Image Illustration from Coffee FB
By Dr Rahim Said
The alarm rings at 5 a.m. Not that it needs to — my body clock has been set for years.
The stillness of dawn is my cue to rise, perform my Subuh prayers, and begin the quiet stretch that greets the day before the city wakes. The calm before chaos, as I like to think of it.
After prayers, I stretch for a few minutes — a simple ritual to ease the stiffness from sleep. Then comes my breakfast at 7:00 a.m.: a plate of fresh fruit, poached eggs, and sourdough toast. Nothing fancy, but enough to fuel the brain and keep the stomach from rumbling during the hours of writing that follow.
Occasionally, I reward myself with coffee — not because I’m addicted, but because sometimes a warm cup feels like good company.
It seems, according to data and the wisdom of Harvard’s happiness professor Arthur Brooks, I’ve been unknowingly following a scientifically validated path to happiness.
Brooks, who teaches a class on managing happiness, says the way you start your day shapes your creativity, focus, and overall mood. His six-step morning routine — wake before dawn, exercise, meditate, delay caffeine, eat protein, and enter a flow state — reads almost like a psychological blueprint for contentment.
Brooks himself wakes at 4:30 a.m., prays or meditates, exercises, eats high-protein yogurt, and only drinks coffee after 7:30. Then, with his mind clear and his body primed, he dives straight into creative work — no email, no distractions, just flow. It’s the same rhythm I try to find in my own mornings when I sit down to write my daily column. There’s something deeply satisfying about shaping thoughts while the world is still quiet.
But what fascinates me most about Brooks’ approach is not the rigidity of routine — it’s the intentionality. Every act serves a purpose: prayer to align the soul, movement to awaken the body, delayed caffeine to sustain focus, and early work to harness the best hours of the mind. Happiness, he suggests, isn’t an accident; it’s a design, refined by self-experimentation.
That idea resonates. My morning isn’t about chasing productivity or adhering to some Silicon Valley-approved ritual. It’s about balance — a spiritual, physical, and creative equilibrium that steadies the day ahead. I may not have a Harvard lab to test my happiness levels, but I can tell when a morning goes right. When the sunrise feels like a blessing, when words flow easily, and when the day unfolds without the fog of fatigue — that’s data enough for me.
Brooks ends his routine with a simple reminder: “Experiment on yourself.” In a world obsessed with shortcuts and hacks, that might be the most valuable advice of all. There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for happiness — only patterns that work for you.
So while some might reach for their phones first thing or chase dopamine in their morning scroll, I’ll stick to my prayers, stretches, and eggs on sourdough.
It may not make me a Harvard case study, but it makes me human — awake, grounded, and ready to face whatever madness the day brings.
And if that’s not happiness, I don’t know what is.
WE