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| The Guardian asks the tough questions. From last year: The cult of 5am: is rising at dawn the secret of health and happiness?  It has been called the morning miracle – getting up before everyone else and winning the day. But does it actually make you more productive and focused? I'm just going to address the obvious first: if "everyone else" got up at 5am, you'd have to get up a 4am to awaken before them. Then there'd be articles about the wonders of waking up at 4am. And people will buy into it, and soon you'll have to wake up at 3. And so on, in a never-ending cycle of backing off in time. But that's about as realistic as everyone suddenly turning vegan. I just wanted to call out the logical fallacy. It is 5.15am and I am walking down my street, feeling smug. The buildings are bathed in peachy dawn light. “Win the morning and you win the day,” suggests productivity guru Tim Ferriss. The prize is within my sights: an oat-milk latte, my reward for getting up ridiculously early. This implies that the oat-milk latte is to be acquired from a coffee shop, not the author's own kitchen. This means, wait for it: the coffee shop is already open. This further implies that the workers there have awoken even earlier in order to get the magic beans, or whatever, prepared. Are the baristas "winning the day?" Or have you already lost because you've slept in later than they did? Or are they just NPCs to your main character? On to the deserted six-lane high street where supermarket delivery vans and the occasional bus are the only signs of life. More NPCs. There is no coffee to be had at any of the eight shuttered cafes I pass... Oh, so I guess the baristas got to sleep in, after all. ...so I head for a patch of green space to meditate. Which is about the same thing as sleeping, so what's the point? Other than smugness. Why am I doing this? Because, in an attempt to become one of the elite superbeings who are members of the 5am club, I am trying a week of very early starts. It's okay to try something new. Doing so may even provide a temporary mood boost, as you are more deliberate in your actions and discovering new things, like the cafés being closed in this case. But doing it because celebrities are doing it? Or because some soi-disant "guru" says you should? I'm not impressed. To a sceptic, there is a degree of magical thinking to much of this. If you can just do this one thing – get out of bed while others snooze – you will have time to get fit, eat healthily and achieve all your goals. Again, if everyone did it, well, that infinite regression is something I've already covered. Also, the "you will have time" part is negated unless you get less sleep by going to bed at the usual time, because there are only 24 hours in a day (absent things like time zone travel or the clock switches in spring and fall). And getting less sleep isn't healthy for most of us, as I've noted before. So, yes, I'm skeptical (look, I understand British spellings, but outside of quotes, I'll generally use American English). And yet, as I said, changing one's routine can also have benefits. Sometimes that's what it takes to shoehorn in a workout or time to cook or whatever. Ordinarily, I get up at 6.30am without an alarm. I am not at my best at this hour. I mainline instant coffee and doomscroll for 90 minutes, and then it is time to get ready for work. Ah. I think I see the real problem. When I was working, both blue and white collar jobs, I never had time in the morning for more than shower, dress, quick bite (maybe) and commute. The few times I woke up earlier than absolutely necessary (by choice or not), I didn't see the point in doing anything else before work. Of course, this was before "doomscrolling." At 4.50am, my alarm, set to Arcade Fire’s Wake Up, blares out of my phone at top volume. There is a thud from above: I have accidentally recruited my neighbour into the 5am club. On behalf of your neighbor: Piss off, wanker! I decide to do some meditation, which is lovely, but 40 minutes later I have pretty much dozed off. What'd I tell you? There follows some description of the author's attempt, and then: Why is this so hard? I put the question to Russell Foster, head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at Oxford University. But he wants to know why I would want to sign up for the 5am club in the first place. To say he is scathing about the fetishisation of the early start would be an understatement. “There’s nothing intrinsically important about getting up at 5am. It’s just the ghastly smugness of the early start. Benjamin Franklin was the one who started it all when he said, ‘Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’ and it’s been going on ever since. It goes back to the Protestant work ethic – work is good and if you can’t or won’t work, that is, by definition, bad. Not sleeping is seen as worthy and productive.” As I've noted before, Ben Franklin was an epic troll, and I insist that this particular quote was satire. And yet, I have to agree with "it's just the ghastly smugness of an early start." Brits use "ghastly" more than we do here in the US, and I aim to change that. (Also, why are Brits listening to the words of someone who, to them, was a traitor?) By day four of my experiment, I am grumpy and miserable. I’ve had to cancel a trip to the pub because, newsflash, an evening of merlot and a dawn wake-up isn’t a good combination. Coward. Day five is a new low. I sleep in until 5.43am and then eat a salted caramel Magnum for breakfast to compensate for missing out on the pub. At this point, I laughed out loud. On day eight, I wake up at 5.04am without an alarm. The morning beckons. Do I bound out of bed to seize the day? I do not. I decide to return to my usual wake-up time, only now with a renewed focus. As I suggested above: changing one's routine does have benefits. But there's nothing magical about particular times. Humans naturally fall on a spectrum from extreme lark to extreme owl (I've talked about this before too, I know), and I hold the considered opinion that arranging your life around your sleep rhythm would be optimal. What happens, though, is that the world is generally made for larks, so larks do better at things like focus and creativity during the standard workday, leading to the classic conflation of causality and correlation (I'm going to have to remember that particular alliterative phrase). In other words, it's not waking up at 5am that does it for them, it's happening to possess a metabolism that wants to wake up at 5am. Musicians, for instance, who tend to play late-night clubs and concert halls, well, I can't see them benefiting from a schedule like that. But we can't all be musicians. Still, I can't fault the author for trying. As an experiment, it fails because the sample size is exactly one. But it's not like there's a perfect schedule that would work for everyone; we're all different, so I don't think science can ever answer the question "What are the ideal times for awakening and asleepening?" with a single answer that works for absolutely everyone. Because that answer depends on individual chronotypes, and we don't all fit into neat little industrial cog-boxes. |
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