Reflections on Waking Up at 5am: Discipline, Rest, and the Reality Behind the Hype
It’s a Tuesday afternoon, around 2pm, and I’m staring at the same paragraph on my screen for the fourth time. My third coffee has gone cold. My wife asked me a perfectly normal question about an hour ago and I bit her head off for it, and I haven’t apologised yet because I’m too foggy to even form the apology properly.
This is month three of waking up at 5am, and I am, by any honest measure, worse at my job, worse at my marriage, and worse at being a person than I was before I started. But I won’t stop, because by this point I’ve told too many people I’m a 5am person, and stopping feels like losing.
I kept that up for two years. I want to write down what I actually learned, because most of what I’d been told turned out to be wrong.
The setup
I run a publishing business with my brothers. The business runs on output. So when I started seeing every successful founder on the internet talking about their 4:30am cold plunge, their 5am gym session, their 6am deep work block, it made a kind of sense to me. If I just got there earlier, I’d get more done. If I got more done, the business would grow. If the business grew, my family would be fine.
The logic seemed airtight.
The first month was great. There’s a clean satisfaction to being awake when most of the city isn’t. The streets are quiet. The phone doesn’t buzz. You feel like you’ve already won the day before most people have brushed their teeth.
I told myself I’d cracked it.
What started happening around month three
By 2pm I couldn’t think. I’d sit down to write something important and my brain would just refuse. I’d read the same paragraph four times. I started leaning on caffeine more, then more, then more again.
I was getting irritable with my wife. Small things became big things. I’d snap at her over a plate left in the sink, then feel awful, then blame the work for being too much.
My runs got slower. I’d come back from them feeling like I’d already done the day, not like I was starting it.
The business didn’t grow faster. The work I did between 5 and 7am was, looking back, often the worst work of my day. Tired work. Forcing-it work. The kind of writing and decisions you have to redo later.
But I kept going, because by then it was who I was. I was a 5am person. Telling anyone I’d stopped felt like admitting I’d failed at something.
The story we’ve absorbed
Somewhere in the last twenty years, a story took hold that being tired is a form of virtue. That sleeping less is character. That if you’re not pushing yourself to the edge of what your body can take, you’re soft.
This story sells very well. It sells books. It sells coaching. It sells the version of yourself you wish you could be.
It also has a particular flavour. It’s almost always told by people who are either very young, very rich, or both. They have the luxury of optimising. They don’t have a baby waking up at 3am. They don’t have a parent declining in another country. They don’t have a marriage that’s quietly slipping out of reach because nobody’s home in their own face anymore.
I bought it because I wanted to believe I could earn my way out of regular human limits. That if I tried hard enough, I wouldn’t need rest. I’d become a different kind of person.
I didn’t. I just got tired.
What changed it
My daughter started sleeping through the night around eight months. I remember the first proper night’s sleep I’d had in a year. I woke up naturally, sometime after 7. I didn’t feel virtuous. I felt clear.
I sat with my coffee and realised I hadn’t felt that kind of clear-headed in a long time. I’d been running on fumes and calling it discipline.
That morning I wrote more usable words in an hour than I had in most of the 5am sessions of the previous month.
So I let it go. I went back to seven and a half, sometimes eight hours. I stopped setting an alarm for 5am. I started going to bed when I was tired, which, embarrassingly, was probably what my body had been asking me to do all along.
What I actually think now
Discipline isn’t a number on a clock. It’s whether you do the thing you said you’d do. If you do it at 9am after sleeping, that counts. If you do it at 5am while half asleep, it counts less, because the work is usually worse.
Rest isn’t laziness. Rest is the thing that makes the work possible. The people I know who do their best thinking, who write the best books, who build the most resilient businesses, are almost all very protective of their sleep. They don’t post about it.
Exhaustion isn’t a badge. It’s a tax. Sometimes the tax is worth paying for a season. Newborns, deadlines, a sick parent, a hard month at work. But paying it on purpose, year after year, because you read somewhere that real founders only sleep five hours, is one of the stranger ways we turn ambition against ourselves.
The quieter part
The thing I didn’t expect was that giving up the 5am thing made me kinder. To my wife. To my brothers when we were on calls. To the people who work with us. To myself.
It turns out a lot of what I’d thought was my personality was actually just being tired.
A rested person and an exhausted person don’t make the same decisions. They don’t speak in the same tone. They don’t see their own life the same way. If you’ve been tired for a long time, you might not realise how much of what feels like reality is just the fog.
I’m not anti-early-morning. If you genuinely love getting up at 5am and your body is happy to do it, lovely. Carry on.
But if you’re doing it because you think it will make you a better person, and you’re miserable, and your relationships are fraying, and your work is getting worse rather than better, you have not failed at discipline. You’ve just been sold a story.
You’re allowed to put it down.
Source: Here
