A few months ago, I was in the middle of a workout, looking at the clock between sets, calculating whether I could finish in time to get the shower in before the kids needed breakfast.
The workout was supposed to be the part of my morning that I looked forward to. The part for just me. Somewhere in the calculations, I noticed I wasn’t really doing the workout. I was getting it done.
I sat on the bench. I let the next set go.
I was the only person this was for, and I’d somehow turned it into work anyway.
My morning routine kept getting longer every year
It started simple. A workout, coffee, and a few minutes to read the news before everyone else got up. That was the whole thing.
Somewhere around year two, I added meditation. Then a lengthy stretch routine. Then, journaling, because someone whose podcast I trusted said you couldn’t really know what you thought until you wrote it down.
Then the supplements. Then the breathwork. Then, a specific way of making the coffee, with a scale, a timer, and beans I ordered from a guy in Oregon.
Each addition seemed reasonable in isolation. None of them, individually, took very long. But the routine had quietly become something I needed to wake up earlier and earlier to get through, and I’d stopped noticing when it had stopped being optional.
Each new thing I added was supposed to make me feel less anxious
That’s the part I don’t quite know how to explain to people who haven’t done this.
I wasn’t doing all of this because I loved it. I was doing it because somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d come to believe that the people who weren’t doing this stuff were losing. They were falling behind. They were the kind of guys who turn 50 and suddenly find out their cholesterol is bad and their marriage isn’t great and their kid doesn’t really know them.
So I added things. The meditation was supposed to fix the anxiety. The journaling was supposed to fix the mental chatter. The workout was supposed to fix the body. The cold shower was supposed to fix the mood. Each addition came with a promise about what it would solve.
Some of them did help, at first. But the help kept wearing off, and the answer was always to add another thing.
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I started waking up earlier just to fit it all in
This one kind of shocked me. When you start a morning routine, you’re carving an hour or so out of the day for yourself. That feels like a gift. But as the routine grows, that hour grows with it, and the time has to come from somewhere.
I went from getting up at a reasonable hour to getting up before the sun, and then before the early birds, and then before the kind of hour any sane person would call morning. I was sacrificing sleep, which is supposedly the most important thing for your health, in order to do the routine that was supposed to make me healthy. I’d built a system that was eating its own tail, and I couldn’t see it.
The journaling was the first thing to feel like homework
I’d been journaling for about a year when I noticed I was dreading it.
Not actively, not the way you dread a meeting with your boss. More like a small reluctance every morning when the notebook came out. A faint sense of here we go.
The thing was, the journaling wasn’t hard. It was three pages of whatever was in my head. There was nothing to dread. But somewhere it had shifted from a thing I wanted to do to a thing I had to finish before I could move on to the next thing, and that shift had stripped the meaning out of it.
There’s a concept called the overjustification effect, which describes what happens when you take something you used to enjoy and attach an external structure to it. The intrinsic motivation gets replaced by the external reward, and the activity stops feeling like its own reason. I didn’t know the name for it then, but I was living it. The journal had stopped being a place to think and started being an item on a list.
I started checking my phone during my meditation
This was the second crack.
I’d been meditating, supposedly, for about three years. I say supposedly because by the end of it, the meditation was more like a holding pattern. Twenty minutes of sitting there, mostly thinking about what came next, occasionally remembering I was supposed to be focused on my breath, then sneaking a look at the phone to see how much time was left.
The phone check was the tell. You don’t peek at the clock during something you’re actually doing. You peek at the clock during something you’re enduring.
I tried to fix it for a while. I put the phone in the other room. I downloaded a stricter app. I told myself I needed to recommit. None of it worked because the problem wasn’t the technique. The problem was that the meditation had become another thing I owed somebody, and the part of me that knew it was no longer interested in pretending otherwise.
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The off-days started feeling like the good days
Once or twice a month, life would force the routine to collapse. A kid would wake up sick at 4 am, or I’d be traveling, or the day would just go sideways in some way that made the morning impossible.
Those mornings, I’d skip the whole thing. Just coffee and getting the day going.
What I started to notice, with a kind of embarrassment, was that those mornings felt better than the ones where I did everything right. I had more energy. I was friendlier with my wife. I wasn’t snapping at the kids over their cereal.
This was confusing for a while. I assumed I just needed to push through. But the pattern kept showing up, and eventually I had to admit what was happening. The routine wasn’t recharging me. It was draining me, and the only mornings I felt good were the ones where it didn’t happen.
A piece on optimization culture describes something called “betterment burnout,” and points to research suggesting that a relentless pursuit of self-improvement might actually lower your life satisfaction. I read it the same week I noticed the pattern with the off-days, and the timing was uncomfortable.
I’d built a list of things to do and called it a life
The routine wasn’t really about meditation or workouts or journaling. The routine was a way of feeling like I had control of something. Each item on the list was a small assurance that I was doing the work, that I was the kind of guy who took care of himself, that I wasn’t slipping.
But the actual experience of doing it was nothing like the experience the list was supposed to deliver. The list was supposed to give me a calm, focused, intentional morning. What it actually gave me was an hour and a half of efficient self-management followed by the rest of a day that didn’t feel any different.
I’m not against routines. I still work out. I still drink coffee. Some mornings I still write a little.
But I’ve stopped trying to optimize. I do the things I do because I want to do them that morning, and I don’t do them when I don’t. The system, such as it is, runs on what I actually feel like, not what some version of me from three years ago decided I should feel like every day.
The mornings are quieter now. I don’t always know what I’m going to do when I get up. And that, it turns out, was the thing I’d been missing the whole time.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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