For the better part of a decade, I’ve maintained a habit of getting to bed as close to 8pm, maybe 8:30pm as possible. I then read for a spell before getting a solid 8-hours of sleep and waking up at 5am.

Individual preferences will vary on this, and biological predispositions make this sort of schedule a cake-walk for some and a near-impossibility for others.

What nudged me in this direction after a lifetime of being more of a night owl was the undeniable realization that I’m most alert, cognizant, and capable in the early hours of each day. Now, I cherish my mornings and the simple little first-thing routines that are enjoyable unto themselves, but which also give me what I need for the balance of my day.

The main downside of this sort of sleep-wake rhythm is its impact on one’s social life.

The distortion of that old saying about being an early riser is right: early to rise, early to bed, makes a person healthy but socially dead.

Building and maintaining a social life when you adhere to this kind of schedule is tricky. A surprising number of social norms are night owl-oriented, so you miss out on a lot of what your local community has to offer if you slip into bed at 8pm each night.

I’ve found that focusing on day-time communities helps; I even started a reading group, in part because all the other reading groups in my area typically meet at night.

It can also help to make semi-regular exceptions, knowing that your next-day rhythm will be disrupted. My twice-monthly D&D group often goes until 9 or 10pm, for instance, but the enjoyment I glean from that group is worth the tradeoff.

Different people have different energetic and mental rhythms, and it’s likely your perfect setup will look different from mine. You might come alive beginning at 10pm, whereas I’m essentially a potato at that point. Likewise, you might not be a fully functioning human at 5am, while I’m up and energized at that hour, excited to greet the day.

The goal is to find a rhythm that lines up with your natural predisposition, and then (to the best of your ability, at least) orient the things you can control around that biological bias.

There’ll be immovable objects, of course, and this process is more difficult the more people you have in your life and living in your household. But tweaking what can be tweaked and leaning into the groove of how your body and brain behave tends to bear valuable fruit. And the first step of that process is allowing yourself to acknowledge that your current setup might not be ideal for who you are and how you operate.

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