Could you join the 5.30am club?

In a quest for a calm mind and career success, Rosie Green sets her alarm for 5.30am for three weeks…

If you’re never on top of the to-dos, it’s time to try a radical approach

What do Victoria Beckham and Michelle Obama have in common? (Apart from hot husbands…) They get up early. Seriously early. As do successful writers (from Stephen King to Maya Angelou), game-changing CEOS (Apple’s Tim Cook) and moviestar moguls (SJP rises at 5am to do emails, Mark Wahlberg gets up at 2.30, yes 2.30am, to work on his pecs).

While the rest of us are enjoying a zzzz, these overachievers are building fashion empires, changing lives, producing seminal works, sculpting bodies or meditating.

Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise,” and I reckon he was definitely onto something.

In my life there are not enough hours in the day. I would like to be on top of my to-do list, to have more time for exercise and, dream scenario, achieve something loftier, something meaningful, seismic even – a screenplay, a novel, a new form of media. Is rising at 5am the answer?

The idea fascinates and horrifies me in equal measure. I suggest to Red’s features editor Natasha Lunn that I write about it, knowing that without the added pressure/incentive of her deadline I’d most certainly be hitting snooze at 5.03am.

Natasha is enthusiastic. She sends me Alex Soojung-kim Pang’s brilliant book Rest, which promises less stress and more happiness and fulfilment by “taking rest as seriously as work”. He has a whole chapter devoted to rising at dawn.

Okayyyyy… but isn’t getting lots of rest and getting up at 5am a contradiction in terms? “Getting up superearly doesn’t seem restful compared to sleeping in,” he laughs, “but working in the early morning creates space in the day for rest.” He gets up at 5am to write (despite being a self-confessed night owl): “It’s one of the most important things I do to stay productive and hit my deadlines. In those early, focused hours, ideas come easily that would take immense effort later in the day.” He also says you can then enjoy any daytime downtime

guilt-free as you have already been productive.

SO FAR SO INSPIRING.

As is Laura Vanderkam, author of I Know How She Does It and the e-book What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast. She emails to say, “For many people with full lives, mornings are the only time they can fit big goals in (eg. getting fit, launching a business), and be sure they’ll be able to devote enough time to them.” I’m in. But as a 5am wake-up feels extreme in manner of an ultra marathon or cayenne pepper diet, I garner some expert health advice.

I contact Dr Michael Hastings, a Cambridge University neurobiologist who specialises in chronobiology, studying how we cope with life’s daily rhythms.

When I quiz him on my health concerns he says, “The important aspect here is regularity. Swapping routines from day to day will ‘confuse’ the body clock or at least work against it. The normal control of your

“Working in the EARLY MORNING creates space in the day for REST”

“Turn unproductive EVENING hours into productive morning HOURS”

body’s rhythms will be compromised.” He likens this to “rotational shift work”, which “carries a heavy penalty for long-term health”. Hmm. Basically I can’t just opt in and out, depending on whether I have been out the night before or got caught up in a gripping TV drama.

And what about getting my seven hours? We’ve been bombarded with research that too little sleep makes you less productive? Dr Hastings confirms this, saying that losing sleep can have a negative effect on health. “Lab experiments show that it not only affects memory and mood, it also affects how our body handles food.

All in a deleterious way.”

And there’s more. If you don’t shift to an earlier bedtime, you could potentially compromise your immune system. “When we sleep not only does the brain restore itself, so does the body,” says Dr Hastings. While we snooze “tissue repairs and responses to infection are up-regulated” – meaning that cells have an increased response to stimuli.

The message is loud and clear: get up early and you need to retire before the 10 o’clock headlines. Which, quite frankly, seems restrictive and boring.

I decide to get up at 5.30am, as that is the time my husband gets up. On day one I spring out of bed and am reminded I am a natural early riser. I am at my computer by 5:34am. I cannot have any caffeine as I think boiling the kettle will wake the children and then not only will I lose two hours of uninterrupted time, I will have two very cranky kids later in the day.

I put on my teeth-bleaching Crest Whitestrips (multitasking) and work on my inbox (9,247 messages). I feel calm, in control and virtuous. Later in the day I do a spin class that I would normally either skip or be plagued with puritanical guilt throughout.

The next night I go for a friend’s birthday drinks. I get in at 11pm buzzing with all the chat. I can’t sleep because I’m obsessing about not getting enough sleep. I get up at 5.30am. I feel okay. By 2pm I am having my 4pm slump. I am more ravenous than a pregnant Labrador. I eat a lot. I am ratty with the kids at bedtime.

By day four I am wondering if really successful people get up at 5am – could a moderately successful person get up at 6am? I’m think I’m okay with being moderately successful. I’m downgrading my ambitions. I won’t write the novel, but hopefully I’ll swap my current frenetic doggy paddle mode for a gliding swan. Somehow, with no research, I make the executive decision that it’s okay to lie in at the weekends.

Natasha emails me to see how it’s going. The truth is I am rather dispirited. In those dawn hours I just seem to wade through admin and any extra time it creates is just taken up with more favours, more to dos. Is this just another #fail to whip myself with?

Then my daughter takes the top of her finger off in a door and has to have surgery, and I pick up a debilitating sickness bug when I’m in the hospital with her. I just cannot get up at 5.30am.

Literally sick and tired, I email the experts with my woes.

WINGE #1: THE MORNING TIME DOESN’T SEEM TO ENRICH ME AT ALL – IT JUST GIVES ME MORE TIME TO SERVICE OTHERS’ NEEDS.

VANDERKAM’S SOLUTION: “Getting up early won’t automatically buy personal time if you don’t choose to use that time for personal priorities. If you believe that you have to empty the dishwasher or fold the laundry before you’re allowed to have fun, then you’ll never have personal time, whether you get up early or not! Instead, simply decide that this is your time. Figure out what you’d like to do with it. What would you really like to do that life has a way of crowding out? Reading? Exercise? Something creative? Meditation? Knowing exactly what you intend to do increases the chances that it happens.”

I mostly want to write. Soojung-kim Pang’s advice here is I need to ruthlessly defend that early-morning focused mental state against distractions. Multitasking, social media, googling Kim’s latest escapades with Kanye – that needs to stop. He suggests the app Freedom, which blocks you going online. “You can make calls and deal with your inbox later when you don’t need high levels of concentration.”

WINGE #2: I’M KNACKERED.

VANDERKAM’S SOLUTION: “Getting up early doesn’t need to mean being sleep deprived. If you plan to wake up early, you need to go to bed on time. And to go to bed on time, you need to give yourself a bedtime. Figure out what time you need to wake up, how much you need to sleep, then count back. Turn unproductive evening hours into productive morning hours.”

Inspired, I return to the experiment. And by the third week, something flips. I decide to meet my friend Jemima to swim in the Thames at 6am. It is glorious and soul-enriching. I return home and the kids are still sleeping, and I feel like I have discovered the secret to life. The next day I wake up and start writing this piece. I turn my wi-fi off. By 7am I have written more in one and a half hours than I would normally write in a morning.

Conclusion? I will never be a consistent 5am-er.

I will use it when I have busy periods in my life or, maybe, when the inspiration/inclination to do something seismic strikes. Until then, I’ll rise at 6am and… glide.