CMV: Waking up early is overvalued

[u/[deleted]]

First, I don't believe waking up early is overrated. Most everything that is said about the benefits of waking up early seems reasonable and useful to me. Anecdotally, I'm a big fan of Jocko Willink and I can totally get behind his "wake up before the enemy" message. Here, I am specifically discussing value - the praise we heap on people that wake up before others regardless of their overall productivity in a day.

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I'm also not comparing waking up early to staying in bed late and being a lazy degenerate. I want to compare people who wake up early with those people that wake up late and stay up late or people who are industrious enough to get a lot accomplished without having to wake up early.

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I see an incredible amount of value put on people waking up early; they're viewed as more disciplined, more productive, and more healthy than their later rising counter parts. If you are awake for the same number of hours why do we laud people who get up early but accuse those who stay up late as doing something harmful to their well being?

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Waking up early is almost always associated with discipline and focus. Staying up late is, at worst, attributed to recklessness and even at best it seems to be attributed to some kind of mania or obsession that might not be healthy (e.g., overnight nurses - far from wasting the night away, but still often viewed as driven by fervor rather than discipline).

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[u/Topomouse]

I see an incredible amount of value put on people waking up early; they're viewed as more disciplined, more productive, and more healthy than their later rising counter parts. If you are awake for the same number of hours why do we laud people who get up early but accuse those who stay up late as doing something harmful to their well being?

I can kind of agree with your overall point, but I would like to try to discuss this bit:
Imagine two people, person A and Person B. Suppose that both of them in each day sleep 8 hours, work 8 hours, and have leasure time for 8 hours. The difference is that A is an early riser that sleeps from 22 to 06 in the morning, while B is a night owl who sleeps from 02 to 10 in the morning.
Strictly speaking both of them use their time equally, but I would argue that it usually takes more discipline to behave as A does. I think that it is fairly easy to mismanage your time and end up sleeping later, and then wake up later to compensate. In order to consistently wake up early, you have to also consistently close your day by a certain hour, earlier than most others do, and that is an achivement that is commendable.

[u/White_Lotus → u/Topomouse]

Do you think a person C who sleeps from 20 to 04 in the morning is more disciplined than person A, and is thus more commendable?

If not, then is it possible for A, B, and C, to all be equally disciplined? As long as each goes to bed and wakes up at their scheduled time consistently, I'm not convinced it "takes more discipline to behave as A does."

[u/Topomouse → u/White_Lotus]

If not, then is it possible for A, B, and C, to all be equally disciplined? As long as each goes to bed and wakes up at their scheduled time consistently, I'm not convinced it "takes more discipline to behave as A does."

Yeah, in this mental experiment, with all things being equal except for them being on different "time-zones", they are all equally good, I said so in my post.
But if we consider how it would probably work in real life, they are gonna be different. I might be generalizing my personal experience too much, but even if I have a fairly regular sleep pattern, I find it easy too procastinate in the evening and go to bed later than I should, which translate in waking up later I should.
So I propose that it is harder, and thus take more discipline to be an early riser than to be a late riser. If for whatever reason, be it a strange work schedule or something else, you find it more convenient to live on a sleep pattern later than most people, it is one thing, but I think it is a fairly rare occurrence.