What My 5 AM Experiment Taught Me About Discipline, Failure, and Sleep Deprivation

In the middle of 2024, someone recommended I read The 5AM Club by Robin Sharma. Now, let me be clear — the book is fantastic. It’s inspiring, motivational, and does exactly what it’s supposed to do: make you feel like a complete failure if you’re not already waking up at 5 AM to conquer the world.

So, naturally, I spent the rest of 2024 wrestling with the guilt of not being a “5 AM person.” Every time I hit snooze or rolled out of bed at a “respectable” 7:30 AM, Robin Sharma’s words would echo in my mind, taunting me: “Legendary people don’t sleep in!”

Fast forward to Christmas time — when everyone suddenly decides to take stock of how catastrophically they’ve wasted the past 12 months. You know the drill: overcooked biryani, recycled gift hampers, and an extra-large serving of deserts. That’s when it hit me — the guilt from The 5AM Club wasn’t going away. If anything, it was yelling louder than “The Final Countdown” at a New Year’s Eve party.

So, like everyone else who makes overly ambitious resolutions in the haze of holiday regret, I decided 2025 would be different. This would be my year. I was going to wake up early. Really early.

Now, Robin Sharma suggests waking up at 5 AM, but I thought, “Why stop there?” Clearly, if 5 AM is good, 4 AM must be legendary. (Spoiler alert: it’s not.) My brain was saying, “This is a bad idea,” but my ego was like, “No, no. This is how greatness starts.”

And so, there it was — my grand resolution for January 2025: wake up at 4 AM every single day. A decision that, looking back, may have been more caffeine-fueled delusion than genuine self-improvement.

Initial Enthusiasm: Optimism Meets Overconfidence

The first day of 2025 was a no-brainer. I had made a commitment. And as the famous Bollywood dialogue goes, “Ek baar jo maine commitment kar di, toh main khud ki bhi nahi sunta” (“Once I’ve made a commitment, I don’t even listen to myself”). That became my mantra. A commitment is a commitment.

But when the alarm rang at 4 AM, my body had other ideas. It quickly reminded me that I’d only gone to bed two hours earlier, thanks to the New Year’s Eve party. My brain whispered, “Postponing by a day isn’t breaking the commitment — it’s just being practical!” So, I hit snooze. Twice. Okay, maybe three times. I made a double commitment to myself that tomorrow, the snooze button and I would no longer be friends.

The guilt hit me hard when I eventually woke up at 9 AM. Determined to redeem myself, I decided to go to bed early that night — 10 PM sharp. This time, I didn’t just set one alarm. I set four alarms at 10-minute intervals, just to be quadruple-sure I’d wake up at the quadruple hour of the day. (Yes, 4 AM still sounds criminally early no matter how many alarms you set.)

And when the first alarm rang, I shot out of bed like a cat hearing a vacuum cleaner. My dramatic leap startled my wife, who nearly clobbered me for scaring her half to death with my overenthusiastic bed-jumping.

The Dawn of Regret

I stumbled into the kitchen like a sleep-deprived zombie and brewed a strong cup of coffee. Looking out the window, I hoped to feel inspired by the serene stillness of dawn. Instead, all I saw was pitch darkness and the kind of creepy silence that makes you question not just your life choices but also whether humanity was a mistake.

Still, I powered through. By 5 AM, I decided to embrace my newfound “morning person” identity. I started with some stretches. Then came some push-ups. And by “some push-ups,” I mean exactly three before my arms and shoulders screamed, “Not today, buddy.”

Crunch Time

The real kicker workout was going to be crunches. 100 crunches split into two sets, I told myself, fully expecting to channel my inner fitness influencer.

Set 1:

• One — Here we go!
• Two — This is easy.
• Three — Wow, I’m crushing it!
• Four — Wait, this feels a bit… challenging.
• Five — Oh no, why does it hurt this much?
• Six — Oh my God.
• Seven — STOP! Somebody call an ambulance!

By crunch eight, my abs felt like they were hosting a live performance of Pain: The Musical. I lay flat on the floor, clutching my stomach and whispering motivational quotes like “Slow and steady wins the race” to justify my surrender. I decided that moderation was the key to success and vowed to take things easier from now on. And the second set was pending right? Well I will leave it to your imagination to imagine how I did the second set.

Recovery Mode

Since it was a holiday, the rest of the day was spent on the couch, undoing every calorie I had burned earlier with copious snacks and TV binges. My fitness journey had officially begun — with a bang, a groan, and a whole lot of soreness.

Battle of the Snooze Button

The next two days were almost a copy-paste of my new morning routine — with one small but crucial evolution: I was hitting snooze just a little longer each day. By day three, my “4:00 AM sharp” commitment had become “4:15-ish,” and by day five, it was teetering around 4:30.

To be fair, the first week of January is practically a holiday for most offices in Sydney, so I wasn’t stressed about work. My only goal was to conquer the 8th crunch — something that remained a pipe dream as my body refused to go past crunch number 7. It’s like my abs signed a union agreement to stop at seven, no matter what motivational speeches I gave myself.

On the night of January 7th, I lay in bed, reflecting on what I had achieved so far in 2025. “Not too bad,” I told myself. Sure, my wake-up time had gradually slid from 4:00 to closer to 4:50, but hey, I was still getting up early, wasn’t I?

That’s when the brilliant idea struck. What if I used technology to save me from myself? Enter: the Math Alarm App. This wonderful creation doesn’t stop ringing until you solve a math problem. Surely, this would get me out of bed, I thought.

Big mistake.

The X That Broke Me

At 4:00 AM sharp, the alarm blared, demanding that I solve for x. The equation it threw at me was something like, 3x + 7 = 19. Sounds easy, right? Well, at 4 in the morning, it felt like trying to crack the Da Vinci Code while half-asleep.

After five minutes of squinting at the screen and scribbling nonsense in my notebook, I did what any rational adult would do: I shoved the phone under my pillow and tried to pretend it wasn’t there. But the app, in its infinite cruelty, refused to be silenced. It just kept vibrating and buzzing like an angry bee under my head.

The buzzing soon disturbed my wife, who woke up and gave me a death glare that could curdle milk. Left with no choice — and a growing sense of panic — I finally sat up and solved the bloody equation.

Now, let me just say, I’ve always wondered why mathematicians are so obsessed with x. Of all the letters in the alphabet, why x? There are 25 other perfectly good options! Teachers could ask us to “find the value of o” or even p, but no — everything has to revolve around x. It’s like x is the Beyoncé of the alphabet, demanding all the attention.

Anyway, I managed to “find x,” but at what cost? My sanity? My sleep? My marriage?

First Great Negotiation: Sleep Vs Sanity (For me and my partner)

By the end of that ordeal, I made a strategic decision to keep my peace — and more importantly, my wife’s. I postponed the first alarm to 4:40 AM instead of 4:00. Sure, I was technically bending my commitment a little, but some battles just aren’t worth fighting.

From that day forward, I consistently woke up at 5:00 AM. Was it the legendary 4:00 AM wake-up I’d envisioned? No. But it was progress. And most importantly, my wife stopped plotting my untimely demise.

Hard Reality: Office is No Sleeping Ground

I marched into the second week of January like a warrior — fully committed, fully disciplined, and waking up exactly at 5 AM, just as Robin Sharma demanded.

The first week had been easy. I woke up at absurdly early hours, but then I made up for it with luxurious afternoon naps that would put a well-fed cat to shame. But then, life decided to throw a twist — because the second week of January meant back to work.

Sydney’s offices had reopened with a big bang, supercharged with all the fake enthusiasm of people pretending they’re excited about “a fresh start.” HR emails about “New Year, New You!” flooded inboxes, and suddenly, productivity expectations skyrocketed to compensate for the time lost in December’s Christmas coma.

However, there was a slight problem. They did know about my 5 AM rituals.

The Office Struggles Begin

By the time the clock struck 2 PM, my body was begging for its usual midday snooze session. But instead of a cozy nap, I was stuck in back-to-back meetings, trying to negotiate with my eyelids to stay open compassionately.

One particularly boring meeting nearly had me caught napping. You know the kind — the ones where someone drones on about synergies and roadmaps, and suddenly, you start nodding along, but not because you agree — because you’re literally nodding off.

That’s when I knew: This isn’t working out.

Where This Is Going…

Just when I thought it was not working out, something unexpected happened.

I could see a faint light at the end of the dark tunnel.

This article is already dangerously long for LinkedIn’s attention span, and I don’t want to be responsible for your boss catching you reading a novel during work hours or your partner giving you starry faces if you read this novel during weekends. So, let’s pause here—"

To be continued… ??

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