I’m going to be blunt: your 5 AM morning routine is probably a performance you’re putting on for an audience that doesn’t exist. You’ve seen the videos. The sun-drenched kitchens, the lemon water, the three hours of deep work before the rest of the world wakes up. I tried it for three weeks last year after reading another one of those ‘CEO secrets’ articles. I bought the expensive athletic greens, I set the alarm, and I forced myself into a cold shower that felt like being stabbed by a thousand tiny ice needles. It was miserable. I wasn’t more productive; I was just tired and angry by 2 PM.
The problem isn’t your alarm clock. The problem is that you’re trying to build a skyscraper on a foundation of wet sand. If your night is a chaotic mess of scrolling through TikTok, answering ‘one last’ email, and worrying about a project that isn’t due for three days, no amount of ginger shots is going to save your Tuesday morning. You’re starting the day in a deficit. You’re trying to launch a space shuttle from a swamp.
The 5 AM club is mostly a scam
I know people will disagree with me on this, and honestly, if you’re one of those people who genuinely loves seeing the sunrise while doing burpees, more power to you. But for the rest of us? The obsession with the ‘perfect morning’ has become a form of procrastination. We spend more time optimizing the routine than actually doing the work. I’ve noticed that most of the people preaching the 5 AM lifestyle are either 24-year-old influencers with zero kids and no actual ‘general’ office job responsibilities, or they’re just lying to sell a course. It’s a cult for people who are boring at parties.
What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. We’ve been told that the morning is the only time we have control over. But that’s a lie. You have control over the end of your day, too. And the end of your day is what dictates the quality of the next one. If you don’t have a way to signal to your brain that the ‘work’ part of your life is over, your brain just keeps running those background processes all night long. It’s like leaving 40 tabs open on a laptop and wondering why the battery is dead in the morning.
The morning routine is the symptom; the shutdown ritual is the cure.
The night everything broke
I remember exactly when I realized my mornings were a lost cause. It was Tuesday, November 14th. It was 1:47 AM. I was sitting in the dark, my face illuminated by the blue light of my phone, deep in a Reddit thread about mechanical keyboard switches. I was specifically obsessing over whether I should buy Gateron Oil Kings or Cherry MX Blacks for a keyboard I didn’t even need. I had a huge presentation at 9 AM the next morning for a client I actually cared about. I felt like garbage. My heart was racing, my eyes were dry, and I knew that even if I fell asleep right then, I’d wake up feeling like I’d been hit by a truck.
I woke up at 7:30 AM, skipped the ‘mindful meditation’ I’d planned, drank three cups of burnt coffee, and completely fumbled the presentation. I forgot the most important data point (the 12% increase in customer retention we’d seen over Q3) and looked like a nervous wreck. That was the moment I realized that my 8:00 AM ‘productivity stack’ didn’t matter if I was sabotaging myself at midnight.
I’ve since become convinced that the ‘Oura Ring’ and all these sleep trackers are mostly useless for this. I’ve owned three versions of the Oura, and honestly, I actively tell my friends to avoid them. They just give you a ‘readiness score’ that tells you what you already know: you stayed up too late and you feel like crap. It’s $300 to confirm your own bad decisions. Total waste of money.
How to actually shut down (The messy version)
A shutdown ritual isn’t about candles or soft music. It’s about closing loops. When I started testing this, I tracked my ‘Morning Velocity’—which I define as how many meaningful tasks I finish before 10 AM—over 22 days. When I did a proper shutdown the night before, my velocity averaged 14 tasks. Without it? It dropped to 4. That’s a massive difference for something that takes ten minutes.
- Close the tabs: Not metaphorically. Literally close every tab on your browser. If it’s important, bookmark it. If it’s not, let it go. I hate Notion for this, by the way. Everyone loves it, but it feels like a second job you don’t get paid for. I use Apple Notes or a physical $2 notebook.
- The ‘Tomorrow List’: Write down the three things you have to do tomorrow. Only three. If you write ten, you’ll ignore all of them.
- Physical Reset: Clear your desk. Put the coffee mug in the dishwasher. My brain is weirdly sensitive to physical clutter; if I walk into my office at 8 AM and see a half-eaten granola bar wrapper, my focus is shot for the hour.
- The ‘Out of Office’ mental flip: Say it out loud if you have to. ‘Work is done.’ It sounds stupid, but it works.
I might be wrong about the blue light thing—some researchers say the effect is overblown—but for me, if I see a screen after 10 PM, my brain stays ‘on’ for hours. I’ve started leaving my phone in the kitchen. It’s the single most annoying thing I’ve ever forced myself to do, but it’s also the most effective. I’ve bought the same cheap $15 analog alarm clock four times now because I keep dropping them, but I refuse to use my phone as an alarm. It’s a trap.
A brief tangent on ‘Productivity’
Sometimes I wonder if we’re all just trying to optimize ourselves into being robots. I once tried to automate my entire house with Philips Hue lights so they would dim slowly as the sun went down. I spent six hours on a Saturday afternoon trying to get the bridge to connect to my Wi-Fi, and it ended up just strobing like a cheap nightclub while I was trying to read. I felt like an idiot. We spend so much energy on ‘systems’ that we forget the point of the system is to give us our life back, not to give us more chores. Anyway… back to the point.
The part nobody talks about
The hardest part of a shutdown ritual isn’t the list-making. It’s the silence. When you stop working and stop scrolling, you’re left with your own thoughts. That’s why we stay busy until 2 AM. We don’t want to hear what our brain has to say about our career choices or our relationships or that weird thing we said to a coworker in 2014. But you have to face it eventually. Better to face it at 10 PM than to have it wake you up at 3 AM in a panic.
I’ve noticed that since I started focusing on the shutdown, my mornings have taken care of themselves. I don’t need a 12-step routine anymore. I wake up, I have coffee, and I start working because I already know what I’m doing and my brain isn’t fried from the night before. It’s not sexy. It won’t make a great TikTok video. But it actually works.
Stop trying to win the morning. Start winning the night before. That’s the whole trick.
I still struggle with it some nights. Last Thursday I got sucked into a YouTube rabbit hole about urban planning in the Netherlands (don’t ask), and Friday was a total wash. I’m not perfect at this. But I’m better than I was when I was trying to be a 5 AM hero. I wonder if we’ll ever reach a point where we stop trying to ‘hack’ our biology and just admit that we’re tired humans who need to turn the lights off.
Try it tonight. Ten minutes. Close the tabs. Write the three things. Walk away.