The best part of waking up

Leaving the wolves to sleep

An old Folgers coffee ad includes a jingle: “The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup.” The practices around waking up have been on my mind lately, and this little earworm roars to life when I think of waking up’s best parts.

Birdsong is big for me. In its absence, something deep in my mammalian psyche is off. A morning can feel bleak and somehow darker without the song sparrow on our neighbor’s roof. Even if you’re not a birder, notice what sense the songs and calls of a dawn chorus give you.

Just as I think of waking up’s best parts, I have a habit I’ve tried to break for a few years. I’ll call it “Waking the Wolves.” Stay with me.

Our day’s wolves

Anxiety can be a familiar companion to a lot of people. When we first wake up, it’s usually not awake yet. But, we anxious types can weirdly feel a need to give anxiety a wake-up call.

If our default mode throughout the day is a combination of baseline anxiety, worry, or turmoil, when we first wake up, we can seek to create these familiar mental states. We do it by imagining someone stewing about an email we owe them, disappointing a boss or client, or thinking of unfinished daily obligations. All this instigates concern, heightens our awareness, and jangles our nerves. Once we have a churning sense of doom in our stomachs, we feel more at home in a perverse sense.

There are varying degrees of this. Some may go off the deep end and struggle to function, cancel plans, and recede into a lesser life, while others simply underperform.

Part of the problem in breaking the cycle is we think it’s helping us. For instance, you may think, well, of course, we add stress; it’s helpful motivation, and to an extent, some stress serves us to bring focus and can mean we care about outcomes. But I’m talking about stress that has nothing to do with outcomes or, in some ways, even reality.

Stress addiction

Our bodies can become addicted to stress. We think it’s a helpful, motivating influence, but it can create reactions or reactivity that’s outsized with what’s happening in front of us. Evidence for this abounds. Why do people explode over slight hiccups in their commute? Why do they fire off cringe emails steeped in displaced anger that they must apologize for later? All this supposedly helpful motivating stress that can gin up our motivation may be partly to blame for our being a jerk.

Even with no outsized reactions or relational casualties, the emotional cost of creating stress is far too high. Yes, you can navigate tricky circumstances because your attention is razor-sharp. Still, the crash and emotional escape that awaits are often harmful in ways the feared and imagined scenarios never would’ve been. After a day of created stress, we can eat our emotions, binge-watch trash television, or think that only a vacation can fix us when we need to reduce our need for escape altogether.

The experience of waking the wolves to feel normal is the subject of the forgoing poem I wrote. It’s a poem; it’s dramatic, but let me know if you have felt the same.

WAKING THE WOLVES

The wolves of unrest emerge —
from the gentle woods of sleep.
Slink in lithe trots
into the clearing of a new day.

The wolf of guilt, the wolf of
disappointing others, the wolf of
remembered unskillful actions.

Doubt wolf, Imposter wolf. Failure wolf.

I was free in sleep — but now
waking feels complete by
enticing, teasing them
to dig real and imaginary teeth into me.

The bites hold equal pain and comfort.

The unsettled uncertainty of dawn’s clearing
feels right now,

as I’m crowded and

devoured.

The help I’ve found is to practice differently than this habit. It’s practice, good one day, difficult the next. Like life.

Be well, friend.