A recent read, titled The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg, was a reality check to everything I had been doing wrong till now. Well, probably not all the small little million things I am guilty of, but about those keynote habits that shape my daily routine, mood, energy and every other important thing one should be bothered about.This one is about that simple yet powerful habit of starting your day early, like all the (good) moms, my mother, too, had tried to teach me, that later translated to those forced morning shouts (read alarms). She finally gave up on the stubborn lazy ass I had become, who had successfully convinced to her, the world and importantly herself of how she wasn't a morning person and should stop trying to be one.
As a college student, I never understood the logic behind waking up at 6, or even 8, for a class that was to begin at 10. Who gives up 2-3 hours of this precious time practically doing nothing! I am partly to blame my early school days, where a school at 8 would force me to wake up at 6 something, with the only motivation of catching the school bus at 7. Coming to college, I would only find myself awake at 8 during times of last minute preparation on the day of exams. And, so was born the self-built concept, more of a subconscious habit to wake up to a class, a job, precisely a list of certain unavoidable things. Exercise, yoga or even breakfast had somehow always failed to make to the list. Amidst the so called busy life of college, engineering followed by an MBA, I soon found myself caught up in this single most destructive vicious cycle. For the past year and a half, I have better understood the absolute necessity to come out of which, and with some effort managed to wake up for my early morning classes. The catch being - how it still required a reason good enough to find a place in "my list" and sacrifice my sweet affair with sleep.
It is difficult to build a habit without knowing the why behind it. This brings me to the book and how I look forward to it bringing that long wished change in me. The Power of Habit, talks about the loop of habit, which begins with a cue, ends in a reward, and in between lies the routine. To build any habit, it is crucial to have a reward strong enough to have an associated craving. My morning behavior very smoothly fit into this, and I could spot that hole in the loop, that of a missing reward. I could make sense of the rationale behind my self-built concept of waking up to nothing. During my struggle with morning blues, I had attempted to wake up to my favorite songs or radio in the alarm, Facebook, Instagram and other social media and seldom to the daily news apps as well. While they did contribute to my instant gratification, they never qualified to be actual rewards. We have all read about how meditation, yoga, exercising have been rewards to some of the most successful CXOs and other big titled men; but what could be my reward?
Turns out, most of us are not really "a morning person" and I haven't been God's chosen one. Which means, if one wakes up at 7, she would only be able to do something productive after 8. What life gives us in between, is a couple of hours devoid of outside control. When we first wake up in the morning, we're in a highly vulnerable state. Fresh from the world of dreams and the unconscious, it always takes a few minutes for our psyche to plant fully back into our bodies. Some traditions teach that the soul travels between worlds when we sleep. This speaks to the fact that morning is a time when the portal between conscious and unconscious is thin, the veil lifted. As I write this at 7 in the morning, an addition to my blog after years, I do get a fractional sense to that and what could possibly be my reward.
