20 Bizarre Ways Famous People In History Started Their Day

Winston Churchill would wake at 7:30 AM but not leave his bed until nearly 11. During that time, the British prime minister would eat a hearty breakfast, read the newspapers and wartime dispatches, and dictate letters to his secretaries, who sat in his bedroom. Basically, Churchill was helping run Britain during World War II without even getting out from under the covers. As I said, that’s a morning routine I can actually get behind!

Each morning at 5:00 AM, Benjamin Franklin asked himself, “What good shall I do this day?” After he got out of bed, Franklin reportedly practiced what he called an “air bath.” And no, this didn’t involve any actual bathing. Franklin described the practice himself in his autobiography and in a letter from 1768: he would sit naked in his bedchamber with the window open for as long as an hour.

By 7:00 AM, Sigmund Freud rose to a waiting beard trim from a barber, who called daily. His wife, Martha Freud, had his clothes laid out and toothpaste already squeezed onto his toothbrush. Must be nice to have your morning routine practically done for you! Freud was a creature of habit, consulting at 8:00 AM sharp, when he greeted his first patient of the day. He maintained this schedule for decades.

In 1818, future U.S. president John Quincy Adams had a rather unusual morning habit: swimming naked in the Potomac River. Journalist Anne Royall did later interview Adams, but the popular story that she sat on his clothes to trap him into giving her an interview, or even stole them, was a 19th-century legend. According to Adams’s own journals from July 1818, he rose before the sun, walked two miles to the Potomac, and took a naked swim that could last up to an hour before returning home for breakfast. And I have trouble just getting out of bed in the morning!

Beethoven supposedly counted out exactly 60 coffee beans for each cup. He worked on his composing from sunrise to early afternoon, occasionally pouring cold water over his hands. However, Beethoven’s early biographer, Anton Schindler, is the source for the tale of the 60 beans, and he is known for his fabrications and exaggerations. Historians therefore treat that oddly specific detail as tradition rather than established fact.

Franz Kafka spent 10 minutes each morning doing naked calisthenics by an open window. But this wasn’t just one of Kafka’s personal eccentricities. He was following a fashionable exercise system outlined in the 1904 book My System by Danish fitness writer J.P. Müller. Müller’s exercise book was popular throughout Europe at the time, so Kafka certainly wasn’t the only one exercising in the buff!

While living in exile on the island of Guernsey, Victor Hugo followed a rather intense morning routine. He was called to his daily task by the sound of a cannon shot from the fort. His breakfast consisted of two raw eggs and black coffee, because apparently a regular breakfast wasn’t dramatic enough. Then, he would write straight through to 11:00 AM, after which he would take a cold bath on the roof of his house, in full view of everyone below.

In a letter to his sister Nannerl dated February 13, 1782, Mozart described his very precise morning routine. By 6:00 AM, his hair was done, and by 7:00 AM, he was dressed. From 7:00 until 9:00, he devoted himself exclusively to composing before his lessons began.

Some accounts claim that Voltaire drank 50 cups of coffee a day, but that number is likely an exaggeration. What is true, however, is that he drank coffee mixed with chocolate in bed each morning. That part of the routine sounds pretty good to me! He would rest on pillows, put a writing board over his knees, and dictate to his secretaries while reciting lines from his plays aloud.

Contrary to popular belief, Ernest Hemingway did not write 2,000 words every morning for decades, as legend suggests. According to the daily word-count chart he kept, his output was typically 400–800 words. He wrote by standing in front of a bookcase converted into a desk and started writing at first light, around 5:30 AM.

It was rumored that poet Dame Edith Sitwell rested in a coffin before she began writing each morning. Her biographers say she did no such thing, which is almost disappointing given how wonderfully dramatic that would’ve been. What Sitwell did do was get up around 5:30 AM to write her poems in bed under the covers. The early morning hours were the only guaranteed quiet time of her day.

Neither contemporary nor modern medicine supports the efficacy of soaking your feet in cold water; however, for about 60 years, Thomas Jefferson started his day at first light by immersing his feet in cold water. Once he was finished with that exercise, he took his weather observations. He credited his practice with his continuing good health.

Louisa May Alcott wasn’t training for any specific athletic event, but she was accustomed to running before dawn on the empty country roads around Concord, Massachusetts. The runs helped prepare her physically and mentally for the intense writing sessions that followed. Running before dawn just to get ready for work? I admire her, but I will absolutely not be joining her.

As part of his morning routine, prolific writer Alexandre Dumas worked on several projects and used different colors of paper to keep them organized: blue for novels, yellow for poetry, and pink for nonfiction articles. The color-coded system helped him avoid mixing up the many projects he was juggling.

Contrary to reports that Thomas Edison slept only four hours total without naps, he typically took a short nap in the morning. He then arrived at his laboratory around 7:30 AM to check on the progress of things already in motion, and often ate cold pie for breakfast.

Charles Darwin got up at 7:00 AM, took a brief walk, and ate breakfast alone. From 8:00 to 9:30, he worked in his study. This was his principal period of work for the day. Chronic illness constrained Darwin’s energies, so that hour and a half was the one work session he could reliably manage each day.

Tchaikovsky’s secret for an uncluttered head ready to compose? Do the things you hate first. Every morning, upon waking at 8:00 AM, he took his mandatory 45-minute walk at 8:30. Then, between about 9:15 and 10:00, he proofread and answered letters, the “unpleasant tasks,” after which he was prepared to compose.

Flannery O’Connor’s desk faced a blank wall. After her 7:00 AM trip to Mass, she devoted the hours from 9 until noon to her writing, and did nothing else, in that time. Though her lupus left her fatigued and limited her hours, two or three good pages a day was enough to leave behind a substantial body of work.

Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius would write his private thoughts down at dawn, in a diary that was never meant to be published and which later came to be known as his “Meditations.” In them, he wrote about the mental preparation he required to deal with difficult people and to get out of bed every morning. I feel that!

For decades, Kant’s servant, Martin Lampe, is said to have woken the philosopher each morning with the same words, roughly translated as ‘It is time.’ Kant would get up, drink some weak tea, smoke one pipe, then work until it was time to give his 7:00 AM lectures. Tradition holds that the other inhabitants of Königsberg set their clocks by Kant’s daily walks.

This content was created with the help of AI.