Belinda Carlisle has revealed the incredibly early time at which she sets her alarm to wake her up in the morning to meditate and go for a walk. The singer, who soared to fame in the 1980s as part of The Go-Go’s before embarking on a successful solo career, has revealed she decided to embrace a crack-of-dawn wellness routine after being dropped from her record label aged 40 and getting sober.
Speaking to The Times in a new interview, Belinda, now 67, shared: “I get up at 3.30am, make coffee, get back into bed and listen to an audiobook by a Buddhist teacher for 40 minutes.” She continued: “I get up and do my meditation and chanting practice until 6am, when I go for an hour-long walk.”
Belinda, who lives in Mexico City with her husband Morgan Mason, explained the moving reason behind her early rising. “Forty was a big turning point in my life because I was dropped by my record company but I also got into Buddhist chanting,” she told the newspaper. “I struggled personally with a lot of things and chanting changed my perspective on life.”
It was quite the shift for Belinda, who had embarked on her dreams of a music career at just 19 years old. She then became the lead singer of The Go-Go’s in 1978, and their debut album went straight to number one in the US.
Belinda – who has a 33-year-old son called James – then pursued a solo career from 1985, with hits including the song ‘Heaven Is A Place On Earth’. However, in 1998, she was dropped from her record label.
Challenging time
The star has previously spoken about how challenging a time that had been for her, following her struggles with alcohol and cocaine addiction. “I was dropped the day after I turned 40,” she told The i Paper in 2023. “For the first time [in my career] I had no record company.”
© Getty ImagesBelinda has said that finding Buddhism helped her stick with sobriety – which has in turn, she believes, has allowed her to rebuild her career and made her a better performer. “With sobriety, I was more present on stage, and the shows got better,” she explained.
She added that it also helped her overcome the imposter syndrome that had lingered despite her industry accolades. “I was always really afraid to get on stage without some kind of chemical or alcohol,” she admitted. “I didn’t feel like I was deserving of this amazing career, which I call service work. But I don’t feel that way now. I know my lot in life is to be a pop singer.”
Is waking at 3.30am a good idea?
“There’s no universal answer here because we’re not all wired the same way,” says Dr Charlie Cox, a cardiothoracic intensive care consultant and longevity and performance focused-clinician at Reborne. “Your chronotype – whether you’re naturally an early bird or a night owl – is largely genetically determined. It’s a real biological phenotype, not just a preference. Some people genuinely function best in the early hours; others hit their stride later in the day.”
Dr Cox continues: “The crucial variable isn’t what time you wake up – it’s whether you’re getting sufficient quality sleep. Your circadian rhythm is the master clock that governs virtually every physiological process in your body: hormone release, immune function, metabolism, cognitive performance, tissue repair. It’s arguably the single most powerful lever in human health.
“Disrupting it – by chronically under-sleeping or forcing a schedule that fights your biology – has consequences that cascade through every system.” If someone, he adds, is waking at 3.30am but going to bed at 7.30pm and genuinely getting seven to eight hours of restorative sleep, that’s a very different proposition to someone setting an alarm for 3.30am after going to bed at 11pm.
Is the morning a good time for mindfulness practices?
Dr Cox insists: “No amount of meditation or morning routine will offset the damage of chronic sleep restriction. The data on this is unequivocal – short sleep is associated with impaired immune function, increased inflammatory markers, metabolic dysfunction, poor cognitive performance, and increased all-cause mortality. You cannot out-meditate a sleep deficit.”
However, he adds: “That said, if you can restructure your evening to get to bed early enough and still achieve seven to eight hours, there is something genuinely powerful about those early morning hours. Low cortisol, minimal external stimulation, no emails coming in – it’s a window that lends itself well to reflective practices. And the behaviour change itself – the act of committing to a routine and showing up for yourself before the world demands anything of you – has real psychological value beyond the meditation itself.”
Lauren Clark
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