What is your Natural Rhythm?
Over the past year I’ve become more aware of my natural pace.
When it’s up to me, my mornings exude spaciousness. I enjoy waking up without an alarm, often rising around 7:30 a.m. if I’ve gotten enough sleep. I make a cup of tea and drink it slowly, unhurried, writing in my journal, then writing for my blog. This is the time when my creativity is at its peak each day, when I’m most prone to ponder and imagine, and vision. There’s energy to access different sources of wisdom, to hear my intuition, and also for more intense focus. I can hear myself think, form cohesive thoughts, and take decisive action. My mind is at her sharpest, energized and invigorated by the dawn of a new day.
A few hours later, things begin to shift. By early afternoon my energy has noticeably started to fade. Creativity is no longer the focus and instead I move to routine tasks, the ones that are repetitive and require less brain power to complete. It’s here that I’ll consult my to-do list, assess what can be tackled with ease, and work my way through items step by step. At this time, I know I can’t handle complex tasks or anything involving too much effort.
Later in the evening, especially after dinner, I prefer to simply relax. It’s a struggle to be productive, to get things done. My mind is looser, thoughts fall through the cracks, and there’s less energy available to push through. My body naturally starts to soften, preparing to slumber, and I gravitate toward quieter activities that aren’t very stimulating. Sometimes it’s reading a book, sometimes it’s catching up with a friend. Some days I watch tv, though calm activities are the ones I typically favor.
This is how my day naturally unfolds when nothing external demands I contort my life force in any particular way. It’s a relaxed sort of rhythm with lots of space, gently flowing from phase to phase.
Rhythm Was Never Supposed to Mean Linear
I didn’t always know how my energy liked to flow, that my creativity and focus are more prominent in the morning yet wane throughout the day, that certain tasks are best done at certain times, while other parts of the day are best allocated to rest and rejuvenation.
For a long time, my life played out in a much more linear fashion.
I woke to an alarm and got out of bed, regardless of whether my body was ready to begin the day. I rarely ate breakfast before rushing to work, where I then spent 8+ hours forcing myself to focus despite a growing awareness that my body couldn’t sustain that level of productivity. My evenings would be packed with all the other things I didn’t have time for: cooking, socializing, exercise, other life tasks.
And really this was nothing new, I’d been repeating a similar pattern most of my life just as so many of us have.
From the time we are children, we largely don’t get to operate on a schedule of our own choosing. In elementary school we learn to adapt to the school day, eating, playing, and studying according to the allotted time slots. This is often our first taste of the “week” concept and we live this out in five-day increments followed by two days off. Weeks are then organized into months, months into years, with school years following their own timeline.
These are arbitrary constraints, not necessarily better or ideal for us, yet we orient our lives around this rhythm and this continues throughout our school years with little to no deviation.
As we enter the adult world and take on jobs, this pattern only continues. We contort our times and therefore our lives based on our employers’ needs, following whatever standardized workday or shift schedule we’ve been assigned.
We rarely get to ask what feels right for us, to discern whether moving this way honors our physical, mental, emotional, and energetic needs, to discover whether another pace would feel more aligned. We master this collective external human rhythm so much so that it becomes normalized, ingrained, unquestioned.
And with that internalization perhaps comes the misconception that rhythm is supposed to look one way: chronological, linear, focused on the end goal.
The Natural World Moves in Seasons
I wonder how many of us have adopted a cadence that feels unnatural to us, to the extent we don’t fully realize it’s happening. To the extent that we come to believe what’s been imposed upon us is just how we naturally are. To the extent we find it nearly impossible to tell the difference.
But some part of us recognizes this isn’t the natural order of things; we know something feels off. Nowhere else in nature do we see this pattern; all we have to do is consider the rest of the natural world around us to see how we are living apart from our intrinsic design.
The seasons impart their own wisdom, quietly teaching us to flow from spring’s new beginnings into summer’s radiant buoyancy, from autumn’s preparation to winter’s inner rest.
The trees and flowers mimic this cycle; the plants go dormant from late autumn into winter, lying fallow underground and only in spring does new life begin to emerge. Spring’s seedlings blossom by summer, culminating in the fall harvest before beginning the cycle anew.
And the animals follow a similar cycle, adapting to their climate, migrating and hibernating in predictable patterns. They sleep when they're tired, they eat when they're hungry, they play when they need to move. They don't naturally suppress these urges but instead honor the wisdom flowing through them.
The natural world doesn’t stay stuck in a perpetual summer, always on, always going, always thriving at peak bloom. Rest and renewal aren’t treated as optional but rather an integral part of the cyclical nature of being alive.
Why should it be different for us as humans?
Humans were never meant to live as machines, endlessly moving forward at a consistent pace without pause. We require rest, play, introspection, spontaneity.
If we aren’t fully cut off from our bodies, we too recognize that we operate cyclically as women. First with our menstrual cycles which afford us the gift to experience inner seasons each along our infradian rhythm. Pregnancy and postpartum operate along their own timelines as do perimenopause and menopause.
And there’s another layer to uncover: each one of us is unique. We all have different individual rhythms, our own internal ebbs and flows based on our bodies’ innate inclinations. We each have a way we like to move, a particular cadence that speaks to us. We each possess a unique amount of energy.
These biological realities take us beyond our human-imposed timelines, transcending what we’ve created in service of a deeper truth.
How We Can Reclaim Our Natural Pace
In productivity-oriented cultures, there’s often only one acceptable pace: fast. We’re told to move quickly, efficiently, with the aim of completing and accomplishing. There’s little room to align with what feels natural to us when we’re busy following the same pace as everyone else.
The problems arise when we follow a rhythm that isn’t ours, where we risk burnout and exhaustion stemming from a life at odds with our natural rhythm, when we drain our energy to conform to the standard rather than embodying what feels good and correct for us.
Every time we override our bodies’ knowing or disregard our basic impulses of when to eat, drink, move, sleep, play, and retreat we further distance ourselves from not only our unique rhythm but from the rhythm of all of the living world around us.
Many of us might struggle to identify what’s specific for us; we’ve been taught to intellectualize rather than attune. And this means we’re taught to override when our bodies tell us differently. Re-attuning to your personal rhythm is largely a body-led process; once the mind gets involved, there’s a tendency to overlay what you believe you should be doing rather than allowing what genuinely wants to come through.
It’s only been after allowing myself larger unstructured periods of time where my natural rhythm finally had the space to emerge, to make itself known without inhibition.
If you’re ready to reclaim your natural pace, consider adjusting your morning with intention.
Wake up without an alarm when possible. Notice how many hours of sleep your body actually needs, not what you’ve been told is necessary, but what actually feels restorative to you. What time do you naturally wake up?
As you move through the morning, notice where your energy naturally wants to go. Do you enjoy eating breakfast upon waking or do you need time to work up an appetite? Do you prefer a structured morning routine, or would you rather have space for spaciousness and flow?
What kind of energy do you naturally have early in the day? What kind of tasks are best suited for this time and which ones should be left until later?
If you’re feeling bold, consider dropping any schedule completely and simply create space for your natural inclinations to become apparent.
The conditioning from so many years of outer pacing remains and it takes work to let go and trust in a new more aligned way. Some days as I sit in the early morning relaxing, taking my time, not needlessly rushing, I feel it: that inner pressure to speed up, jump into action, and get things done. I have to remind myself it’s ok to honor my desire to slow down.
If you feel uncomfortable without an outer structure guiding you, remember our bodies move more slowly than our minds. The more you create space for your natural energy to emerge, the more your inner somatic knowing will guide you.
You may not know what your own rhythm looks and feels like yet, but it’s underneath the surface, waiting to be remembered. Once you remember, you may realize your personal cadence doesn’t neatly fit into a structure that aligns with outer expectations. That’s ok. The discovery offers an invitation to realign with your unique pace, one unhurried morning or small moment at a time. How deeply to honor that pace is up to you.
