While it's certainly no coincidence, there's a lot of confounding reasons. The industrial revolution's timing of shift work placed a very long-lasting and extre

While it's certainly no coincidence, there's a lot of confounding reasons. The industrial revolution's timing of shift work placed a very long-lasting and extremely strong weight on punctuality. And that punctuality often run 24/7, meaning that the clock's crucial tipping points often landed at unpleasant hours like 7am (be at your station at 7am, which means getting there between 6:30am and 6:45am, which means leaving the house by 6am, which means waking by 5am...) Add that a lot of people who work physically hard in that sort of tiring shift work (especially people my parent's age) learn to consider early rising a moral virtue and a badge of worth, and you've got a lot of pressure to hold it up as an admirable standard. It can get pretty silly, to the point that I've seen people promoted for punctuality despite a record of poor performance; factories are different, of course, but America was built on the power of heavy industry, so it's a philosophy that pervades. To wit: even in fields where work spans months instead of hours, getting up daily 'before your competitors' gives you an 'edge'. It's a really odd notion if you look at it closely. On the other hand, I find the added mild stress of waking early, combined with a ritual (absolutely and especially like making coffee as noted in the article) helps me have an excellent start to the day. I don't usually do that, but I really like it when I do. Waking early is nice, so long as I'm not horribly sleep deprived to start; or so stressed that I can't fall asleep early. EDIT: I should note that I'm just skimming the surface here. That industrial timing may really be rooted in how trains had to be critically on-time, which forced plants to be ready or miss the ride, and vice-versa. The whole topic is stressful to read about, but really interesting.