I am not empowered or optimised by my current morning routine. I am a bleary-eyed doom-scroller. So I spent a month ditching my phone, exercising, journalling and embracing the dawn, to find out what really works

Are morning people better than night owls? I was delighted to discover that they are not. The “morning morality effect” – the notion that our capacity to resist lying and cheating dwindles through the day – applies only to larks, research shows; nighthawks behave better in the evenings.

Morning people do, however, have a reputation for getting stuff done. Early rising is associated with energy, optimisation and efficiency; it is a foundational principle of all manner of self-help and self-actualisation programmes. “If you look at many of the most productive people in the world, they’ll have one thing in common: they were early risers,” says one wide-eyed zealot in the trailer for the motivational guru Hal Elrod’s film about his “miracle morning”, as Oprah Winfrey, Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Einstein flash past. Elrod’s Savers routine – silence, affirmations, visualisation, exercise, reading, scribing – is a classic of the genre, but he is only one of many urging us to seize the day super-early.