. This is the window most usefully used for light exposure, movement, and orientation, not for email, not for social media, and emphatically not for the first high-stakes decision of the day.
Productive Avoidance in the Morning
One of the patterns I describe in Somatic Productivity is productive avoidance, the use of legitimately productive-looking activity as a substitute for the high-stakes work that the nervous system is reluctant to approach. Morning is the peak time for this.
The inbox check, the social media scan, the tidying of the workspace before beginning, these are not morning routine. They are displacement. They consume the window of peak alertness with low-stakes activity, then wonder why the big work never quite gets started. The antidote is not to ban those activities. It is to be honest about their function.
Designing Your Morning for Your Actual State
The morning routine should begin with state assessment, not with a fixed protocol. Before anything else, notice where you are. Rested or depleted? Regulated or anxious? Present or already ahead of yourself? That assessment takes thirty seconds. It determines everything that follows.
A regulated, rested nervous system can move into deep work within the first hour of waking. A depleted or anxious nervous system needs physiological support first, movement, breath, light, food, grounding, before it can access the cognitive functions that complex work requires. Ignoring the state and running the protocol anyway is the mistake. Design the morning for the body you have, not the one you think you should have by now.
Bart Reevers