For most of us, mornings are a battle. A fight with the alarm clock, a bargaining session with your own sleepiness, a mad scramble to leave the house before the day swallows you whole. But there is a C.E.O. who swears he has cracked the code — one who wakes up each morning with or without an alarm, fully rested, at exactly the same quiet, effortless rhythm. And he will tell you it’s not luck or genetics. It is something that spanss can learn just by knowing how to work with their body and not against it.
He wasn’t always a morning person. In his 20s, he would subsist for weeks on caffeine and five hours of sleep. But leading a company meant he had to question everything about his routine. Burnout was starting to blossom, productivity was fading and waking up had now become a battle in which I dragged my brick-legs from bed. So he started to read up on sleep science, experiment with habits and construct the kind of lifestyles that instructed his internal clock — until getting out of bed became the simplest part of his day.
The first thing he discovered is that consistency trumps motivation. Most people who are trying to “fix” mornings are doing it by waking up earlier, but he learned that the real change happens the evening before. It’s not sexy, but the body loves predictability. Once he’d elevated bedtime to non-negotiable as a meeting with his board, his brain was tuning itself toward rest without much help. That discipline, he says, is what made getting up easy.
The second shift was characterized by the understanding of light. He awoke to the fact that there’s more to morning sunlight than good, old-fashioned pleasure: It’s biological programming. Within minutes of waking, he heads outside, even if it’s just to his balcony. That initial exposure kicks the brain into gear to establish its internal clock for the day. Then there’s a second advantage: it makes the melatonin, the hormone that helps you fall asleep, kick in earlier at night. It was the easiest habit he ever adopted, but it changed everything.
The third change involved cutting out what he calls “sleep sabotage.” Late-night screens, doomscrolling and binge-watching) take far more sleep away from us than we’d care to admit. So he created a cutoff point. No screens, he would be screen free for an hour before bed — no emails and especially no bluish glowing lights sending signals to his brain that it was still the middle of the afternoon. He traded that window for reading, stretching and dimming the lights. The first couple of nights were uncomfortable, though he said the payoff was tangible — he slept deeper and woke up clearer.
He also learned to anchor his mornings in small cues his body could cling to. For him, this means a glass of water by the side of his bed, a walk outside and an anticipated breakfast. Those small repeated actions form both a routine and a habit, one that your brain starts to expect. In the weeks that followed, he began naturally waking up a couple of minutes before his scheduled time — without an alarm, without grogginess and without feeling like he desperately needed a shot of espresso to feel human.
His final lesson was that you can’t outrun biology. The reason why people who try to turn themselves into a morning person over night fail is that they are treating sleep like some kind of productivity challenge rather than a biological process. For him, it’s not a matter of trying to force yourself to wake up earlier — it’s also the worst way to do this, he says — but instead slowly shifting your circadian rhythm earlier by 15 minutes every couple of days. Too much speed and your body revolts. Slower and steadier, so your brain can adjust without you hating it.
What makes his advice so arresting is how ordinary it sounds. He’s not hocking hacks or miracle supplements. He’s referring to habits that anyone can cultivate with a touch of discipline and curiosity. And what he’s doing works, and he’s not sorry about its advantages. Better focus. More energy. Reduced stress. More brainstorming before the world rises. (He says becoming a morning person didn’t simply change his schedule — it changed his leadership, his health and much else in his life.)
What startled him most, though, was how mornings taught him what he did not have control over. Waking without an alarm wasn’t simply a matter of rest. It was speaking to taking the first part of his day back, before his in-box, phone or company required anything from him. It was the one time of day that was fully his. And once he established that routine, everything else — productivity, clarity, mood — clicked.
The truth is, he isn’t convinced everyone needs to be a morning person. But if you’re the kind of person who would prefer that your mornings not be totally chaotic and more intentional, he thinks that hell yes, you can definitely train your body to work for you instead of against you. Discipline, after all, is not what mornings are for, in his opinion. They’re about alignment — and when your internal clock syncs up with your habits, waking up will be the easiest thing you do all day.
