Member-only story

How To Wake Up At 4:30 AM Every Day

What I Learned About Being An Early Riser From Having A Baby

Jessica Delfino
8 min readApr 18, 2019
photo credit: Icons8 Team / Unsplash

Whether you need the extra time to write or want to get up early to work on a personal project, whether you need to be up before dawn for a long commute or you just want to shake up your routine dramatically, waking at 4:30 is not for the faint of heart, literally.

In the early 1900s, Americans averaged about 9–10 hours of shuteye on a nightly basis. Our circadian rhythms were strongly connected to the sun’s rise and set. With the onset of electricity, our days became artificially lengthier with TV, screen time, the internet and video games, among other time thieves among the culprits.

Now many are lucky to get seven hours of sleep each night and about a third of us manage on 6 hours or less per night.

According to Harvard’s Health blog, sleep shortages can wreak utter havoc on your well-being in myriad ways.

“Too little of it can throw off the clock and disturb the intricately timed release of hormones and other chemical signals, as well as cause fatigue and daytime drowsiness. Uncoordinated hormonal signals, in turn, can affect many systems in the body. Poor sleep has been linked with high blood pressure, atherosclerosis (cholesterol-clogged arteries), heart failure, heart attack…

--

--

Jessica Delfino
Jessica Delfino

Written by Jessica Delfino

I write about life with 1 husband, 2 kids, 1 cat, sometimes funny. Instagram.com/JessicaDelfino Bylines: TheNew Yorker, The NY Times, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s.

No responses yet