Meditation, vodka and vinegar: can the morning routines of the rich and famous make me a better person?

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

Orlando Bloom: among the many celebrities whose morning routines have been held up as an often unattainable ideal.

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.