mornings

i need to make them better

Still some tickets left for Glasgow, Belfast, Canterbury and London on the last leg of the tour! ESPECIALLY BELFAST HAHAHAHAHAHAH.

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If you look up ‘Not A Morning Person’ in the dictionary, and if the dictionary included phrases rather than single words, and if dictionaries still existed as physical books you could look things up in, there would be a picture of me (if the dictionary involved pictures).

This has been the case since I can remember. School mornings, sixth form mornings, uni mornings. When I got my dream journalism job (alright, any journalism job. It was for a careers advisory website but it was fun!!!!), I thought this would cure me - instead, after a few years, when I’d moved into a true dream job, I simply had to go freelance. Sure, I would lie and say things like ‘I needed more flexibility’ and ‘I can earn more money this way’, but the main reason was: ‘I am absolutely done with getting up at 7.30am five days a week’.

I know what you’re thinking. Oooh hark at her! What a dream to now get up whenever she likes! Some of us, between actual jobs and having kids, don’t experience that luxury til retirement age! Some of us are getting up before we go to bed! Some of us have never even been to bed! Some of us are vampires, demonic half-beings who physically can’t sleep due to the ancient curse! Think about that, next time you’re writing you’re little Substack posts about mornings being all difficult when your average rising time is between 9.30am and 10am.

I get it, I do get it. And this is what 2026 is about: me stopping being a whiny little bitch at dawn. Or, more accurately, quite a long time after dawn.

It wasn’t clear to me how entrenched my bad mornings have become until my partner did a jovial impression of me waking up where he yelled ‘IT’S 10AM FUCK’ and thwapped around the room like that video of the duck running up and down the hallway (if you haven’t seen it, it’s a duck that runs up and down a hallway).

Imagine how frustrating it must be to live with someone like that if you, like my partner, are perpetually quite a good laugh in the AM. He makes stupid jokes and says things like ‘fancy going to that cafe for a flat white’ rather than shouting the time and becoming a duck. Important to note: he gets up later than average too, but seems fine with it, leading me to believe so much of this is about (massive yawn) perspective. God why is everything about perspective? I’m so bored of Changing My Perspective all the time. Just once, I’d like the solution to be Buy Some Magic Shoes or something.

So what happens in the morning, Steven? Well, every time I open my eyes I cycle through the exact same three emotions I did at school, sixth form, uni and the entirety of my adult life.

1. Fury (the verbal stage, where I will say the time out loud followed by the word ‘fuck’) (when I was at school, before I knew the word ‘fuck’, I would just let out a strangled moan).

2. Sadness (the silent stage, where I will lie prone like a stone statue atop a tomb. Or a body inside a tomb? I suppose this depends on the duvet placement)

3. Horror (the judgement stage, where I am so disgusted by my Fury and Sadness, when there are people who are for example doing my bins at 5am, that it propels me into violent action thereby forcing me to get out of bed)

Before you think I’m exaggerating for comic effect, I’m not: this is almost every morning. The only time it doesn’t happen is if I’m doing something very exciting and have slept incredibly well, which must have happened but so little that I can’t think of one example.

I do, however, remember waking up to go to Venice with my sister, something I was so excited to do because we’d never gone on holiday together, and the first thing I said when I opened my eyes was: ‘it’s 4am fuck’ followed by ‘I’m not even joking shall we not go’.

The knowledge that I would prefer to stay in bed and ruin a holiday, rather than get up and go on the holiday, is ironically what made me get up and go on the holiday. Is that irony? Not sure.

‘Steven you sound depressed’ - I hear you, but I’m not, I promise. I know this because the moment I’ve done literally anything at all, even just gone for a wee, the mood has dissipated like a bad dream or a good wee. It helps that the dog will usually jump into the bed at this point to do her customary forward rolls (nobody is sure why she does this, but it’s a lot of fun).

This dissipation is why my morning agonies (shut up, they are agonies) have continued unexamined for so long. Why I’ve just accepted them as a part of my daily routine: wake up, agonies, wee, brush my teeth etc. I’ve also read so much stuff about Morning Larks and Night Owls where journalists (including me, because I wrote loads about it when I was a journalist) explain how some people just have a different circadian rhythm, that’s that, and there’s nothing you can really do about it.

In those articles, there are usually references to higher instances of depression, anxiety, alcoholism and other mood disorders in Night Owls, which is probably a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. Are Night Owls more depressed and anxious etc because their natural cycle is apposite to what western culture sees as ‘good’ (e.g. getting up early and going to bed early) (e.g. what The Rock does)? Or are Night Owls often just people more prone to depression and mood disorders, which causes them to struggle to sleep, and therefore struggle to get up early? And what time do chickens get up? And is an owl really just a sort of flying chicken of the night? Lots to discuss.

Last night when having a drink with two friends, one said she doesn’t sleep well and the other said ‘why is that?’ which made me laugh so much; this is a question only asked by a Good Sleeper. Being someone who doesn’t sleep well is such a wide-ranging, complicated thing, you can’t sum it up in a sentence. My friend also then suggested she rub magnesium butter on her feet, but that’s a whole different vibe.

Anyway, I’d resigned myself to a life of shit mornings until I started free-writing three pages every day upon waking (I’m doing The Artist’s Way, because I’m not like other Creatives hehe) and couldn’t help noticing that every single entry started with a variation of:

25/1/26

FUCKING HELL MY TUMMY IS SO SORE WHY DO I KEEP EATING HOUMOUS AT MIDNIGHT WHAT AM I PAVLOVS DOG. PAVLOVS HOUMOUS. I ALSO DIDN’T LISTEN TO WUTHERING HEIGHTS AGAIN SO ENDED UP PARALYSED BY MY OWN THOUGHTS, THEN SCROLLING ON REDDIT READING ABOUT WORLD WAR 3 AND THINKING ABOUT DEATH UNTIL 4AM WHY DIDN’T I JUST PUT THE HEADPHONES IN I BET [insert someone who is very successful and prolific] DOESNT SLEEP IN TIL 10AM LIKE HENRY THE FUCKING EIGHTH. I AM SO LAZY AND NOW I DONT HAVE HOUMOUS LEFT I’M GOING TO WALK THE DOG I CAN’T BE ARSED GETTING DRESSED I’M SO ANGRY WHY CAN’T I JUST ENJOY MORNINGS LIKE A NORMAL PERSON

Later-

Just walked the dog, feel absolutely fine now. Bought some more houmous.

The eagle-eyed among you might notice some clues here as to what is exacerbating my night time pain/morning woe.

1. FUCKING HELL MY TUMMY IS SO SORE

Not sure if this is evident by the amount of jokes I make about shitting myself, but I do have quite intense IBS. If I eat after 8pm, I get a tummy ache the whole night and wake up with cramps in the morning. I also become so bloated I feel like someone has stuck a bicycle pump up my arse. And pumped air into me, sorry, that bit is crucial.

This discomfort has happened ever since I can remember eating food. We’re talking thirty-seven years of hard evidence I refuse to act on because - and let me make this so, so clear - I don’t want to be the kind of person who’s all ‘sorry I can’t eat after 8pm’ because it just sounds really lame. When I boil it down, that’s genuinely it.

Similar to how I refused to use alarms on my calendar for years because ‘I shouldn’t need to do that’ or never planned meals in advance because ‘I should just know what I want’ even though I need those alarms and I cannot decide on dinner ever.

2. I DIDN’T LISTEN TO WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Yet again, I sometimes refuse to put my headphones in because I’m annoyed that I’m the sort of person who needs to hear a little bedtime story in order to sleep.

When I was six I remember lying awake until sunrise after trying to fill in a notebook I’d got at Christmas called ‘My Favourites’. The problem was, I’d settled down to fill it in and become paralysed by indecision. I couldn’t decide what my favourite things were, because there were so many options! And also, some of those options depended on context - my favourite food for dessert was vanilla ice cream, but my favourite dinner was spaghetti and maybe also enchiladas and I also loved Dairy Milk and oh god!

The worry of not knowing myself, of not being able to answer such a simple question as ‘What is your favourite film’ provoked me into a list-making frenzy, where I compiled all the possibles in an attempt to whittle them down. The worst, and I remember this so clearly, was ‘What is your favourite colour’. I knew I had a blue dress I enjoyed wearing, but was that the shape of the dress, or because it was blue? By the time I’d brainstormed the pros and cons of every single colour I could think of, my alarm had gone off and I was such an absolute state - so sweaty with stress - that my mum thought I was ill and I got a day off school. I then threw the book in the bin.

Now, imagine what sort of thoughts this person has as an adult woman at night. Imagine being my sleeping partner, turning over, opening your eyes and seeing me staring at you like one of those china dolls in horror films, but instead of singing ‘come and play’ I hoarsely tell you a statistic about microplastics.

The takeaway here is: I need to chill the goddamn hell out and listen to Wuthering Heights. This is probably good advice for most situations, actually. Except maybe sea captains in storms? Or burglars. You can’t have headphones in while stealing things, what if the homeowner returns and you don’t hear the car in the driveway? I’ve gone off piste. Skiing! Don’t listen to Wuthering Heights while skiing!!!!!!

3. I BET [insert someone who is very successful and prolific] DOESN’T GET UP AT 10AM LIKE HENRY THE FUCKING EIGHTH

This is less to do with mornings, and more to do with how I’ve recently finished watching the Wolf Hall series (after reading the books - Autumn/Winter 2025 was very Hilary Mantel oriented) so all my analogies are Tudorian. Tudorish? Tudor-based. For example, we got a new boiler this week because the house was colder than Thomas Cromwell’s treatment of Anne Boleyn’s lutist.

Anyway, those are the three areas I have identified, and will be working on, to ameliorate my mornings. Not the Henry VIII thing - the third and most important point is, I need to stop beating myself up about things that really aren’t that big a deal. Does getting up at 9.30am radically alter my ability to work, exercise and have a good day? No. Does me thwapping around like a duck radically alter my ability to work, exercise and have a good day? Er, yes. Have you seen a duck do a spin class etc.

I’m done with angry mornings. No (Thomas) more. Sorry, I can’t tell you how pleased I am with that Tudor reference. But yes, the scales have fallen from my eyes and all has become clear: I don’t need to start every day like this. I can look after my tummy, listen to my stories and forgive myself for getting up later than The Rock. Maybe I’ll also buy a little gratitude journal (I won’t do this, but nice to pretend I will).

The gratitude journal stuff is a good example of how I used to mess up self-improvement by attempting to overhaul everything at once via some sort of brain transplant. Suddenly, I’ll be totally different person! This rarely works, so I’m actually putting my foot down on the gratitude journal stuff, will change those three things and, once they begin to feel easy to do, maybe I can begin adding more (can’t express to you how much I won’t do this).

If you have something that pisses you off but you’re convinced is just Part Of Your Psyche, Soul And Personality, consider this a wake-up call (bit of a pun there). You can change anything you want to change!

Please have a lovely week. As lovely as a big ol’ castle (I’ve run out of Tudor references sorry).