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Do you need to wake up at 5am? No

8 min read

Not for its own sake. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society advise adults to sleep 7 hours or more on a regular basis, and their joint statement names no best hour to wake. A 5am alarm suits people whose bodies fall asleep early; for a night owl it mostly means less sleep, and what made the routine work for the people who love it was doing it every day, not the hour on the clock.

So the early risers aren’t wrong. Some of them are larks, and 5am is when their day would start anyway. The trouble starts when one person’s natural morning is offered to everyone as a discipline.

What is the 5am club?

The phrase comes from Robin Sharma’s The 5 AM Club, published by HarperCollins in 2018. It’s written as a parable: two struggling strangers, an artist and an entrepreneur, meet an eccentric tycoon, and the book follows them as they learn to rise at 5am and spend the first hour on what Sharma calls the 20/20/20 formula. He names that hour the Victory Hour and splits it into three pockets of 20 minutes:

  • Move, 5:00 to 5:20: exercise hard enough to sweat.
  • Reflect, 5:20 to 5:40: journal, meditate, pray, plan, or sit quietly with your thoughts.
  • Grow, 5:40 to 6:00: learn something, from a book, a podcast or a language course.

It’s a reasonable hour. Exercise, quiet and reading are hard to argue against, and the book doesn’t ask you to sleep less to fit them in. Summaries of its evening routine have the last meal eaten and every device off between 7 and 8pm, phones kept out of the bedroom, and readers in bed shortly after 10pm so they wake recharged at 5.

The claim worth answering is the one about the clock. In a 2020 podcast interview, Sharma put it plainly: “anyone can get up at 5 AM”. Anyone can set an alarm for 5. Whether you can fall asleep at 10 because a book suggested it is a different question, and the whole plan rests on it.

There’s also a filter on who tells the story. The people who say the 5am club changed their life are, by definition, the ones who kept it up. Someone who tried it for a fortnight, felt dreadful by Thursday and drifted back to 7am doesn’t usually write about it. A method mostly hears from the people it suited.

Larks, owls and everyone between

Whether 10pm brings sleep depends partly on your chronotype: the time of day your body clock prefers for sleeping and waking.

In 2003, Till Roenneberg, Anna Wirz-Justice and Martha Merrow reported a pilot study built on a new questionnaire. In it, 500 people recorded when they slept on workdays and on free days, how much time they spent in daylight, and which type they thought they were. Their abstract opens: “Human behavior shows large interindividual variation in temporal organization. Extreme ‘larks’ wake up when extreme ‘owls’ fall asleep.”

Three of their findings bear on 5am:

  • Sleep times differed a lot between workdays and free days, except among the most extreme early types, who kept much the same hours on both.
  • Late types built up considerable sleep debt during the working week and paid it back on free days by sleeping several hours longer.
  • Sleep timing wasn’t down to genes alone. Accumulated sleep debt mattered, and so did light: people who reported more time outdoors in daylight slept earlier.

It was a pilot, the answers were self-reported, and a survey shows a pattern more readily than it proves a cause. Still, the word “extreme” in that opening line is worth noticing. Larks and owls are the two ends of a range, and you can sit anywhere along it. Your chronotype also shapes which hours you think best in, which is the subject of schedule your energy, not your hours.

Who an early start suits

Some people are already up. If you fall asleep by 10 without trying, often wake before the alarm, and do your clearest thinking before lunch, a 5am start costs you no sleep and gives you the quietest hour of the day. The same goes if your life fills up later: a parent whose house is only silent before 6, or someone whose shift starts at 7. For them the club is a good fit, and Sharma’s hour is a sensible way to spend it.

For a late chronotype, the bill is different. It’s paid in sleep.

Sleep is what 5am costs

In 2015, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society published a joint consensus statement on how much sleep a healthy adult needs. A panel of 15 experts reviewed 5,314 scientific articles and, over several rounds of discussion and voting, agreed a recommendation for adults aged 18 to 60: “Adults should sleep 7 or more hours per night on a regular basis to promote optimal health.”

The statement goes on to say that regularly sleeping less than 7 hours is associated with weight gain and obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke, depression and a higher risk of death, and also with impaired immune function, more pain, worse performance, more errors and a greater risk of accidents.

How the statement is framed matters as much as the number. The panel calls it a general recommendation. The wording is “is associated with”, a link rather than proof of a cause. It notes that “Individual variability in sleep need is influenced by genetic, behavioral, medical, and environmental factors.” And it tells anyone worried that they sleep too little or too much to talk to their healthcare provider, which is the only medical advice this page has to give.

It also counts hours, not clock times. The statement lists “appropriate timing and regularity” among the things healthy sleep requires, but its recommendation is about duration, and it names no best hour to sleep or to wake. Nothing in it says early risers are healthier than late ones, or the other way round.

Now run the 5am schedule backwards. Count 7 hours back from 5am and you reach 10pm, and that’s when you need to be asleep, not when you get into bed. Sharma’s evening routine, in bed shortly after 10, lands close to that line. For a lark it holds on the night as well as on paper. For an owl whose body won’t settle before midnight, a 5am alarm leaves 5 hours, and the Victory Hour runs on what’s left.

That’s the pattern the 2003 study found with ordinary workday alarms: late types short of sleep through the week, sleeping it back on free days. An earlier alarm doesn’t, by itself, move the hour an owl falls asleep. What it reliably moves is the end of the night. And the consensus asks for 7 hours “on a regular basis”, which a 5am plan that runs Monday to Wednesday and collapses into a Saturday lie-in doesn’t meet.

The ingredient was repetition

What 5am fans describe is real. They found an hour, kept it free, did the same three things in it, and did that every morning. Each of those parts works at 7am. None of them needs the dark.

Even the method leans on repetition more than on the hour. In that same interview, Sharma’s advice to night owls was to give it three or four weeks, or “the 66-day minimum”, before judging the results. That’s advice about doing something many times in a row, and it holds at any hour you choose.

The 5am hour does have one honest advantage: at 5, nobody needs you. No email, nobody asking where the charger went. That protection is worth having, but it comes from the quiet, and quiet turns up at other times. An owl’s 9pm can be just as empty.

Consistency is not a personality type. It’s a schedule small enough to survive a bad week. If the full hour is too much for your worst day, make it smaller until it isn’t; tiny habits covers how to size a routine for the tired version of you.

Is there a best time to wake up for productivity?

Not one that works for everybody. The best time to wake is the one that leaves 7 hours or more after the time you actually fall asleep, and that you can keep roughly the same across the week, since the consensus lists regularity alongside duration. After that, what you get done depends on what you put in your sharpest hours, wherever they fall.

A Tuesday you can repeat

One test works for any routine at any hour: is this a Tuesday you could repeat in your worst week? Not the week with the clear diary and the good night’s sleep. The week with a cold, a deadline and a child awake at 3am.

Three mornings, run through it:

  • The lark. Asleep by 9:30, awake at 5 most days without an alarm. The full Victory Hour fits: 20 minutes on the bike, 20 with a notebook, 20 with a book. It passes.
  • The owl, on 5am. Rarely asleep before 12:30, alarm at 5. That’s 4 and a half hours. The hour happens on Monday and Tuesday, Thursday gets snoozed, and Saturday is a lie-in until 11. It fails, and it would fail at any hour that cut the night that short.
  • The owl, on 7:45. Same bedtime, up at 7:45, which is 7 hours and 15 minutes. A smaller version of the same hour: a 10-minute walk round the block, 10 minutes with coffee and a notebook at the kitchen table, a chapter on the bus. The hard work waits for the hours they think best in. It passes, most Tuesdays.

The owl’s morning is the less impressive photograph. It’s also the one still running in March.

Something to try: for the next 5 nights, note the time you actually fall asleep, not the time you go to bed. Add 7 hours or more. That’s the earliest start you can build on. For a lark it may well be 5am, and then the club is yours. For everyone else, put the routine where that number lands, make it small enough for your worst Tuesday, and give it three weeks before you decide whether it works.

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