Bill Ralston on morning people

Don’t talk to me about being a morning person – not until lunchtime, anyway.

It’s easy to detest “morning people”, those who get up at the crack of dawn no matter how little sleep they may have had and chirrup their way into the day. I usually wake around 7am and have little desire to linger in bed, but it’s hard to get a civil word out of me until I’ve had two cups of coffee, lit a fag, read the paper, flicked through the email, and the clock has passed 10.00am.

I am definitely not a morning person. Generally, I do not hit my stride until early afternoon, then I go into high gear approaching dinner time when fortified by a sundowner or two.

This trait made it all the more ridiculous that, for a few years in the 1990s, I was a breakfast radio host. I would rise at 4.30am, step into clothes I’d carefully laid out on the floor the night before, then tiptoe out the door so as not to wake my wife. Once I hit the studio, I would spend the rest of the early morning consuming buckets of instant coffee – a habit I had to give up when my skin turned a peculiar shade of orange.

Weirdly, I still found I could not go to bed till 10.30pm, which reduced my sleep to barely five hours a night. Over the course of a year I became increasingly psychotic to the point where, although I was babbling like a loon on radio for the first three hours of the day, I sleepwalked through the remainder.

A friend who worked the breakfast shift for years told me the jet lag would wear off, my internal time clock would adjust and I’d be off to beddy-byes by 8.30pm and as fit as a fiddle the next day. He lied. Finally, I gave up radio, slept in and sanity returned.

I recently read a New York Times article that said you can train yourself to wake up at dawn and become a “morning person” by setting your alarm clock back 20 minutes a day until it becomes natural to rise at daybreak and go to sleep earlier. The NYT ignored vital questions, such as why the hell would you want to do that?

The only sensible suggestion the paper had was to avoid the glare of a TV screen, laptop or iPad while in bed preparing to sleep because apparently the light from the damn things has roughly the same effect as sunlight, and your idiot brain will decide it’s morning and that you should be awake.

I found a website called happyhealthy longlife.com, which talks about maximising your energy levels by matching “your tasks with your body’s ebb and flow”. It may help you, but the recommendations seem completely out of sync with my “circadian rhythms”.

Between 7.00 and 9.00am it says to “connect with friends, family and co-workers”. In my case, not advisable, unless by “connect” it means “bite” because there is insufficient caffeine and nicotine running through my system.

I have little argument with the period 9.00-11.00am that the site advises to set aside for “brain work – creativity – analytical work”, but then it says 11.00am-2.00pm should be for “tough tasks – errands – attacking the to do list”. Frankly, such tasks are odious and best tackled while slightly drunk, and I’m sorry, 11.00am is a little early to hit the bottle – even for me.

These lunatics claim 2.00-3.00pm is “siesta time – take a break”. Hello? It should read noon-3.00pm “creative lunching”. Why would you sleep away part of the best time of day when you could, for example, be sitting at a courtyard table at Prego with a cool glass of sav blanc while munching on pasta and discussing what to do later?

What you may do is certainly not what the website suggests, which is to set aside 3.00-6.00pm as a period to “collaborate with co-workers or exercise”, because if you’ve had a three-hour lunch and a couple of bottles of wine, the only likely collaboration is the horizontal kind, which I guess is a form of exercise.

The one point of agreement I have with the happy-clappy health website is that we all need to find our own rhythms and work to them. In my case, seeing I perk up around lunchtime, it’s probably best to continue to combine work, wine and a hearty meal around the middle of the day.

If you want to wake earlier, I suggest you forget the NYT’s advice of changing your alarm clock. Just wait till we get to that stage of old age where sleep becomes less necessary, we stay awake longer at night and we rise with the first chirp of the dawn chorus.

In my case that still won’t make me a “morning person”. I’ll just have more time to be grumpy before noon.