I joined the 5am club so you don’t have to
Waking up at 5am is popular among celebs like Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Obama and Jennifer Lopez. But for this writer, the trend had mixed results.
I’m very vulnerable to the cult of life optimisation — the new quasi-religious belief that we’re all wandering around in a state of messy underperformance. If only, cult members say, we could deep-breathe through our noses, view morning sunlight and brush our teeth standing on one leg, we’d emerge from the swamp of our suboptimal existence.
Lines need to be drawn, however. The Disney CEO Bob Iger told the Norges Bank Investment Management podcast that he gets up at 4am and works out for 45 minutes most days. I think that if a personal trainer loomed over my bed at 4am and tried to drag me out for some burpees and star jumps, I’d feign actual death until they went away.
Iger told the podcast that the early rise allows him to “attack the world and day a little more organised”. Having experimented with early rising earlier this year and joined the 5am club — by Iger’s standards, feckless slobs — I can officially share the news that ultra-early rising is horrible.
The 5am club theory is much like the 4am club theory — you get more done if you get up early. I found the effect of disrupting my sleep was akin to being in that stage of a viral infection when it’s in your system but you haven’t yet started coughing and sneezing. A bone marrow-deep weakness overtook me. Pulling aside the duvet while my wife continued her warm journey through dreamland in her normal unproductive loser sleeping routine, I put on workout clothes (inside out and the wrong way round) and headed to the park. I wasn’t arrested or sectioned but that feels like a lucky break — I felt bonkers and shifty. No one wants to see a late middle-aged man plodding towards them at that time. I was scaring early shift workers and creeping out twenty-somethings with glitter on their faces from the night before.
By 11am I was useless. I couldn’t navigate my local Sainsbury’s, let alone run a world-dominating media company. The effect of stepping out of my usual routine hit me for days after I returned to more conventional habits. I couldn’t sleep at the right time and wanted to lie down on traffic islands during the day to catch forty winks. To be fair to the early rising tribe, you can over time adjust your sleep patterns so that you can get up at all sorts of odd hours. I simply crashed into my experiment but had I edged my way incrementally towards rising at 5am or earlier, I would have felt much more on top.
The core of the night-time rising obsession is efficiency. If you get up at 4am you’ve already finished your HIIT, written a report on next year’s big film projects and wrapped all your Christmas presents while the rest of the world is at the mercy of their unconscious. You can do all this because you are alone.
Getting up at 4am is the equivalent of moving to a remote treehouse in a forest far, far away. The trouble is, unless you want to live on five hours’ sleep a night you will also have to be in bed by 9pm, taking you away from restaurant meals, gigs, the theatre, your family and friends.
I imagine there is a social network of 4am club billionaires who can meet up for affirmations and one-legged tooth brushing but if I put my head down at 9pm, I’d be struggling to do much socialising at all.
Like the Disney CEO, I also want to attack the day, I just don’t want to take it on without reinforcements.
Celebrity early risers
3.30am
The actor Mark Wahlberg went viral when he posted on Instagram his morning routine, which began with a 2.30am start and included prayer time, breakfast at 3.15am and a 7.30am round of golf. He has since decided to sleep in until 3.30am, according to an interview in the Wall Street Journal.
3.45am
Apple’s chief executive officer, Tim Cook, told Time Magazine he rises at 3.45am every morning to send emails before going to the gym, then Starbucks.
4.30am
Michelle Obama woke at 4.30am to work out when in the White House, saying: “If I don’t exercise, I won’t feel good. I’ll get depressed.”
4.45am Jennifer Lopez is said to wake before 5am to exercise, telling US Weekly: “I try to make good choices and balance my time.”
5.45am
Richard Branson has said he rises early even when at Necker Island, leaving the curtains open to catch the sunrise.
The Times
