I have never been a morning person. Even now, as I’m writing this article at the exhaustingly early hour of 8am, all I want to do is crawl back into bed and sleep until noon. I’ve been up since 6 a.m., had breakfast and a nice strong cup of coffee, but I still feel like my insides are slowly liquefying and like my head is full of cotton balls.
I schedule my life specifically around the fact that I’m not a morning person; I don’t take any classes before 10:30 a.m. and I usually don’t go into work until 4 p.m. Granted I’m sometimes at work until 2 a.m., but honestly I usually function best from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.
However, for some reason my inability to function before 10 a.m. without copious amounts of caffeine causes me to be labeled by many as “lazy.” This stigma against non-morning people, or night-owls, as we like to call ourselves, is as ridiculous as it is annoying. I do the same amount of work as a morning person, work the same amount of hours, take just as many classes, I just do it all later in the day.
My inability to be a morning person isn’t a choice either, early morning have an adverse effect on my mental and physical wellbeing. It doesn’t matter how early I go to bed the night before, or how many hours of sleep I get, waking up before 10 a.m. always feels like I’m dying. My entire body aches, my stomach is in knots leaving me way to nauseous to eat anything, and no matter how much coffee I drink I can’t shake the feeling that I just want to curl up in a ball on the nearest flat surface and take a nap. I’m miserable, tired, grumpy and unable to actually do anything or be productive because my brain refuses to function that early.
Nothing helps me adjust to early mornings either. If I had a dollar for every time someone has said “you’ll get used to it” or “your body just needs time to adjust” I would be able to buy myself a nice, new Memory Foam mattress. During high school and middle school I got up between 5:30 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. for eight years in a row. Yet every day, despite getting eight to nine hours of sleep, I would fall asleep in at least one class in the middle of taking notes, be so tired that I would blank out on tests, and be so physically and mentally exhausted when I got home I would need to take a nap. At no time did my body ever just “adjust” so I could “get used to” early mornings, it just rebelled, prohibiting me from performing at my full potential.
The moral of the story is I’m just not a morning person, I’m a night owl. And being accused of laziness because I don’t get up at the crack of dawn just makes me want to go take a nap. Some people’s bodies’ just can’t do mornings. I am definitely one of them and that’s okay.
