I Was Rushing Every Morning Because I Went to Bed Late

Last updated: 2026-09-17

I used to rush every morning. I went to bed late. That’s why the start of the day felt like a sprint.

To make time for a rise ritual, you often need to adjust your bedtime rather than your wake-up time. I shifted my bedtime earlier, gradually, 5 minutes a day. That created the space for a calm, intentional start to the day.

I know, 5 minutes doesn’t sound like a real change. Do it anyway.

Are your mornings rushed because you keep changing the alarm and never the night before? If you feel like you don’t have time in the morning, run a 5-minute-earlier bedtime challenge for the next two weeks. Move bedtime 5 minutes earlier each day. Leave your wake-up time alone until the night has actually given you some room.

Hopium

The biggest mistake in building a morning routine is hopium. You plan an idealized routine that ignores your actual schedule.

If you have a 40-minute commute and a 9 AM start, you cannot fit a 2-hour yoga session. You have to audit your real available time and adjust your inputs, like bedtime, until the routine is realistic.

Does this sound familiar? You write down a ritual that looks great. Then the commute, the kids, and the first meeting eat the morning.

Calculate your true free morning minutes after subtracting commute, kids, and meetings. Design the ritual inside that number. If the gap is small, the ritual is small. A 2-hour yoga session that never happens does nothing for you.

Call it a rise ritual

“Morning routine” is a narrow label. It assumes a certain clock time, and it leaves out shift work and sleep schedules that don’t look like everyone else’s.

The rise ritual is a more accurate and inclusive term because it applies to anyone who wakes up, regardless of shift work or sleep schedules. The goal is a repeatable sequence of steps that sets you up for a productive day.

Rename “morning routine” to “rise ritual” in your planner. You’re building a sequence for whenever you get up.

Don’t copy other people’s routines. You’ll stall out trying to run a ritual built for someone else’s constraints.

To build a personalized rise ritual, select activities from four core categories:

Movement Stretching or exercise. If the window is small, stretch. If you have more time, exercise.

Mind Meditation or reading. Put your attention on something you chose before the day fills up.

Planning Visualization or journaling. Take a few minutes to decide what the day is for.

Food/Drink Hydration or breakfast. Keep it simple so it happens.

You do not need to do all four. Hitting a few of them gives you a well-rounded start. Pick one item from each category, then keep only what fits the minutes you actually have.

Brooks moved his workout because of an afternoon lull

Brooks moved his exercise from the morning to the afternoon because he identified an afternoon lull in his energy. By exercising when his energy was naturally dipping, he boosted his afternoon productivity and freed up his morning for deep, focused work.

Personalization means aligning habits with your biological energy peaks and troughs. The best time for a habit is the time that supports your specific work goals.

Have you been forcing a habit into the morning because that’s when it’s supposed to happen?

Track your energy levels for a week. Find your lull. Find your peak. Then move one habit to match.

If you can’t sleep, journal

You try to wake up earlier, then you can’t fall asleep. Too tired to sleep, too wired to rest.

Have you recently lain in bed exhausted and still wide awake?

If you struggle to fall asleep when you’re trying to wake up earlier, use that time to journal. Writing down your thoughts helps clear the mental clutter that keeps you awake, so you can actually sleep the extra time you’ve created for your rise ritual.

Do a 5-minute brain dump before bed. Write what’s in your head until the clutter is on the page.

Non-negotiables and droppables

Travel. A family emergency. A morning that falls apart.

What do you do when the morning gets wrecked? This is where the all-or-nothing mindset kills the entire routine. You miss one piece and drop the rest.

When a routine is disrupted, identify your non-negotiables (the core habits you must do) and your droppables (the habits you can shift to later in the day). If you can’t read in the morning, move it to the evening. You keep the consistency. You just move the piece.

List your top 3 non-negotiables and your top 3 droppables. Do it now, while the day is normal, so you have the list when it isn’t.

Never skip twice

Brooks’s Golden Rule for consistency: never skip a habit twice in a row. If you miss a day, you must do a suboptimal or compressed version the next day to maintain momentum. Skipping twice breaks the chain and makes it significantly harder to restart.

Identify one habit you’ve been skipping. Commit to the never-skip-twice rule for the next week. A compressed version counts. Missing a second day in a row does not.

Tonight, go to bed 5 minutes earlier than you did last night. That’s it.