morning person

I don't hold the moral view that it's better to be a morning person than an evening person. Having always tended towards a later sleep schedule, the cultural tendency to judgement around this can be infuriating. But I do recognize some practical advantages to an earlier schedule:

• It aligns better with daylight hours and the natural rhythm of the sun. As a society there's an asymmetry in our sleep schedules in that almost everyone stays up for several hours past sunset, but almost no one gets up significantly before sunrise. staying up late heightens this asymmetry, since I sleep in and miss the first few hours of sunlight --- in extreme cases I'll sleep into the afternoon and wake up with only a few hours of sunlight in my day. That just feels dysfunctional, and there's a lot of research about well-being to back this up.
• Morning time is often more productive than evening time. When I'm well-rested, have just had coffee, and have a whole day ahead of me, I feel like I can really do anything.When evening time feels more productive, that's often a sign that my days are set up badly, full of meetings or obligations to do things that don't feel important. Or, that my sleep schedule is so skewed that mornings are groggy and it takes me until evening to really 'wake up'.
• In places with hot weather, early morning is often the best time to go for a run or other outdoor exercise. And in general, morning exercise feels good - you start the day with a sense of accomplishment, a sense that no matter what else happens the day won't have been wasted.
• Sleep research has shown that having a consistent schedule is extremely valuable. Since occasionally you'll have to wake up at times dictated by other people's schedules --- for meetings, appointments, events, etc. --- then for consistency's sake you don't want your natural rhythm to drift too far from what's socially 'normal'. Of course this applies in both directions; an extreme 'morning person' in the habit of going to bed at 8pm will suffer disruption when events are scheduled later than this. But night time, and late nights especially, tends to be less scheduled, more flexible and wide-open (one of the things I love about it), so it's less common for hard late-night obligations to interfere with a morning person's schedule.

Aside from any inherent advantages, I've noticed that waking up early can also be a result of alignment in other areas of my life, of being in a pattern where I'm regularly excited and energized to greet the new day. Conversely, a regular pattern of staying up later than I intend can be caused by despair, depression, and dissociation (though certainly this isn't always the case).