A personal account, not health advice. What worked for one self-employed person in his forties is not a sleep protocol. If you cannot sleep over a long period, that is worth raising with a doctor rather than solving with willpower.
I wake up just before the alarm now. The room is still dark and the day starts quietly.
Originally published in Japanese on January 27, 2025. This English version was written in September 2026.
It took until my forties for early rising to stick. Not for lack of trying — I had attempted it repeatedly, given up quickly, and slid back to nights every time.
This time it held. I finally let go of a life where I worked into the small hours and noticed the sun coming up.
The first step out was the early start
I could not sleep.
So I worked late into the night. And because I worked, I slept even less.
I ran that loop for years.
Then something happened that knocked me down harder than I could absorb. I have written about that period separately, in an account of rebuilding my daily life in my forties (in Japanese).
This could not continue. And the thing to change was not my circumstances but me. So I set about redesigning how the days ran, and the first piece was getting up early.
Ten years of freelancing at night
I have been freelance for ten years, working as a web engineer with about as much freedom over my schedule as the job allows. A few years ago I moved out to the countryside, and once online meetings became the default my working conditions actually improved.
Work was supposed to be stable. Then something happened and I could not hold myself together.
What I realized was that the state I had been calling normal had been running on chronic sleep deprivation the whole time.
Not sleeping, so working. Working, so not sleeping.
Staring at a screen in a dark room and noticing the sky going pale. At the worst, two or three hours of sleep. If I got tired in the afternoon my head was too cluttered to nap properly.
I would force myself out to do something, move until I was wrecked, and drop like someone switched off. Even then I was thinking about work the whole time, so none of it was really enjoyable.
That was the pattern, repeating.
Hitting the wall mentally is what finally made me look at it. Bad things happen and I replay them endlessly, and how I was living was feeding that.
Change yourself and the world changes. I decided to act on it.
What actually made it work
I knew the arguments for early rising. Japanese has a proverb about it being worth three mon — a small sum in old currency, roughly “the early bird catches the worm.”
But forcing yourself up in the morning while still not sleeping at night does not last. That is what had failed every previous time.
So I started at the other end: going to bed earlier.
It felt wrong at first. I closed the laptop at 10pm and stopped touching my phone.
I knew willpower alone would not hold, so I made it physical. Phone and computer stay in the work room. Neither comes into the bedroom.
That made me anxious. I kept wondering whether someone had messaged.
Nothing happened. In ten years of freelancing, nothing has ever needed me between 10pm and 5am badly enough to justify what the checking was costing.
For the hour before bed I switch to indirect lighting, read, and keep things quiet.
Falling asleep was hard at the start. After a while the noise dropped away and I was sleeping properly.
I had thought of myself as bad at sleeping. I had simply been arranging my evenings so that it could not happen.
I started this in winter, so mornings were dark. That was hard enough that I set the first target at 8am, then moved it to 7:30, then 7:00, in small steps as each one settled.
Two months later, a wake-up somewhere in the five o’clock hour had stuck.
These days I am in bed by 10:30pm. I tried various amounts of sleep, and about seven hours seems to suit me — that is my own trial and error, not a recommendation.
What changed
There is slack in the morning now.
Time to do the things I want to do. And sleeping properly, my head works better.
The bigger shift was from being made to do things to choosing to do them.
Having work to do is something to be grateful for. Without any slack, you forget even that.
Work getting properly finished made life outside work fuller. I think better of myself, and I get dragged around by low moods less often.
I used to go out with my wife while thinking about work the entire time.
If I could spend these hours working, things would be easier. That was the running commentary.
Not any more. What needs doing is done in the morning, so going out is something I am actually present for.
I must have been permanently on edge before. Dealing with people in that state, I was certainly making it harder for them too.
Late, but worth it
I do wonder why I did not switch years ago.
Then again, some of what I understand now came out of living the other way.
Doing this in my forties is late. But looking around, plenty of people are stuck where I was.
Being freelance made it easier to change, and I should say that clearly rather than pretend otherwise. I control my own calendar. Anyone on fixed hours, doing shift work, or with small children is solving a harder problem than I was, and the fact that this worked for me says little about whether it transfers.
Still — changing how the day is arranged made this much difference to how everything looks.
So, for what it is worth: early mornings are good.