I woke up at 5:00 AM every single day for a month because some guy on YouTube with perfect teeth told me it would make me a millionaire. It didn’t make me a millionaire. It just made me a person who was incredibly angry at my toaster by 7:15 AM. We’ve been fed this narrative that the world belongs to the early birds, the CEOs who crush a workout and three meetings before the sun is even up, but for most of us? It’s a recipe for absolute burnout.
The cult of the early bird is mostly just performance art
There is this weird, almost religious obsession with the 5 AM start time. If you look at LinkedIn or those “aesthetic” TikToks, it’s all the same: a dimly lit room, a journal, a green juice, and a caption about “owning the day.” But here is the thing nobody mentions—half of those people are probably back in bed by 9:00 AM, or they’re so caffeinated they can’t actually focus on a single complex task. It’s performance art. They aren’t working; they’re documenting the idea of working. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently: they are prioritizing the appearance of discipline over the actual output of their brains.
I know people will disagree with this, and they’ll point to Jocko Willink or Tim Ferriss, but those guys have built entire ecosystems around being “that guy.” For a regular person who has a job in general management, or someone who has to deal with a commute and a boss who doesn’t care about your “deep work” blocks, forcing yourself into this window is just adding another layer of stress to an already packed life. It sucks. It really does. You end up in this state of being “tired-wired” where you’re too exhausted to be creative but too jittery from the four shots of espresso to actually rest.
Waking up early is only a virtue if you actually do something useful with the time, and staring at a wall while your brain defrosts doesn’t count.
That Tuesday in March when I almost lost my job
It was March 14, 2022. I was on day twelve of my “5 AM Club” experiment. I had gone to bed at 11:30 PM the night before because, you know, life happens, but I still dragged myself out of bed when the alarm hit. I felt like a zombie. I was sitting at my desk at 5:45 AM, trying to look at a spreadsheet for a logistics project. I was so out of it that I accidentally deleted an entire column of vendor pricing data and then—this is the embarrassing part—I saved the file and closed it. I didn’t realize what I’d done until my manager called me at 10:30 AM asking why the budget for the entire Q3 rollout was missing. It cost the company about $400 in emergency data recovery fees and me a very awkward afternoon of explaining why I was “optimizing my routine” instead of just sleeping. Total disaster.
Anyway, I think that was the moment I realized that sleep isn’t a luxury you can just hack. I used to spend so much money on expensive coffee beans—I’m talking $22 for a 12oz bag of some single-origin roast—thinking that if the coffee was better, the 5 AM wake-up call would be easier. It wasn’t. It just meant I was drinking expensive bean water while feeling miserable. But I digress.
I tracked my brain for 22 days and the results were depressing
I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to tracking things, so during my second attempt at this (yes, I was dumb enough to try it twice), I kept a log. I used a simple spreadsheet to track my “Focus Score” on a scale of 1 to 10. I defined a 10 as being in a total flow state and a 1 as “I am currently looking at pictures of vintage watches instead of writing this report.”
- 6:00 AM Focus Score: 2.4 (Average)
- 10:30 AM Focus Score: 8.1 (Peak)
- 2:00 PM Focus Score: 3.2 (The post-lunch slump)
- 9:00 PM Focus Score: 6.5 (The second wind)
I tracked 22 days of data and found that my brain literally doesn’t turn on until about four hours after I wake up, regardless of when that wake-up happens. By forcing myself to start at 5 AM, I was wasting my most disciplined hours on tasks that didn’t matter, like clearing out my inbox or folding laundry. By the time 10:30 AM rolled around—my actual peak—I was already hitting a wall because I’d been awake for five and a half hours. I was losing about 4.2 hours of “deep focus” per week just by being tired at the wrong time.
I might be wrong about this, but I think the whole 5 AM thing is actually a form of self-harm for people who feel guilty about not being “productive enough.” We punish ourselves with early alarms to feel like we’re winning, even when we’re losing.
I refuse to use an Oura ring and here’s why
I know everyone in the productivity space is obsessed with their Oura ring or their Whoop strap. I hate them. I think they are $300 mood rings for people who want to feel like elite athletes while they sit in a swivel chair all day. I bought one, wore it for three weeks, and it just told me what I already knew: I was tired. It gave me a “Readiness Score” of 42 every morning, which just made me feel even more defeated before I even put my pants on. I don’t need a piece of titanium on my finger to tell me that staying up until midnight watching documentaries about the Silk Road was a bad idea. I actively tell my friends to avoid them. They just turn your natural intuition about your body into a data point that you then feel pressured to “optimize.” It’s exhausting.
And let’s be honest—I genuinely think a lot of people who swear by the 5 AM routine are just trying to escape their families. It’s not about the “quiet hours for deep work.” It’s about being in a room where nobody is asking you for fruit snacks or complaining about the Wi-Fi. It’s a socially acceptable way to hide from your responsibilities as a parent or a spouse. That’s a bit harsh, I know, but I’ve seen it happen. They’d rather be at a cold desk at 5 AM than deal with the chaos of a 7 AM household. It’s an avoidant personality trait masquerading as a success habit.
How to actually get stuff done without hating your life
So, what do you do instead? You find your own rhythm. For me, that means waking up at 7:30 AM, which is apparently a sin in the world of “high performers.” But at 7:30, I actually feel human. I’ve stopped trying to “overclock” my brain like it’s a PC with a broken cooling fan.
The real secret isn’t when you start; it’s how you manage the energy you have. I started doing this thing called “Energy Mapping.” It sounds like some New Age nonsense, but it’s just looking at your day and realizing that you shouldn’t do hard things when you feel like trash. I save my hardest, most brain-melting work for 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM. If I try to do it at 5:00 AM, it takes me three hours. If I do it at 10:00 AM, it takes me 45 minutes. It’s not rocket science.
Productivity isn’t a ladder you climb; it’s more like a garden that needs specific weather conditions to grow. If the sun isn’t out, don’t try to force the plants to grow. Just wait for the sun.
I’ve completely changed my mind on the whole “discipline” thing. Discipline isn’t about doing things that make you miserable; it’s about having the discipline to ignore the trends and do what actually works for your specific, messy, non-optimized life. I’m much happier now that I’ve stopped trying to be a morning person. I’m still not a millionaire, but at least I don’t want to throw my toaster out the window anymore.
Are we all just chasing a version of ourselves that doesn’t actually exist?
Sleep in. Work hard when you’re awake. Ignore the gurus.
