October 26, 2026

I tried Brahma Muhurta for 30 days

The first morning of my 30-day Brahma Muhurta challenge, I woke up at 5:20 a.m. My alarm was supposed to go off at 5:02.

I apparently hadn’t set it.

Which is a pretty efficient way to fail a challenge. All the planning, the research, deciding I was going to document this entire thing, and I’d managed to overlook the one button responsible for getting me out of bed.

So we’re calling this a practice day.

I figured I could at least get some movement in, drove to the gym, and found out it was closed for Labor Day. Perfect. I can’t even get rejected by my alarm and go work out in peace. I went for a run instead, and the following morning I got another chance at the very complicated task of being awake.

Why exactly 5:02?

I wanted to try Brahma Muhurta for 30 days. It comes from Indian spiritual and Ayurvedic traditions, where the time before sunrise is set aside for meditation, prayer, and study. The idea of having some quiet before the rest of the world starts making requests sounded really good to me.

Usually I wake up and go straight to the gym, already thinking about work and everything I need to do afterward. I’m barely conscious and somehow already behind.

For this challenge, I used the calculation that places the start of Brahma Muhurta 96 minutes before sunrise, with a 48-minute window for the practice. When I calculated it for where I live, that gave me 5:02 a.m. The timing moves with sunrise, but I kept 5:02 as my fixed wake-up time to keep the challenge simple. Having to recalculate when to be miserable every morning seemed unnecessary.

My own added rule was that if I missed a morning, I’d start over. Which explains the immediate need to invent a practice day.

Anyway. I had the time figured out. What I hadn’t really figured out was what prayer, meditation, and reflection were going to look like for me once I was sitting there in the dark.

The first few days: giving myself time to want my phone

I’m not exactly an experienced meditator. I’d sit down, close my eyes, and try to focus on breathing. Then I’d start wondering if I was doing it wrong. Or think about what I needed to do later. Or wonder whether enough time had passed for me to check my phone without immediately admitting defeat.

Apparently, the fastest way to make your phone interesting is to tell yourself you can’t touch it.

I’d given myself this gift of peaceful time before sunrise and was spending a good amount of it trying to escape. There wasn’t anything particularly urgent happening. I just suddenly had a very strong interest in whatever might be happening somewhere else.

So the first few days involved a lot of experimenting. A little meditation, some journaling, reading, sometimes a walk while it was still dark. I did some yoga too. I wanted to find a version of this that I could actually get something out of, while still keeping the time for reflection that drew me to it.

There were little moments where I could see why someone would want to do this. I liked being outside before everything got going. I liked having a few minutes where I didn’t need to rush straight into the next thing. I was still figuring out the rest when, on day five, I suddenly had to travel for work.

Days five onward: inner peace, now available in economy

I was looking at six or seven days of airports, hotels, and a schedule I couldn’t control. Which is a fantastic environment for building a consistent morning routine.

The first stop was Tucson, Arizona, for a two-day work conference. Then I flew across the country to Philadelphia. At home I could at least decide when to go to bed and know where I’d be sitting the next morning. Traveling, I was trying to figure out when I could sleep at all.

One night I didn’t get to my hotel until around 1 a.m. That left me with roughly three hours of sleep before I was supposed to get up and do something good for myself.

Waking up was miserable. At that point it was very clearly a “this is now making me worse” sort of thing.

The restart rule sounded reasonable when I was making plans at home. It became considerably less appealing when following it meant dragging myself through a workday after barely sleeping. I can rally with little sleep. I can also become more chaotic, which was getting pretty far away from the reason I wanted to try this.

I thought I’d only be in Philadelphia for 48 hours before going home. Somewhere in the trip I ended up sleeping in the Denver airport, and another morning I was awake at 3 a.m. for a flight. I also found myself meditating and journaling on an airplane.

There is something very funny about trying to find inner peace while you’re folded into an economy seat next to a stranger. You’ve got your journal out, trying to reflect on your life, with approximately enough personal space to reflect on one elbow.

But I did keep finding little opportunities to do it. The practice could fit into a pretty ugly version of a morning. I could take a few minutes to sit, write, and think even when the rest of the day was out of my control. Getting enough sleep was the part I kept running into, and waking up earlier obviously wasn’t helping me manufacture any more of it.

Back home, I started finding my version

Once I got home, I could finally control my evenings again and spend a little less time figuring out which building I was going to sleep in.

The routine started coming together. I’d read one page from The Daily Stoic, journal, and meditate. Sometimes I used a guided meditation. Sometimes I didn’t. I also started writing down the three things I most wanted to accomplish that day, an exercise inspired by Essentialism.

That gave the study part of the practice somewhere to go. I had things I wanted to learn and get better at, especially making videos, but they’d been gathering dust on my to-do list. Something always came up. Or I’d spend enough time thinking about all the things I needed to do that I’d have less time to actually do any of them.

Picking three forced me to decide what I wanted to get done while I still had a say in it. Before my phone, my inbox, or really anyone else had contributed their own suggestions.

I also made a rule that on normal mornings I wouldn’t touch my phone until I was leaving for the gym. Even when I wasn’t using it, I was thinking about using it, and I was already awake early enough without giving part of that time back to an app.

By day 17, I could actually feel a difference

Around days 15 and 16, meditation was feeling less awkward. The mornings felt less rushed. And I kept finishing the three things I’d written down.

There were several days in a row where I’d get to the evening and all three were done. I was spending more time making YouTube videos. I worked on my A-roll lighting and framing, researched keywords and how successful videos were structured, and wrote more scripts. All the stuff I’d wanted to give more attention to was finally getting some.

And by some 3,000-year-old magic, deciding what was important first thing in the morning seemed to help me get it done. I’m aware that writing something down and then doing it sounds like a pretty basic discovery. I’d apparently needed a month-long experiment and a practice day to get there.

In my day-17 recording, I talked about waking up being less of a struggle and feeling the most productive I’d been. I really liked having time to sit and plan without rushing. Normally I’d be heading straight into the day, and now I could actually think about what I wanted from it before I was in the middle of it.

Waking up still fluctuated after that. Some mornings were easier than others. But once I was awake, I enjoyed having those hours. I wanted to get up and have that time, even on the mornings when getting out of bed sucked.

The weekend problem

Weekends were some of the hardest mornings of the entire challenge. During the week I can go to the gym early. On weekends it doesn’t open until 9, so I couldn’t even use the early start the same way.

I’m awake before everyone else, it’s dark, and the place I normally go is going to remain closed for several more hours. There’s a lot of room in that situation to reconsider every decision that led to it.

Then one Friday I went to an emo night. It was a lot of fun. I got home around 11:30 p.m., with an alarm set for 4:50 the next morning.

Nothing says health like having a great Friday night and remembering you’ve scheduled consciousness for 4:50 a.m.

I really hated some of those weekend mornings. I could enjoy the practice once I got going and still have absolutely no interest in the alarm that made it possible. Both things kept happening.

This was also the part I couldn’t seem to solve for after the challenge. I wanted to keep doing it, but I also wanted to be able to go out and enjoy my life. Becoming more intentional was starting to require some very specific negotiations with Friday night. I still haven’t figured out a perfect arrangement there.

The part I couldn’t put on a checklist

I could see the work getting done. The other changes were harder to put a number on.

By day 22, I was talking about meditation feeling deeper. I felt a connection to something that I couldn’t tell what exactly it was. With other people still asleep, it felt like there was less interference. I could just sit there for a while without feeling pulled toward everything else.

I would be lying if I said I felt like a new spiritual being. I did feel a pretty drastic change in my attitude from having more time to just sit.

I felt more capable of handling what was in front of me. I was spending time on things I cared about and making my actions line up with what I kept saying I wanted. There was something really nice about going into the day having already checked in with myself.

The best way I can describe it is feeling spiritually charged before going out into the world. I don’t have a graph for that. I just liked how it felt, and I noticed it carrying into the rest of my day.

I also can’t separate every part of this experiment and tell you which one produced which feeling. I changed when I woke up, spent more time reflecting, put the phone away, and started choosing priorities. That’s a lot happening at once. I can tell you that I liked the version of my mornings I ended up with, especially when I’d actually slept enough to enjoy them.

Day 30, and what happens after

I made it to day 30. I was so happy to be done. I was also surprised by how much I liked it.

This was probably my most productive month in a long time, without needing every second of the day accounted for. I’d gotten more done on the things I cared about, and I liked having time when nobody needed anything from me.

I do want to keep doing it. I came close to restarting, and I’ve also had a very clear demonstration of what happens when I try to force an early alarm onto a night that barely had any sleep in it. Travel is going to happen. I’m going to want to go out with my friends. Some mornings I’m going to need more sleep.

I still want the reading, the journaling, the meditation, and the time to decide what I’m doing with my day. I’d just like to keep those things without turning every late night into the beginning of another 30-day sentence.

I don’t need every morning to be exactly 5:02. But I’ll definitely take more mornings where I get to decide what the day is for, before it starts deciding for me.