The "positive morning vibes" trend on TikTok is full of 5am people and I respect them completely as human beings while also being absolutely certain that 5am will never be part of my life in a recurring way. I am a night owl. I am an insomniac. I am a musician who does her best work between 10pm and 2am and whose brain at 5am is a grey fog with no redeeming qualities. And yet I've been posting morning content and getting questions about my routine, so here it is. The honest version, with no shame and no aspirational 5am pretending.
My morning starts at 11. Sometimes 10:30 on an ambitious day. Sometimes closer to noon. Right now during the HEATHEN HYMNS rollout, when press days sometimes run late and I'm talking to people in time zones that have different ideas about when things should happen, it can slide later and I just have to accept that. This is not a moral failure. This is my life and I've made my peace with it, actually more than peace, I've come to appreciate it.
Nobody tells you about musician hours, the late night is not a defect. It's when the world is quiet and the creative brain comes online. I have written things at 1am that I could not have written at 9am if you paid me. The particular quality of late-night focus, the absence of the noise and the expectations of the regular day, the sense that you're working in the margins of time when nobody's watching, that produces something specific and good. And if you work those hours, you are going to sleep later and wake up later, and that is simply what is true.
What My Actual Morning Looks Like
Step one: coffee, made in my apartment, not fancy. I have a drip coffee maker that is several years old and that I love with a reliability that is slightly embarrassing. I also have a pour-over setup that I use about thirty percent of the time when I have more patience, which happens more often now that I'm not in the frantic recording-closet phase. I drink the first cup before I look at my phone. This is the one morning-routine-content rule I actually follow, and it's the one that makes the most difference. The first cup is just for me. It happens before the notifications.
Step two: watering Lazarus. My pothos, named Lazarus, who has been dying since I got him and keeps coming back. He lives near the window and requires checking. On good weeks he has new growth. On bad weeks he is very dramatically wilted and then bounces back within an hour of watering, which is why he has his name. Watering Lazarus in the morning is a small grounding ritual that I did not design to be a ritual but became one. I check on him. He's fine. Occasionally he requires the kind of concern and intervention that takes three minutes of my morning. This is acceptable.
Step three: opening the windows or door to get actual outside air. My apartment is not large and my studio takes up a significant portion of it, and both of those things mean the air can get stale when I've been in a working tunnel. Letting in outside air feels disproportionately restorative for how simple a thing it is. On days when the weather is okay, I'll stand outside for a few minutes. Sometimes Biscuit is available, that's my neighbor's dog, a medium-sized creature of uncertain breed and absolute emotional reliability, and a morning greeting from Biscuit is genuinely better than almost any wellness intervention I've encountered.
Step four: checking in with myself before checking in with anything else. This sounds more woo-woo than it is. I just mean: sitting for a few minutes with whatever state I'm in. Not meditating formally, though I've done that and it helps. Just noticing. Am I tired? Am I anxious? Do I have a lot of energy or not much? What happened yesterday that I'm still processing? Taking that inventory before I open email or TikTok or whatever the day's first task is means I'm meeting the external world with some awareness of my internal state rather than just getting immediately hit by everything and reacting without context.
The Morning Routine Industrial Complex
I need to talk about this because it's relevant. The "positive morning vibes" content space is heavily colonized by a particular aspirational aesthetic, the cold plunge people, the 5am journaling people, the morning pages at 4:45am before the rest of the world wakes up people. And look: if that works for you, if your life is genuinely structured in a way that makes that possible and it gives you what you need, I'm not here to criticize it. Do the thing that serves you.
What I object to is the implication, sometimes explicit, usually ambient, that the 5am routine is morally superior to any other routine. That waking early is discipline and waking late is indulgence. That the person who has optimized their morning is more productive, more serious, more worthy of success than the person who wakes up at 11 and drinks their coffee slowly and pets a dog before facing the day. That productivity hierarchy is bullshit and I want to name it as such.
Different creative work happens at different times. Different neurotypes and body clocks have different optimal windows. Different life structures, jobs, caregiving, health conditions, disabilities, geography, the fact that you work in a creative field where your best hours are when other people are asleep, require different schedules. The morning routine content industrial complex is, like a lot of wellness content, selling you a problem (your schedule is wrong) and a cure (here's how to be a morning person) to a problem you didn't have until they gave it to you. It's the same sell-the-disease-sell-the-cure pattern I wrote about in a whole other post, just applied to alarm clocks instead of doctrine.
Your morning is whatever time you wake up. Your positive morning vibes are whatever makes you feel good and capable and human in the transition between sleep and the active part of your day. There is no canonical morning. There is only your morning.
What Actually Makes a Morning Good
Since we've established that 5am is not a prerequisite for a good morning, let me talk about what I've found actually makes the difference, regardless of what the clock says when you open your eyes.
Not starting with your phone. I know everyone says this. I know you've heard it. I'm saying it again because it's true in a way that I have tested many times and the data is consistent. On days when I check notifications in the first ten minutes of being awake, my energy is different, more reactive, more scattered, less mine, than on days when I have at least a short period of just existing before the external input starts. Even fifteen minutes makes a difference. Even five. Let your brain have a minute where it's still just yours before it becomes everyone else's too.
Having something that is not a task. Coffee is not a task. Watering a plant is not a task. Briefly saying hello to the neighbor's dog is not a task. A five-minute walk around the block with no destination is not a task. Starting your day with at least one thing that is just an experience rather than an item on a list changes the flavor of the day in a way that's hard to explain but very consistent once you notice it.
Eating something. I know this is extremely basic but I was bad at this for years and then I fixed it and the difference is embarrassing. Eat something in the morning. It doesn't have to be elaborate. It doesn't have to be "healthy" by whatever the current definition is. It just has to be food that you eat before you start expecting your brain to function. Cold coffee plus creative work plus an empty stomach is a recipe for a 2pm crash and a headache and the faint sense that everything is slightly wrong. Eat the thing.
Mornings During Rollout Season
Right now, with HEATHEN HYMNS out and things happening, my mornings have a different texture than usual. There's more checking, more email, more comment sections, more seeing what's happening with the music in the world. I try to still have that first cup before the phone, but press days blow that out of the water and I've had to make peace with it. On press days the morning is whatever it needs to be. The routine is for the days when I get to choose.
On those days I'm incredibly grateful for the 11am start. For Lazarus being alive again against all odds. For the coffee that is neither fancy nor fast. For Biscuit, who does not know what an album rollout is and therefore greets me with exactly the same energy every single time, which is the energy of pure uncomplicated joy at my existence. That's the positive morning vibe I actually need. It starts at 11 and I wouldn't trade it.
Wherever your morning starts: make it yours. I love you.