Let a girl Pitter-Patter

I love early mornings for one reason, and it has nothing to do with productivity.

I pitter to my morning drink. I patter to my journal or meditation. And then I continue pitter pattering, slowly, getting ready for the next two hours.

Younger me would have had something to say about that. like , Girl, that's called lazy. Get a move on.

But younger me was also spending half her days drowning in guilt, writing off entire afternoons because the morning hadn't gone the way she'd planned. So. We live and learn.

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A couple of years ago I got an Oura ring, which introduced me to the concept of chronotypes -  your body's natural circadian rhythm, largely shaped by genetics, that determines when you're actually wired to sleep, wake, and do your best thinking. Mine diagnosed me as an early evening type, with an ideal sleep window of roughly midnight to 8 AM and peak energy hitting around 3 PM.

This was, genuinely, a little revolutionary.

It turns out that long before alarm clocks and 9-to-5s, staggered sleep schedules served a specific purpose: someone in the tribe was always awake, always alert. The early risers and the night owls weren't opposites, they were a system. 

The fact that some of us crash at 2 PM while others finally come alive at sunset isn't a character flaw.

It's ancient design.

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Before I understood any of this, my internal logic went something like: if it was noon and I hadn't been to the gym, crossed off at least three things, and generally performed some version of a productive morning, then the day was already lost. I might as well start over tomorrow.

That logic quietly wrecked me for years.

By mid-afternoon, I'd be so tangled up in guilt about the morning I'd "wasted" that I couldn't function. I'd written the day off before my brain had even fully come online. I had decided I was lazy, undisciplined, fundamentally behind, all because I hadn't managed to be someone I was never biologically built to be.

And here's the part that still gets me: I was beating myself up during my low-energy window, spiraling through guilt during the window right before my peak, and then arriving at my actual productive hours already emotionally exhausted. Every. single. day.

All in the name of optimization.

I was working against my body, punishing myself for it, and missing the hours that actually counted, because no one had told me those hours existed, and because I was too busy performing discipline to notice them.

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My peak hours are 12–2 PM and 3–5 PM. Once I knew that, the mornings stopped being evidence of my failure and started being exactly what they are: a slow warm-up. The pitter patter isn't laziness. It's just the beginning of my day, on my body's actual schedule.

If you wake up at 5 AM naturally lit up and ready, genuinely, not out of guilt… then that's your rhythm and it's worth honoring. But if you're dragging yourself into the dark, forcing coffee, staring at a to-do list while your brain is still buffering, it might be worth asking: who decided this was the only way?

Because the 5 AM thing isn't a universal truth. It's an aesthetic. A productivity culture that decided early rising was synonymous with discipline, ambition, and moral character. And a lot of us absorbed that without questioning it. Real optimization isn't someone else's schedule. It's knowing your own rhythm well enough to actually work with it!

So I sip my coffee slowly now. I journal without rushing. I ease in. And when my real hours hit, I show up for them. The hard tasks, the deep thinking, the work that needs my whole brain present and awake.

SO in the name of optimization,

let a girl pitter patter!