If I had to to try to summarize the core, it would be that I've been conditioned through school/society/work over decades that the morning is for fulfilling responsibilities to others. Only when school/work/chores are done, could I exercise any autonomy to do whatever I wanted (seeing friends/playing videogames/programming/night-life/etc..). Naturally, I ended up with at _least_ a moderate pavlovian response to the end of the workday.

The one thing I absolutely couldn't shake was that by the end of my workday, my "fulfilling responsibilities" energy felt completely drained -- leaving me in a cycle of "wake up, immediately go to work, finish work exhausted, veg out on whatever interest my brain has until very late and go to sleep anywhere from 12AM-2AM" with little time to maintain _my_ life up to the standards I set for myself.

I also interpreted threads like this one in the way you do:

> Should I really give that up so I can be more productive at my day job?

No, absolutely not unless that is a personal goal of yours! Maybe this isn't true for you or others, but I _do_ feel recharged in the morning. In a very general sense, there is somewhat of a clean slate mentally in the morning that my wife and I call the "good brain". Anxieties that I fell to sleep with are often resolved, pessimism might be reframed into cautious optimism, that tricky programming (or interpersonal!) problem has had some fog clear out of the way, etc...

This led me to realize that my sleep schedule _was already_ optimized for my employer's benefit. Get out of bed, and take that fresh "good brain" to work and drain it. The way out of this for me was to slowly transition into earlier mornings to get a few hours of orientation in the morning where I can use my fresh energy to do something valuable _for me_ instead of the company I am working for.

Nowadays I'm up at 4-5AM without an alarm clock which leaves me 2-4 hours to get ready and do the things I feel I need to do. The head-start feels really nice.