A Cure for Morning Inertia

For years, I didn’t have an answer to my morning inertia, until recently

Photo by Mario Azzi on Unsplash

I have been struggling with morning inertia for a long time. Not your usual reluctance to wake up early or wanting a few extra minutes of sleep. It’s the kind where I know I have to get up and get moving if I want to keep my job, and yet I stay glued to my bed for more than two hours at a time.

It isn’t that being awfully late doesn’t come with consequences for me. I have a job that requires me to be in the office by 10:30 at the latest, whereas I barely manage to get up by that time. It takes me an hour on average to get ready from the time I finally start moving. And another 30 minutes to reach work.

My office also has an attendance policy under which you get one day’s worth of leave deducted for four late arrivals in a month. And on days you arrive after noon, you get attendance for half a day.

It isn’t an unfair policy, if you ask me. They also offer overtime pay for work extending to late nights and weekends. Unfortunately, it doesn’t align with the way my days are structured. On a few good days, I manage to be on time, but on most days, I’m either marked late or get a half-day, depending on how long it takes me to get out of bed.

The consequences brewing underneath for being chronically late had already started showing up. And yet I kept allowing the morning inertia to overpower my mind and body to the extent that I felt disappointed in myself, but couldn’t stop procrastinating. The frustrating part is that I was painfully aware of how bad things were getting, and still unable to function until past noon.

Why did I keep doing this? Why could other people get up and function normally while I stayed stuck in bed trying to convince myself to begin? These were the thoughts that haunted me for the longest time.

Simply knowing there’s a problem isn’t enough

I could identify that the bed had become a place of safety and avoidance. I could see how one delayed morning quickly turned into a larger story about failure and self-disappointment. But all this awareness did not necessarily get me out of bed.

In fact, sometimes being aware made the loop more elaborate. I would stay in bed and start journaling to get my thoughts out on paper. I hoped that doing so would bring some clarity and get me moving. On some days, it did exactly that. And I took that as a tiny victory towards overcoming my battle with morning inertia.

Those little victories reinforced the belief that journaling could become my escape from the loop, as it’s a powerful method to untangle one’s thoughts. Little did I know that I would make journaling part of that loop. And now the vicious cycle had one more step.

The storm before the calm

Last month, I reached a tipping point. I applied for multiple sick leaves in a single week. Nothing was particularly wrong, except that I was stuck in limbo.

I took those leaves thinking that it would ease the immediate dread of going to the office, and make it easier to move out of bed.

This is where I realised that ‘having to go to the office’ was never the problem.

As soon as I removed ‘going to the office’ from my morning schedule, it became worse. Because now I had no motive to move out of bed at all. I had all this free time to myself. The first two hours in bed felt good. I could journal and plan about what I wanted to do. But when it came to getting out, I got stuck again.

My husband was worried, and at the same time, he looked exhausted from picking up my slack. He didn’t have to say anything; I could tell. And it bothered me.

I remember that evening crying uncontrollably because I was nearly convinced that I had no other way than to leave my job and family behind and go someplace far away from everyone. Thankfully, I let that dreadful thought pass.

The next morning, I convinced myself to find a good therapist. Deep down, I wasn’t fully convinced that seeing a therapist would help. But I had to give it a shot, since nothing else was working in my favour.

An unexpected intervention

A casual inquiry at my workplace led me to discover a clinical psychologist in Guwahati. I booked an appointment for the week after. It was also during that time that I decided to hire help to ease our morning responsibilities.

The hire is an important detail because even before I had my first session, I encountered something incredible that involved her presence. The doorbell rang sometime past 7 in the morning. On any other day, I would have found no reason to step out of bed. I reluctantly pulled myself out of bed to open the door, sheepishly showed her to the kitchen, and let her do her thing.

I was still groggy, almost convinced that I needed to lie down and melt into my bed. But I also wanted to change, now that I had one less excuse to dread the morning. So I went into the kitchen again and asked her to make some tea. A cup for her and a cup for me. My husband doesn’t drink tea, so I never had a morning ritual with him that involved sipping tea before the day started. This is something I used to do back at my mom’s place.

Making tea in the morning was something I rarely did for myself at my own home. At that moment, with the piping hot cup in my hand and someone to talk with over tea, the morning didn’t seem forced anymore. I saw myself not dreading the ‘routine activities’.

After what seemed like ages, I was able to leave for the office like a normal person.

What therapy taught me

I also completed the first session of therapy that evening. As I said, I wasn’t particularly sure to what extent therapy could help me. But I was willing to give it a shot. And I’m thankful that I went for it. Because in the first fifteen minutes of our interaction, she called out the way I get fused with my thoughts.

Unknowingly, I was embodying every little thought as my self-identity. But by simply altering how we speak or think about ourselves, we could change the dynamic. For instance, instead of saying, ‘I am too tired to complete this assignment right now’, I should be saying, ‘I’m having a thought that I won’t be able to complete the assignment right now’. In my former case, the brain reads it as a fact, and hence it won’t argue to change the outcome. However, in the latter, the brain reads it as an open statement, allowing room for negotiation to change the outcome.

It never occurred to me that by practising this simple thing, we could shift our perspective on how we see things. I went one step further to modify the script in my head a bit more.

So, it goes from ‘I’m having a thought that I won’t be able to complete the assignment right now’ to ‘I see that my tired body is causing my mind to think that I won’t be able to sit with my assignment right now’.

Yes, it’s longer to read. But it makes more sense when I’m trying to find a way out of a stuck situation using this script. It makes me feel like I’m viewing the situation from an outsider’s perspective. And that gives me control over how I want to shape my next course of action.

Did it help with my morning inertia?

That’s the 64-million-dollar question worth asking. I had desperately hoped it would be the case. And for the next 2–3 days, my mornings did feel a bit more manageable. Perhaps it was the mental framework; perhaps it was the cook who kept showing up at 7:00 am in the morning, and made me start my mornings earlier. Either way, I had it good.

But I have had small bursts of transformation before. And the only factor I have been familiar with my entire life has been ‘inconsistency’. By the time the weekend arrived, I noticed the first cracks in my schedule.

First, it was my periods that messed up my mornings. I stayed in bed longer due to cramps and had to take time off from work as well. And then, it was because my help did not show up one day. And before I knew it, I fell back into my old pattern. It didn’t help that she was on time the very next day.

I stopped asking her to make tea. I also couldn’t get myself to activate the outsider’s perspective during the mornings. It got way too hard.

Choosing to focus on what worked

But it’s only been one session with my therapist, and a week of having help in the morning. Instead of staying fixated on the ‘failed attempt’ at rewiring my mornings, I have decided to shift my focus to the things that worked surprisingly well.

Take this piece, for instance. For the longest time, I have only moved forward with content pieces that I could come up with in one sitting. Those pieces that couldn’t be completed are still sitting somewhere in one of my forgotten folders, waiting to be opened again.

Not this one, though. For some reason, I have been updating this piece on Google Docs in parts. It’s taken almost a week to get the entire piece out. Midway, I also changed the narrative flow, because I realised that I do not have it all figured out, unlike what I had originally intended this article’s ending to be.

Having said that, I have been more consistent with my work deadlines compared to earlier, just because I intentionally did my job in small sprints without turning it into a dopamine-chasing marathon.

My next therapy session is two days away. Tomorrow, I am going to ask her to make tea again. And maybe try igniting that outsider’s perspective too, even if just for the five minutes it takes to get out of bed. I don’t know yet if either will hold. But I’d rather keep testing what worked than keep mourning what didn’t. I’ll allow myself to become a better version of myself without being perfect.