Fourteen Mornings in Lisbon
I went to Lisbon for two weeks and tried to keep a 6:30 AM routine while everything else changed. What held it wasn't motivation — it was an appointment I'd made with someone who'd notice if I missed it.
The pastelaria three floors below my rented room in Alfama opened at 6:00 AM. I could tell because the smell of custard tarts rose through the building’s old walls and reached my room around 6:10. On the first morning in Lisbon, I lay there smelling it and not getting up until 8:40.
I had come to Portugal for two weeks to write and, in theory, to maintain the 6:30 AM routine I’d spent three months building at home. I had my alarm set. I had my intentions clear. I had booked the room partly because the neighborhood was quiet in the mornings and there was a café with good coffee two blocks away. I had set things up, as I often do, in a way that looked like a plan but required me to do everything from scratch every morning in an environment where absolutely nothing prompted me toward it.
By day three, my routine had dissolved. I was waking at 8:00, which became 8:30, which became: whatever the afternoon felt like recalibrating to.
I should say something about my natural chronotype. I am not a morning person by inclination. Left to my own devices — no alarm, no obligations — I tend toward a 1:00 AM bedtime and a 9:00 AM wake. The 6:30 AM routine I’d built at home took a long time and a lot of external structure to make consistent. Being removed from that structure, I discovered, was all that was required to lose it.
On day four, I made an arrangement with a friend in London. She would expect a WhatsApp message from me at 6:35 AM Lisbon time. Nothing elaborate — just a photo of whatever I could see from wherever I was standing. If the message didn’t arrive, she’d send one word: up?
I told her this might be annoying. She said it would be fine.
The next ten days were different. Not dramatically, not magically — I still woke groggy, I still resented the alarm for approximately ninety seconds on each of those mornings, I still stood in the cold of the apartment kitchen waiting for the coffee maker with no particular sense of triumph. But I got up. On eleven of the next eleven days, I got up.
There’s a version of this story where I credit my friend’s friendship, or my own determination, or the quality of Lisbon’s light at 6:45 AM, which is genuinely beautiful — soft and horizontal, coming off the Tagus, hitting the white tiles on the buildings across the street. All of those things were present.
But the operative factor was simpler. I had an appointment. Not a vague intention. An appointment, with a specific person, at a specific time, who would notice a specific absence.
The research on what actually sustains behavior in disrupted environments is cleaner than I expected. A 2020 paper by Wendy Wood at the University of Southern California, reviewing decades of habit and behavior change research, makes the point that habits are context-dependent — they are cued by environmental features that are often invisible to the person who has them. Travel doesn’t just move you geographically. It removes the cues. The person who is “good in the mornings” at home may be good at home because their bedroom, kitchen, running shoes, coffee maker, and neighborhood sounds all fire the sequence. In Lisbon, none of that fires.
What Wood’s research and others working on behavior in context suggest is that when environmental cues collapse, the replacement must be social or temporal — external scaffolding that holds the shape of the behavior while the internal scaffolding is missing.
My friend in London was that. A person who expected me at 6:35 was, functionally, a substitute for my home environment.
I want to be honest about the limitations of this as evidence. It is n=1. I am a self-reporter. I have no idea what my routine would have looked like in Lisbon without any intervention — maybe I would have found my way back regardless. And fourteen days is not enough to draw conclusions about anything except what happened to me in those fourteen days.
What I am more confident about: the motivational reading of why I got up on days four through fourteen is mostly wrong. It wasn’t because I wanted it more. On day four I did not want it more than I had on day one. The want was roughly constant. What changed was whether an absence would be noticed.
That is not a personality story. It is a structural one.
People who want better mornings usually try to change how they feel about mornings — to find motivation, to build desire, to become someone who genuinely looks forward to rising. This is not impossible, but it is slow and unreliable, particularly in new environments.
The faster path, in my experience and in the research, is to change who is watching. Not the alarm. The audience. There’s a specific wrinkle worth knowing: the first exception to a new routine is the most consequential break — not because one miss degrades the habit, but because of what it does to your identity as someone building one. The fragility is highest early, which is exactly when external structure matters most. And the research on what actually happens to behaviors when accountability partnerships end — whether they internalize or collapse — is documented in three case studies from after the accountability partner leaves.
If someone expects you at 6:35, that expectation travels. It was in Lisbon. It will be wherever you go next.
A friend in London works if you have one available and willing. DontSnooze is built for the same structural function: it creates an external appointment at your wake time, with real people who notice when you’re absent. A few months after Lisbon, it’s what I use at home.