The Morning Myth Read online

  And of course we cannot forget my all-time favorite, the one that was disproven by folks who knew Mr. Franklin. By his own admission, Franklin got up at 9:00 a.m. every day despite living in times with no electric lights, when people naturally got up with the sunrise:

  Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

  —Benjamin Franklin

  Personally, I think that’s the most damaging of all early-bird quotes for the simple fact that it’s the most well known. Think about it: Can you think of any adults you know who haven’t heard that quote, or even recited it themselves? Even children are exposed to that nonsense in school.

  Here’s the thing about Benjamin Franklin: He’s one of America’s Founding Fathers and I will always have the utmost respect for Mr. Franklin, especially since I’ve been to Philadelphia several times where I’ve visited multiple museums and exhibits about the life of Benjamin Franklin. He truly accomplished a lot, and even the size of his house is seriously impressive, even compared with modern housing!

  Having said all that, Mark Twain’s grandfather happened to be friends with Ben Franklin, and told Samuel Clemens just how much Franklin was a “Do as I say, not as I do” sort of fellow.

  For example, Franklin preached and wrote endlessly about the virtue of being industrious and never wasting time on activities that don’t produce anything for you in return. But Mark Twain’s granddad constantly found Franklin frittering away his time playing games by himself and doing other useless activities that are typical of procrastinators.

  Most important of all, by Ben Franklin’s own admission, he got up at 9:00 a.m. every day. Now I get shit from people, today in the twenty-first century, when I get up at nine! Back in colonial days, that was extremely late; there was no artificial lighting and most people arose at daylight. Considering that sunrise generally happens on average at between 6 and 6:30 a.m., Franklin was very likely a major-league night owl by comparison with his peers!

  Perhaps that was the secret of his success?

  However, this “early rising” nonsense is what society has been brainwashed to believe. Or I should say, has been led to believe by morons who don’t know what they’re talking about.

  Here’s a good example of the kind of damage morons can do: I got to know the brother of a very famous and wealthy person who lives nearby. His degree is in law—he’s an attorney by trade—yet he claims to be an expert on addiction. However, everything he teaches entirely contradicts the method I used to quit drinking. It has a documented 90% success rate versus the 96% failure rate of Alcoholics Anonymous. Anytime I bring it up with him, he goes “shields up” and shuts down the conversation. This is despite the fact that he’s invested as much as 12 years “in recovery,” as he calls it. He’s still resisting the craving for a drink—for over a decade—and continues to commence his monologue with, “I am an alcoholic,” while the methodology I used completely removed the desire for alcohol. Indeed, not only do I never crave a drink, but also the thought of having one is revolting, and the few times I have since had a drink under peer pressure, I did not enjoy it at all. Interestingly, I didn’t get hooked again either, despite what Alcoholics Anonymous would have you believe, which is the exact opposite.

  So, what did I do? I had a conversation with my very expensive, exclusive, noninsurance concierge doctor, one of the best in town. He explained in detail why everything my friend’s brother is saying about addiction is not only medical mythology, but it’s keeping alcoholics and other addicts stuck in the trap. In other words, it’s complete bullshit coming from a guy trying to sell his books on addiction and recovery.

  Needless to say, I no longer waste my time trying to convince that lawyer who plays fake doctor for a living that he is wrong. In fact, I don’t bother speaking with him at all anymore. The reason I brought it up, however, is because his mindset is exactly like those who still claim that early rising is the key to success. Worse yet are all the self-righteous morning people, who all seem to have a chip on their shoulder about it and cannot mention the fact that they get up early without also sounding like “Aren’t I a goody-goody?”

  In my books on sales—for example, Never Cold Call Again: Achieve Sales Greatness Without Cold Calling (Wiley, 2006)—I obliterate the myths about how cold calling works and teach sales professionals alternative methods of generating leads, methods that actually work in today’s high-tech society in which decision makers wall themselves off using gatekeepers, fake voicemail boxes that salesmen are transferred to (and which are never checked), and on and on.

  Likewise, in this book my goal is to obliterate the myths and the societal disapproval of night owls by proving that we are more successful, more productive, more creative, and generally more prosperous than morning larks.

  How People Fall into the Morning Trap

  This concept of always getting up at sunrise, or never letting the sun catch you in bed, was literally invented about 10,000 years ago for the purpose of farming.

  I’m totally serious … and we’re still using that ancient work schedule today in the Information Age!

  You see, the economic transition to agriculture, or the birth of the Agrarian Age, happened sometime between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East. Farming and agriculture also appeared around 6,800 BC in East Asia, where rice was farmed, and also in Central and South America (maize and squash, initially). Rice farming also likely arose in India around the same time, and taro agriculture began in Southeast Asia.

  Fast-forward, oh, 10,000 years or so, and we end up in the late 1800s, 1870 specifically, and people were still living in the Agrarian Age, earning both a living and subsistence by farming. At that time the average workweek was between 60 and 70 hours. (So stop complaining when you have to work a little overtime!)

  Fast-forward to today and the average workweek has dropped to around 38 hours per week. In other words, we’re down to a point where we are working not much more than half the hours that people worked only a century prior. In the United States, the average workweek is only 33.9 hours! Heck, even in my lifetime that used to be considered part-time. As it turns out, the wealthier the country, the fewer hours citizens work on average.

  So, based on that, why on earth are people still getting up at the crack of dawn when this incredible drop in weekly working hours has occurred? There’s no reason to be up before dawn in an era when few people still farm and workweeks are nowhere near 70 hours. Especially when, here in the United States at least, that number is down to 33.9 hours.

  To further put things in perspective, in Germany the average workweek is 26.4 hours, and in the United Kingdom it’s only 32.2 hours a week.

  Now granted, this hyperproductive, “never let the sun catch you in bed” attitude is largely an American phenomenon. So is the destructive habit of downing massive amounts of coffee all day. When my sister got married, she and her husband went on a honeymoon to Italy and were shocked at how small a cup of coffee is over there. That’s because they know how to live well in Italy, they’re not up at five o’clock in the morning, and as a result they don’t need to pump their bodies full of caffeine, a dangerous habit that routinely results in adrenal fatigue. I’ll talk more about that later in the book and how following the advice of another book that preaches the virtues of getting up at four or five in the morning actually made me physically ill. (Please, if you really intend to follow a program like that, see your doctor first and get your thyroid and adrenal function checked. Trust me on this: you don’t want to experience the incredible level of exhaustion that I did, along with the business, financial, and even marital problems that having zero energy caused. You sure as hell won’t want to experience that, after learning more about what happened to me.)

  Even if downing coffee all day long doesn’t cause adrenal problems for you as it did for me, what’s the use of getting up so early in the first place that you even need coffee? Or to drink it only to experience a crash late
r on, rather than get the full amount of sleep that your particular body requires?

  When I get a good night’s sleep and I’m well rested, I don’t bother with caffeine. Sure, I still drink coffee when I feel like I need it, but I keep it in moderation, just like they do in Italy, knowing that having too much of a caffeine rush will result in an equally large crash later on, and also knowing that it takes about two hours to reach peak effectiveness; anyone who suddenly brightens up as soon as they sip their first coffee of the day is experiencing a placebo effect.

  This is contrary to the incorrect societal belief that we night owls must survive on coffee because we go to bed too late!

  The late comedian George Carlin once said that the more complicated the Starbucks order, the bigger the asshole that is ordering it. “If you walk into a Starbucks and order a ‘decaf grandee, half soy, half low fat, iced vanilla, double-shot, gingerbread cappuccino, extra dry, light ice, with one Sweet’n Low and one NutraSweet,’ oooh, you’re a huge asshole.” (That’s Carlin talking, not me.)

  Guess who places Starbucks orders like that? You guessed it—those goody-goody morning people. While most are nice people, far too many have a superiority complex about getting up early, and it shows, with that Starbucks quote from Carlin being a prime example. Indeed, back in the bad old days of having to get up early to go to work, I learned to avoid Starbucks and go to Dunkin’ Donuts or an independent coffee shop to avoid all those assholes holding up the line for a half hour, while always making a point to give everyone around them dirty looks as they hand the coffee back and demand that it’s redone “right” this time. Ironically, in high-end coffee shops, where everything is truly gourmet, people simply order off the menu; there’s no “half this, half that, light ice” nonsense happening there.

  The Cult of the Early Riser

  One thing I’ve noticed about the seeming cult of early risers is that it has very much the same characteristics of religious fanaticism.

  For example, they’ll tell you all those quotes about why getting up early makes them so great, yet they can’t explain why. In other words, they’re just going on faith. In other words, they’ve come to believe the brainwashing.

  Likewise, if you ask someone why they are a member of a particular religion, or why they vote for a particular political party, they will invariably tell you, “Because that’s what my parents did.”

  That’s not much of a choice, is it? Like I said, early rising and the cult of morning people resembles religious fanaticism and taking advice on blind faith, rather than employing logic and reason. I was born in a working-class Democratic family and then became a Republican in my teens, thanks to educating myself on what both sides stand for. I didn’t blindly follow my parents; in fact I converted them, as well.

  Reading the autobiographies of countless successful men and women, I’ve seen that one common theme is that their fathers drilled early rising into their heads.

  In Conrad Hilton’s Be My Guest (Fireside, 1984), which I got for free when Hilton hotels used to put a free copy in every room, he wrote that he started his habit of getting up at 5:00 a.m. every day after he slept in until 7:00 a.m. one day. He overheard his father freaking out, saying something like “The boy will never amount to anything unless he gets up before dawn.” Mr. Hilton took that advice on blind faith and got up at five in the morning for the rest of his life.

  Likewise, Clarence Thomas, in My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir (Harper, 2007), writes that his grandfather taught him never to let the sun catch him in bed, and he never did again.

  Granted, these are very successful men. Having said that, the majority of people are not night owls; that’s why they don’t like us. It’s common for the majority to be suspicious and afraid of the minority, which is exactly what happens to night owls, and make no mistake, night owls are discriminated against equally as bad, or worse, than other minority groups. Indeed, I’ve been mocked and criticized for being a late riser by people of almost every race and sexual orientation you can think of.

  Based on that, common sense says that both of those men were natural morning people. If they were not, I can guarantee you that they’d never have survived habits such as getting up at 5:00 a.m. or being up before sunrise. Then again, Justice Thomas looks older than he actually is, and just looking at what happens to the face of any American president over eight years is proof of how insufficient sleep greatly accelerates the aging process.

  It reminds me of the antiracism movie Blazing Saddles, when Bart said, “I don’t know. But whatever it is, I hate it.” Morning people may not necessarily hate us, but far too many see us as inferior, or lazy, or just plain “different,” as though we should be riding the short bus to work.

  It makes one wonder just how many successful people were given advice like that, found that it didn’t work, and went on to huge success as night owls.

  This is the brainwashing I’m talking about.

  You see, in a cult, members don’t read the Bible or learn about a legitimate religious faith. What happens in a cult is that members are brainwashed to blindly follow the leader.

  Likewise, people who are told to get up early, without any explanation or science to support why they should do so, are taking that advice on blind faith, with no rhyme or reason, just like a cult member.

  Modern society continues to bombard us with this idea that early rising is virtuous while there’s something wrong or even sinful about getting up later than average.

  In an article on Vox.com entitled “Late sleepers are tired of being discriminated against. And science has their back,” Brian Resnick writes that late sleepers are made to feel like losers.

  While he points out that night owls merely have a different internal clock and sleep on a different schedule, they’re commonly perceived as partiers, deadbeats, irresponsible, and unable to keep a schedule.

  He goes on to interview a few night owls, and the responses he received are extremely eye opening:

  “They just thought I was a fuck-up,” one woman said about her parents’ opinion of her natural night owl tendencies. In her family, early rising was expected. She went on to say that she ended up taking strong stimulants in the morning to function during the day, and then consumed excessive amounts of alcohol at night to counter the stimulants and get to sleep. I went through the same nasty cycle every day when I had jobs that required me to be in the office early. Back then I’d get myself to sleep with several glasses of wine, then use ephedrine and coffee to wake up; that’s anything but healthy.

  This is the kind of damage that society’s attitudes toward night owls cause. The woman interviewed for the Vox article was not only fired from a job for sleeping late too many times, but was forced to become a drug addict and alcoholic just to try to conform to society’s working hours—the same schedule the world has been using for 10,000 years. (I mean, come on—that right there tells you it’s time for a change already!)

  I myself drank excessively for several years, and part of the reason was to fall asleep early enough in order to get up early. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

  A student at Northern Arizona University said, “People have mocked me for it, saying how lazy I am, that I’m not trying hard enough, and that really bothers me, because it’s not my fault. I’m really, really trying, and it’s just not working.”

  Of course it’s not working; that’s not her natural schedule. She went on to say that she saw a doctor, who told her to stop drinking coffee and she’d be fine. (How?)

  Amy, a Seattle night owl, said, “There’s a lot of emotional baggage tied up into going to work. You’re arriving later, you feel like you’re not actually present, when people ask you questions, you give stupid answers.”

  Oh, how I feel her pain, because I’ve been there too, and I have a feeling you have as well, since you’re reading this book, a book that I’ve been writing from 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. every day because those are my peak hours.

  Enough is enough already. It’s
time for society to become more accepting and accommodating of the one-third to one-half of those of us who are night owls.

  In a world where the Internet allows people to work whenever, wherever, there is no reason for companies to continue to push the morning myth brainwashing.

  Likewise, there’s no reason to force a night owl student—and most are night owls at college age—to be in a lecture hall at 8:00 a.m. when he or she can view a recording of it online later in the day.

  Morning Madness

  Society is stuck on a work schedule created 10,000 years ago for the purpose of maximizing farming output. Members of society, particularly early risers themselves, continue to brainwash people that getting up early is the key to success and happiness, when in reality, following your own internal clock is the real key to success and happiness. The endless brainwashing we’re exposed to even convinces millions of night owls to attempt to become morning people, frequently with disastrous results, as was the case with me.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Prison: How Our Society’s Discrimination Harms Night Owls

  I called the endless garbage society pushes on us, described in Chapter 2, as “the brainwashing,” because even night owls come to believe this nonsense that early rising is an absolute essential to success in school and in life.

  I know I certainly did, and for a long time I thought there was something medically wrong with me. I read endless books on chronic fatigue syndrome, high-energy diets, and much, much more. My wife will tell you I love reading medical books and over the past few years I’ve learned so much that I can even talk to doctors in medical terms. I remember being in agony the morning after my ankle surgery, saying, “It’s on the medial side!” “Are you sure you don’t mean lateral?” “No, I mean medial …”

  I was born with hypothyroidism—low thyroid function, which causes chronic fatigue—but I’d been taking Armour Thyroid® replacement hormone, desiccated pig thyroid, and my thyroid labs were at normal levels, so that wasn’t it.