Priya Natarajan

Most morning-routine advice assumes an uninterrupted hour, which she considers a luxury unavailable to a huge number of people. Her diagnosis is that caregivers who try standard 60-minute routines fail repeatedly, then conclude they are bad at habits, when the real problem is a routine designed for the wrong constraints. Her fix is to shrink the target until it survives a 3 a.m. wake-up call: a fixed short sequence that fits inside whatever window actually appears.

Each of her core actions has a stripped-down version that takes under 90 seconds — a few sips of water, a fixed short phrase used as a mental reset, a single stretch. The full version is the goal, but the 90-second version always counts as a completed day. This matters because, in her account, caregivers who miss the full version tend to skip entirely rather than do a partial version, and removing that all-or-nothing trap was what made the habit stick for her workshop participants.

Because a caregiver's sleep is often broken into pieces rather than one block, she focuses less on total hours and more on protecting whatever windows exist: a strict wind-down cue before any sleep opportunity, and avoiding phone use during night wakings, which she found reliably turned 20-minute wakings into 90-minute ones.

She warns against comparing your interrupted mornings to someone else's uninterrupted one — the comparison itself, not the interruption, is what she sees derail people. The measure of success is whether the 90-second floor happened, not whether the ideal version did.