How Aristotle gave me Jaylight Savings

It came from his theories of rhetoric and habit.

In my next book, I tell how I embarked on a yearlong experiment to establish a godlike physique—assuming one of the older, less-fit gods.

Before I could establish an exercise habit, I faced a huge obstacle: time. I thought, If only I could conjure an hour, magically creating a twenty-five-hour day, then I would have a window for a daily workout. Perhaps a quantum physicist could pull this off, but I needed a different technique. I realized that the least productive hour of my day was the last one. The hour before bed belonged to the television, streaming movies. What if I chopped off that hour and grafted it onto the beginning of the next day?

To put it simply, I would go to bed an hour earlier and wake up an hour early.

And I thought, That sucks. Sacrifice an hour of relaxation to get up before dawn? Did I have the Aristotelian courage to actually accomplish that? No, I did not. So I practiced a technique I had honed from many years of writing: I procrastinated.

I waited until the following autumn, when on one November day the United States government granted us an extra hour. On that day, daylight savings time turned to standard time, and seven o’clock in the morning magically became six. Being married to a morning person, I was already in the habit of getting up at six, so now my wakeup time became five. Boom, there was my extra hour.

I stuck to that hour, even when daylight savings came around the following spring. The next year, I used the standard time change to set my clock back yet another hour. I was now getting up at four every morning! Late television time turned into early me time—a peaceful period when the phone stayed silent, no one texted, and the dawning world was my oyster.

Sunrise from our backyard mountain. Since only my wife lives in Jaylight Savings, nothing is ever crowded.

Not that I used it wisely; not yet. While I had succeeded in carving out 8 percent of the twenty-four-hour cycle for exciting new habits, I remained unprepared to actually acquire those habits. The thought of doing anything useful at that godawful time of the . . . can you even call four o’clock morning? Writing, working out, reading improving books, whatever, seemed daunting. I lacked the courage to attempt them.

Still, I had the time. Eventually, I got used to having nothing else to do that early. So I chose to spend those two hours reading. Eventually, I began spending the second hour doing an easy downloaded workout. Over the months, that workout turned into harder workouts. My reading hour became a writing hour. It’s not that I pushed myself to do any of these things. I just got a little bored with the easy way. The writing and workouts seemed novel and therefore somewhat attractive.

Plus, each small accomplishment added to my courage. Just look: I had managed to get up two hours earlier than my already early wakeup time! What’s more, I did it seven days a week, even Sundays! I was so proud of this feat that I declared my own time zone, Jaylight savings. It was like any other time zone, and not an entirely crazy one.

People who fly to London from New York don’t think it especially odd to have to get up five hours earlier the next morning. We call the adjustment period jet lag, as if blaming it on the transportation.

What the Greenwich Observatory did for the world’s time zones I did for my very own schedule. There was a downside, of course. Jaylight savings would have been perfect if more people than just my wife and I had been in it. Friends learned not to invite us to any dinner that began after five p.m. Still, I was willing to embrace that particular suck.

Besides, the benefits of those extra hours kept adding up. When it got light enough, I would head outside for brisk walks. The walks turned into runs, and the runs turned into trail runs, and eventually I was going up mountains in my home state of New Hampshire. That early in the morning, I was not tempted to eat junk, so I focused on nutrition drinks that wouldn’t upset my stomach during workouts. I went from pushups and pullups to workouts using dumbbells, and I got stronger. Those two hours of Jaylight savings transformed into an hour of writing followed by an hour of working out, and the writing hour—sheer coffee-enabled hard work, no matter how I framed it—turned the workouts into playtime, something I actually looked forward to.

You could justifiably hate me for telling you this. But I don’t mean this story to show what great courage and self-discipline I had. In fact, Jaylight savings let me carve out those good-habit hours without much bravery or discipline. My cumulative habits simply ratcheted themselves up.

Here’s an early-morning horrible TikTok video that shows how delightful Jaylight Savings can be. My publisher’s marketing person made me do it.

Exercise:

1. Set a goal and make it shiny.

2. Carve out the time. Ideally, use the transition in the fall from daylight savings to standard time. Simply go to bed and get up as if the time had never changed, gaining that extra hour in the morning.

3. Indulge yourself in that extra hour. It’s yours to do whatever you want. Meanwhile, congratulate yourself. It took a bit of courage to do something as strange as exploiting the federal government’s time standards.

4. Take that boost of courage and set a tiny new habit in that early hour. Read, practice a new skill, take an online lesson, or exercise. Whatever small thing leads to your goal, you now are courageous enough to try it.

5. Ratchet up. Celebrate each new habit, and once you get used to it, see if you can make it a tad more ambitious.