Does waking up at 5am help or hinder your productivity?

“Early to bed, early to rise makes a man wealthy and wise. That’s dates back to 1635 as an idea, but there’s no evidence of it,” said Neil Stanley, sleep expert for over 40 years and author of viral book ‘how to sleep well’. 

He added: “your morningness or eveningness is genetically determined there’s nothing you can do about it”. 

A study by amerisleep showed that 49.6% of people haven’t always been an early riser. Almost 35% of them said that wanting to be more productive caused them to become an early riser. 

Waking up at 5am is a trend that has been circulating social media in the past year. Many people across the world blog themselves waking up early to show how productive it makes them. Labelled as ‘the 5am club’ many people say that waking up early is the key to success. 

Alessandra George is an Australian influencer who films her 5am morning routine for her 200 thousand followers. We did a zoom at 5:30am Australian time but for me it was 7:30pm. I had just finished work whilst Alessandra was just starting her day and she was still in her pyjamas. 

Alessandra started waking up at 5am two years ago: “I was going through a breakup, and I was like okay how am I going to better myself.

“I started waking up early randomly, so I decided I might as well do something. I started doing my uni notes because what else can you do at 5am.” 

Alessandra said that she has always been very driven: “when I started waking up at that time, I was like instead of treating it like it’s a negative thing let’s do something positive with it and use the time well and I realised that because I used to wake up at like 10am it gave me an extra five hours in my day where no one was awake and disturbing me.” 

Waking up early can help your mental health. 87.3% of early risers said their health is excellent to good compared to 73.7% of late risers according to a study by amerisleep. 

It may be hard at first, but Alessandra described how once she had adjusted her health is now better.

“It was really hard in the beginning to kind of like moderate social time as well, but it was more positive in the sense that it taught me that I actually can-do difficult things, I just needed to balance work life and my social life. 

“There are times where I do have to prioritise sleep and stuff over like going out and drinking. So, to go out and tell my friends I’m not drinking it’s like bam, they’ll try and get me to drink. That was probably the hardest thing because it’s not really a normal thing for people to understand.”

Alessandra said that she thinks its case by case whether people should get up at 5am: “If you’re a single mother with three kids? Probably not. But definitely if you feel like you want to challenge yourself, or you just want more time in your day, I would definitely recommend it to people.”

The 5am club concept was popularised by Canadian writer Robin Sharma, and he has five rules for the club: rise at 5am, append your first 20 minutes on exercise, invest the next 20 minutes working on your plan/goals/dreams, devote the last 20 minutes to learning, do this 20/20/20 formula for 66 days.

Neil told me about the backstory to the getting up at 5am trend and where it started: “Waking up early goes back thousands of years to the ancient Greeks.” Neil Stanley went more into the history of this trend.

“The idea was that if you’re in bed that’s the devils time and therefore God will love you more because you get up early to praise him. And so, there was this whole idea of as a good Christian you wouldn’t waste time sleeping. Now, more recently we’ve sort of cut God out of the equation and we’ve decided that getting up early makes you a wonderful person and a genius.”

Neil described the idea as ‘nonsense, there’s no scientific evidence and of course it doesn’t take into account what your chronotype is, whether you’re a lion or a wolf.”

A lion is someone who loves an early start and an early night, and their peak productivity is in the early morning.

Whereas someone with a wolf chronotype has trouble waking in the morning and stays up later in the night, their peak productivity is mid-day and evening. 

There is also no set amount of hours sleep someone should get a night.

Neil explains how it isn’t that straight forward: “everybody knows the answer is eight hours and everyone is wrong. Sleep need is individual. Again, it’s genetically determined, so to a great extent some people can absolutely thrive on five hours sleep, other people need 11 hours sleep. It’s about getting the right amount of sleep you need.” 

I asked Neil for some advice as I was going to be waking up at 5am to see if my lifestyle will improve.

“You need to force yourself to get up, but the other thing is not to worry. You will get into the routine after a couple of days your body will be expecting to be woken up at 5am and therefore you might find it easier, initially it will be a bit of a shock but there’s nothing you can do.”

Alessandra also shared her tips for waking up early: “I always say nothing good happened after 10pm so it’s better to go to bed at 10 and make sure you get a good sleep. Don’t sit in bed for too long, you can have about a minute or two just to wake up and then after that immediately get up. Doing something that you know you need to do will also be motivating because that way you feel like you have a purpose for getting up at that time.” 

I took this advice and found the first few days I was quite productive but after about three days I was just doing nothing but getting up early and scrolling on my phone.

I don’t think the 5am club is for me, you need a lot of structure, routine and determination to wake up early every day and get things done that you need to.  

I’m going to take Neil Stanleys advice of “if it’s dark, you’re meant to be asleep.”