Morning and evening

I’m experimenting with a change of pattern. Rather than stay up late working on-line, I’m not doing any work on the computer at night. Instead I’m coming into work early in the morning, before anybody else, to get things done. It’s something I used to do years ago, with great success, but of course it’s all too easy to slip out of such a pattern.

It could just be the newness of it all, but I notice immediately that I’ve gotten an immense amount of work done, well before anyone else has even arrived. There seems to be an element of fearlessness in my mindset first thing in the morning which is relatively lacking at the end of the day.

This is nothing new — many people have experienced this phenomenon. Upon waking up in the morning one’s mind is still uncluttered, and thereby more free to make proactive decisions. Benjamin Franklin even had an aphorism about it.

We are, after all, creatures of instinct, wired for survival. On some deep level our emotions cannot really disambiguate one threat from another, much as our rational mind would like them to. As the day wears on, and one thing after another comes up, alarms start to go off somewhere in our brain, and the natural tendency is to go into a defensive crouch.

Sometimes I wonder whether there isn’t a systematic difference between “morning personality” and “evening personality”. We tell ourselves that the people we know have just one personality, but what if that is merely an illusion? If you always encounteredy someone only in the morning, and I encountered that same person only in the evening, would we, in effect, be getting to know two different people?

Hmm. Maybe I’ll check back again tonight, to see whether I agree with what that guy wrote here this morning. 🙂

5 thoughts on “Morning and evening”

  1. Hmmm. Then if you see your husband only for 5 minutes in the morning, and the rest in the evening, am I seeing only a version of him!? 🙂

  2. Just had a similar conversation with a fellow writer. Mornings we agreed are the productive hours. There’s a late afternoon blip of productivity and then not much to work with until 10 PM or so.

    On a slightly different tack, I’ve noticed that during afternoon runs up a hill, I am inclined (pun intended) to be filled with “ah ha!” creativity on the way up and “now wait a minute” doubt and reconsideration on the way down.

  3. It would be interesting to compare statistics (i.e. most frequently used words) from blogs/tweets/etc. posted AM/PM.

  4. I have always been a morning person. My creativity is so fertile in the morning. I awake, get my coffee and go to it for three hours from 5am until 8am…I almost feel as if the morning belongs to me. Then I leave it, come back in the afternoon and do the edit for another three hours…If there are problems, I sleep on them because I always work things out in my dream space…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *