A MORNING HATER’S GUIDE TO WAKING UP EARLY

The sun was barely up, but I’d already chugged my pour-over coffee, been turned down for sex by my wife (again), and hit the gym for a dumbbell circuit. With the rest of the world still asleep, I found myself a little hungry, slightly jittery, and trudging into a self-prescribed ice-cold shower – not related to the sex thing – only to yelp like a wounded animal.

Turns out men get an extra wake-up call from their testosterone

I was just one week into a month-long quest to test as many scientifically backed practices as I could for becoming a productive morning person, which I’ve never really been but which I’ve been told (via social media, regular media, and, uh, everyone I’ve ever met) is the key to killing, crushing or otherwise surviving in these crazy times. Think of it as Morning Culture 2.0, a sort of new-age approach to productivity embodied by everyone from the Rock, whose 4am workouts hit Instagram like a sweaty fever dream, to Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, whose own ritual involves rising at 6:15am to meditate. The list of super-early risers with mornings tagged as “me time” includes former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Disney CEO Bob Iger. Both rise around 4:30am, their successes providing the rest of us with our coffee and cheer, and neither of them – and this is the real kick in the pants – seems to mind it. In fact, they seem to like it.

All this morning mojo is a natural extension of today’s prevailing hustle culture – our society’s collective inclination to celebrate long hours and extreme workdays as a badge of honour. But what about all the data telling us that most guys aren’t getting enough sleep? (The US National Sleep Foundation recommends that adults get seven to nine hours of sleep per night. Many people, like me, might need more than that minimum.) Or the countless studies that show how