Before children, my mornings were calm and a bit smug.
I’d wake up at 5.45, walk the dog in peace, come home and do some exercise, then shower and get ready slowly. I’d make a decent fresh breakfast, listen to a podcast on the drive in, and arrive early with time to get organised before the ward round started. It felt like a good routine: productive, healthy, like I was doing life properly.
Then I had children and everything changed.
Now the alarm goes off at 4.15am, theoretically so I can have a little quiet time before anyone wakes up. In practice, by about 4.45 the first small person is already shouting from their room. Cue an immediate meltdown while I try to collect the correct cuddly toys and make milk quietly enough not to wake the other one, which rarely works. The three-year-old wakes up anyway and starts shouting too, so I run upstairs to retrieve her, only to be told she didn’t actually want her sister there.
Eventually we make it downstairs, followed by ten minutes of negotiation about whether anyone would like to use the toilet today. Breakfast is then fairly liberally distributed across the kitchen floor while the eighteen-month-old tips her bowl upside down and spits out most of what went in, and the threenager cycles through several big emotions while loudly objecting to whatever is happening.
At some point I take a very quick shower: no hair wash, definitely no make-up, and the standard uniform of jeans and a jumper. My husband takes the dog out while I try to get the children ready for forest school, which involves one child clinging to me while refusing to get dressed, then removing the clothes I’ve just put on. Bags are unpacked, siblings argue, more negotiations occur. About an hour later we are, technically, ready to leave the house, at which point I discover I have stepped in a small puddle of wee on the floor. Or occasionally something even better, like finding vomit in the felt-tip pen box because someone coughed so hard with a cold that they were sick. We run out the door (no breakfast for me) and I still arrive fifteen minutes late, slightly frazzled and in a bad mood. I’m not in clinical practice for the time being, and mornings like this are part of the reason.
Mornings like this reaffirm for me that a lot of health advice assumes a life with spare time, spare sleep, and only one adult body to organise.
The internet loves the 5am club. Apparently, if you just get up early enough, you can exercise, journal, meditate, have a slow nourishing breakfast, and greet the day like someone who has their life completely under control. If it works for you, genuinely, great. I’m not here to take that away from anyone. I’m technically in the 4am club now and I still don’t have time to do all the things I’m supposedly meant to do for my body, my mind, and my spirit (or whatever it is I’m meant to be nourishing before sunrise). Mostly what I have is a dark house, a baby monitor, and the constant low-level readiness to sprint upstairs.
And then there’s the version of this you see on Instagram, where mums ‘get up before the kids’ with a full face of make-up, clean their already spotless house, go to the gym, and then collect the little darlings at 7.30 as they stand quietly in their cots smiling sweetly. I find that version of the internet slightly surreal.
Yes, I could technically try to exercise at 4am, but I’m fairly sure I’d wake the children. I can’t go to the gym even if I had a membership, because it isn’t open. I can meditate, and I have tried, but it doesn’t have quite the same effect when you’re responsible for the baby monitor and your nervous system is primed to jump at every cry.
So I’ve done what anyone sensible does when they have absolutely no free time. I started a Substack.
To be clear, I’m not against morning routines. I used to have one and it did help. When I managed to exercise before work, eat properly, and start the day in a calm way, I genuinely felt better and was noticeably calmer and in a better mood. That’s probably why this stage frustrates me: I know the benefits, but recreating that routine in this phase of life takes far more time, energy and mental bandwidth than I currently have. What I object to isn’t the routine itself. It’s the implication that if you can’t achieve it, you simply lack discipline. Sometimes the problem isn’t discipline. Sometimes the problem is reality.
There’s also a slightly boring biological point here that often gets missed. A lot of the habits that genuinely help health rely on the exact capacities that broken sleep and parenting chip away at: patience, planning, emotional regulation, impulse control. When you’re running on fragmented sleep, everything is harder, and your brain is not at its best for long-term goals at 5am. That isn’t a personal failure. It’s just what tiredness does to people. So when someone suggests waking up even earlier to solve the problem, it can feel a bit like recommending extra homework to someone who is already drowning.
Over the past few years I’ve had to adjust my expectations. The goal in the morning isn’t improvement anymore. It’s basic functionality. If the adults are washed, the children are dressed, teeth are brushed, bags are packed, the dog has been walked and everyone leaves the house with shoes on, I consider that a success. If I manage a matcha somewhere in the process (yes, I’m a matcha wanker), even better.
More importantly, I’ve realised that a large part of my morning effort now goes into something that rarely appears in morning routine videos: staying regulated enough to be kind. Listening, cuddles, taking an extra moment to slow things down rather than rushing everyone out the door in a state of mutual irritation. Some mornings I manage it well. Some mornings my nervous system taps out and I absolutely do not. But increasingly, connection feels like a better marker of a “good morning” than whether I managed a workout.
I’ve started to think a useful test for any piece of health advice is whether it survives real life. Not your best day. Not a child-free weekend. Real life: broken nights, small people, competing needs, and the ordinary chaos of getting everyone out the door. In that context, the question stops being “what’s the perfect morning routine?” and becomes “what actually holds up, even a bit?”
For me, it’s less about adding more and more inputs and more about protecting the basics: sleep opportunity when it’s available, a half-decent breakfast, some movement somewhere in the day, and not pushing my nervous system past its limit before 7am.
Maybe that’s the point. A good routine isn’t the one that looks impressive online. It’s the one you can repeat when your life is noisy, constrained, and full of other people.
Leave a Reply