Does waking up at 5am make me more productive?

Simple answer: not always.

Waking up at 5am is not a new thing for me. I’m a Muslim, and we have to do Subuh pray before the sun rises. So I pretty much try my best to wake up around 5 to 5.30 am everyday. But I almost always go back to sleep after that, because I still feel tired and sometimes I can’t keep open my eyes. I always assume that it was because I went to bed quite late the night before and didn’t put much effort to sleep earlier. So I try to change my habit.

These past few weeks, I’ve been telling myself that I have to put down my phone at 9pm and do nothing until I fall asleep. Not everyday goes as planned. Some days I’ll still binge watching K-band content for no reason. But I can say that this time I’m trying a bit harder to follow my own rules. If I’m being honest, rather for wake up at 5am, the reason is because I want to wake up at 3am to do Tahajjud pray. If I remember it clearly, at this point I have done it 3 times in the past few weeks. Not great, but I’m making progress. In one of those days, I even stayed up until 5am to do Subuh pray.

But I still always go back to sleep after that, again and again. Even when I wake up at 5am not 3am, I still going back to bed. When I went to bed at around 9pm the night before, I obviously expect myself to be fully awake by 5am, since I already had 8 hours of sleep. But that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes when I managed to not go back to sleep, instead of doing something productive, I binge watching Youtube videos until much later after the sun comes up and just start my day at 9am. What a waste.

I once watched a Youtube video (if I remember correctly it was Matt D’avella) where he tried to challenge himself to wake up early and found out that it wasn’t for him. It goes similar like his normal wake up time was 7 or 8am to start the day productively, so when he tried to wake up at 5am, instead of getting more work done, he was feel exhausted until his normal wake up time, then he can be productive. I’m not sure which video it was, but I remember after watching it made me understand that if something works for other people (with all the benefits and such), it won’t always works the same for me.

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Because now that I think about it, what’s the point of me waking up at 5am just to spend 2-3 hours binge watching Youtube videos, then feeling guilty about it, then it will effecting the rest of my day. It’s getting annoying because sometimes at around 7.30 pm the night before, when I could actually still be doing something productive, I’m kind of telling myself something like “its okay you can watch youtube for 1,5 hours and go to sleep at 9 and you’ll be able to finish what you want to do tomorrow morning because you WILL wake up at 5.30 am” then I do wake up at 5.30am, but binge watching Youtube videos for another hours. What a mess.

Waking up early is definitely have its own benefits no matter which way we look at it. But I think it goes the same with every other habits and lifestyle, we need to be self-aware as well. With this reflection, it doesn’t mean that I won’t wake up at 5am again, because I have to do Subuh pray anyway. [even this morning I still woke up at 5.15 and manage to not fall back to sleep].

However, I think I also have to be aware of what my body needs. I know that I need to be more disciplined, but I also need to consider external factors too. The weather is one of them, when we wake up feeling cold, let alone being productive, even being able to move our body is not that easy in my opinion😂 that’s so silly but at least for me it’s true.

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Maybe I write completely no sense at all🤣 if you read this far, thankyou :) and I would love to know your thoughts on waking up early does to you—both for body and mind. Anyway, have a great day, hivers!