There is a version of wellness that seems to happen almost entirely before sunrise. You know the one: the alarm goes off at 5:00 a.m., you get out of bed before the kids wake up, put on the workout clothes you laid out the night before, drink your water, get your workout in, shower, and somehow start your day already feeling accomplished before most people have even opened their eyes.
It looks incredibly disciplined, and if you’ve ever struggled to make exercise fit into your life, it can also make you feel like you’re doing something wrong. Because the advice is always so simple. Just wake up earlier. Can’t work out after work? Wake up earlier. Your kids make mornings chaotic? Wake up earlier. You’re too tired at the end of the day? Wake up earlier. You don’t have time? Wake up earlier. And if you point out that you’re already exhausted, there’s an obvious solution: just go to bed earlier.
Except... what if you can’t?
What if getting into bed earlier doesn’t mean you’re actually going to fall asleep earlier? What if you have kids who need to be put to bed, a house to take care of, a shower you’ve been putting off, work you haven’t finished, and a brain that has apparently decided nighttime is the perfect opportunity to process every thought you’ve had since 2014? What if there simply isn’t another hour hiding somewhere in your day?
Because when you tell someone to wake up an hour earlier, you’re not actually creating an extra hour. You’re taking that hour from somewhere else. And for a lot of us, that somewhere else is sleep.
Maybe Sleep Shouldn’t Be the Thing We Sacrifice
I have started thinking about this very differently, and I think you might want to as well. Not because exercise isn’t important. It is. You know it, I know it, and most of us don’t need another lecture explaining why moving our bodies matters. But somewhere along the way, we’ve started treating exercise like the gold standard of taking care of ourselves while sleep becomes the thing we’re allowed to steal from whenever we need more time.
If you want to work out, you need to make time for it. If you want to sleep, you need to make time for that too. Those things should be able to exist together. Yet somehow the conversation around fitness has become, “How badly do you want it?” as though the answer is supposed to be, “Badly enough to get less sleep.”
I don’t think that’s the health message we should be sending women.
Sleep matters. Exercise matters. Neither one should have to lose for the other one to win. But when you are constantly being told to wake up earlier, there is an assumption hiding underneath the advice that your sleep is the easiest thing to move. Your work can’t move. Your kids can’t move. Your responsibilities can’t move. But your bedtime? That can move. Your alarm? That can move. You can just squeeze a little more out of yourself.
And I think we need to question that.
Because what happens when the thing you’re sacrificing is the very thing your body needs to recover?
What happens when you are already tired and your solution is to become more tired?
What happens when “being healthy” starts requiring you to feel worse?
That’s where I think the conversation gets much more interesting.
The full essay continues below.
The Problem With “Just Go to Bed Earlier”
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