Early birds have always carried a halo – but what if listening to your internal clock is actually the superior way? | Canada Voices

When her alarm clock goes off at 5 a.m., Amy Sutherland has a rule: Do not hit snooze.

In the dark before dawn, she rises and makes her bed. She has a protein coffee, straps on her workout gear and hits the gym in her condo. All of this she documents on Instagram, under the hashtag #5amdiaries.

Ms. Sutherland, a 30-year-old content creator and senior manager in Calgary, is one in a legion of energetic morning people sharing their routines on social media. Like other early birds, she evangelizes about these golden hours – quiet and still before obligations start lighting up her phone.

“I prefer to be up and starting my day before the world starts,” Ms. Sutherland said. “It gives me my own time to get collected.”

These hours bring a mental clarity she was missing through her 20s, when she’d wake up late and rush. Today she tucks in by 9 p.m. to rise before the sun. Doesn’t that stunt a millennial’s social life? Not really – most of her friends are in bed early, too.

As of March, posts tagged #MorningRoutine numbered 6.2 million on TikTok, with another 6.3 million posts on Instagram, plus 1.67 million more tagged #5am and #5amclub on the platform. The timestamped videos show young people popping out of bed before sunrise, smoothing their beds, applying face serums, chugging electrolytes and hitting the gym. Young women dominate the posts, a good number talking about the discipline it takes to be a “5 a.m. girly.”

Predawn influencers join a wider movement of people living life earlier. Offline, 5 a.m. cold plunges, running clubs and writing groups are proliferating, people seeking community in the morning. Some 63 per cent of Britons now rise before 7 a.m., with 61 per cent of Londoners getting up earlier than they did three years ago, a 2025 survey from The Guardian found.

Some commodify mornings, the influencers shilling exercise gear and peptide serums. But many other early birds rise quietly. They’re the readers, meditators, gardeners and dogwalkers who like a relaxed start to the day.

Mellow or ambitious, mornings have always carried a certain halo. People who rise at dawn seem disciplined, “early bird gets the worm” and all that. What we’re seeing now is productivity culture merging with early rising – the optimized morning.

So where does it leave the groggy riser? The person whose energy comes late at night – who especially detests clocks springing forward, as they will this Sunday?

The trouble with early bird culture is this pressure people end up feeling to adhere to schedules that are way out of whack with their internal clocks, said Rahaf Harfoush, a digital anthropologist and avowed night owl. She believes many people move through life oblivious to their own natural rhythms, unclear which bird they really are.

“The message has become that you don’t even need to get to know yourself. You don’t know your sleep cycles, your sprint cycles, your creative cycles or your energy peaks,” said Ms. Harfoush, whose book Humane Productivity publishes later this year.

Most days, she doesn’t begin working in earnest until 2 p.m., her “magic hours” coming in the afternoons and evenings. Once the author found her rhythms and stopped “shoving them into someone else’s expectations,” she found she got more done.

Still, few night owls would boast about staying up till 1 a.m. on a weeknight – this is what teenagers do, not adults.

“Being an early bird has been assigned a moral value; it reflects your goodness as a person. It’s a type of virtue signalling,” Ms. Harfoush said. “That’s why people feel like they have to make excuses or justify being a night owl.”

While many early risers won’t openly lord it over anyone – “I’m not any better than you because I have a 5 a.m. routine,” Ms. Sutherland says – there’s been a sense, at least since our agrarian days, that earlier is better.

As the pace of life accelerates, mornings feel even more precious. With non-stop demands pinging our phones, ratcheting up stress and fragmenting focus, time can feel like it’s not our own. There’s a desire for peace, a moment in the day for ourselves. Often, it comes before the world wakes.

Somewhere along the way, that morphed into 10-step routines of elixirs and affirmations, at least among the 5 a.m. set on social media. For some, these rituals ease the chaos of modern life. For others, they’ve become another stressor.

Sleep and circadian rhythm researchers have been watching 5 a.m. clubs proliferate on social media and have mixed thoughts.

Julie Carrier is happy to see more people rising with the sun. The University of Montreal psychology professor says night owls who stay up late on workdays are often sleep-deprived, a cycle linked to anxiety and depression.

But she also worries for people cutting back on sleep to cram ever more into their mornings.

“Change your schedule, if you wish, but make sure you have seven to nine hours of sleep,” Prof. Carrier said. “You need to have enough sleep to be in good physical, cognitive and emotional health.”

She said most people actually fall in the middle. Not night owls or morning larks, they’re “hummingbirds” who flit flexibly around a more moderate schedule.

Most Canadian adults tuck in around 10 to 11 p.m., getting up between 6:30 and 7:30 a.m., said Jean-Philippe Chaput, a University of Ottawa professor in the faculty of medicine who looks at sleep health.

Extreme early rising remains statistically uncommon, Prof. Chaput said, with only a small minority able to wake this way consistently.

“While the 5 a.m. trend may look aspirational online, most people’s biology isn’t aligned with such early rising,” he said.

Ultimately, our chronotypes, age and genetics dictate when we wake, sleep and are most energetic. These are individual biological tendencies, indifferent to 5 a.m. hustle reels on Instagram.

“The social media driven pressure to adopt ‘ultra-productive’ early mornings risks normalizing sleep deprivation and promoting guilt or anxiety for those whose bodies simply don’t fit this schedule,” Prof. Chaput said.

“Forcing oneself awake this early can lead to chronic sleep restriction, impaired cognition, mood disturbances and metabolic strain.”

Hal Elrod rises at 4:30 a.m., waking naturally without an alarm clock. After caffeine and ablutions, he begins his “miracle morning.”

His six-part routine involves silence, affirmations, visualizations, exercise, reading and journaling. The whole process takes up to an hour, or as little as six minutes when he’s pressed for time.

“No one’s vying for my attention. No one’s bothering me. The kids are asleep,” he said. “Once you have that time that is protected and all to yourself, it’s hard to go back.”

Mr. Elrod spotlights the routine in his bestseller The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM). He followed that with a dozen more titles focused on mornings, a podcast, app and documentary featuring self-help heavies Mel Robbins and Robin Sharma, who wrote The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.

Looking refreshed during a video call from Austin, Tex., Mr. Elrod said whining about early mornings is a “limiting belief.”

“When we’re kids, we’re forced to wake up when we don’t want to wake up for school. If given the choice, we’d keep sleeping. Then we become adults, free from mom and dad’s accountability, and we go back to this limitation of, ‘I don’t like waking up early.’ That ends up becoming a lifelong habit, until we become conscious of, ‘Maybe if I start my day with intention, there’s a better way.’”

Mr. Elrod says the social proof for early rising is in. It’s what successful people do, from the Stoics, to Benjamin Franklin, to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who reportedly gets up at a bleary-eyed 3:45 a.m. to check e-mail, exercise and caffeinate.

“The morning routine allows you to take control of your morning,” Mr. Elrod said. “Then you feel a sense of peace, proactiveness and control for the rest of the day.”

Control is a clear motivator for the 5 a.m. club, maybe for good reason. With the milestones of adulthood – job security, savings, home ownership – feeling out of reach for young people, there’s a desire to rein in some aspect of life. That’s where regimented mornings come in.

“My generation getting to their 30s now, they’re starting to add more routines and consistency because they know it makes them feel better,” Ms. Sutherland said.

Still, some worry that the supercharged mornings portrayed on social media are becoming another pressure point, for women in particular.

“Women will set a lot of high intentions for themselves. Then they’ll miss one of those steps – the smoothie, the 20-minute workout, the meditation – and they’ll throw the whole thing away,” said Heather Boersma, a Vancouver life coach who focuses on routine and time management.

“The thought error is believing that you have to create a morning routine to accomplish someone else’s goals for your life,” said Ms. Boersma, who wrote the 2025 book The Rest Revolution: The Power of Rest for Women.

For the past six years, the mother of three has kept the same morning routine. She rises at 6 or 6:30 a.m., her youngest following her down the stairs. Having learned that mom needs 10 minutes to herself, he curls up on the couch with a blanket.

Ms. Boersma moves through her four-part routine. First, a “thought download,” jotting down what’s whirring through her mind. Then a moment of gratitude, a quick calendar overview and setting an intention for the day.

Asked how we got here – people bracing themselves this way for the day ahead – Ms. Boersma is clear-eyed.

“What’s brought us here is the intense level of input,” she said. “To wake up and immediately have access to so many people’s opinions, thoughts, lives, ideas … you wake up and feel like, ‘I’m already behind, and the day hasn’t even started.’”

When she was nine years old, Samantha Willman would lie awake at night. Her mind would light up, thinking of all the art projects ahead of her. She’d rise in the dark, reading and drawing quietly.

“I just felt like more myself at night,” said Ms. Willman, now 35 and an architect in Montreal.

Through adolescence and high school, she’d stay up late, struggle during the day, and berate herself. As a young adult, she somehow managed opening shifts as a barista – start time 5:30 a.m. In the long run, it didn’t work: “I found I get really despondent waking up early every day. And then I get apathetic. I become a less nice person to work with.”

Eventually, she stopped moralizing her late night hours, realizing this “dysfunctional thing” actually makes her more functional.

Today, Ms. Willman heads into the office at 9:30 a.m., a slightly delayed start time she negotiated with her employers. She edits, reads and meets with clients. But her most inspired time often comes between 11 p.m. and 1:30 a.m., a window she sets aside for creative writing. On weekends, she might go full night owl, staying up till 5 a.m. Even though the next day might be shot, Ms. Willman tries to give herself these “little flights at night” whenever she can.

“It creates this little pocket of disturbed, walled-off space and time. People have some of their most cohering insights when they do that sort of practice. It can have this stepping away effect. We step away from our lives on vacation, and sometimes we have epiphanies once we’re outside of our lives. We can also step outside of our daily lives, just by using the nights.”

Michaela Chung draws a connection between night owls and introverts, who get sapped in social environments but gain energy when they’re alone.

“Nighttime is less stimulating. It’s a time of solitude when other people are sleeping. We can hear our own thoughts and recharge,” said Ms. Chung, who coaches introverts on building confidence and connection in Vancouver.

Ms. Chung is also a comedian. On nights when she does stand-up shows, she’ll get home after 10 p.m. Too wired to sleep, she’ll brainstorm jokes, journal or take a bath to wind down, not getting to bed until 2 a.m. some nights.

“I’m lucky because I’m self-employed – I can do that,” she said, acknowledging that people with kids and firm start times at work don’t necessarily get this opportunity. “I don’t book any calls before 11 a.m. I read, water the plants and have breakfast. Midday is when things start to pick up.”

Ms. Chung’s nocturnal hours have brought some unintended consequences. She described dating several doctors, all of them early to bed and early to rise. It was like they were living in different time zones.

“When are you going to spend quality time together if you’re going to sleep at vastly different times?” she said. “That’s actually important in a relationship – a similar sleep time.”

Back when Ms. Chung used dating apps, she’d make her circadian preferences clear on her profile: “I said, ‘I’m looking for someone who can stay up past 9 p.m.’”

Despite living at opposite ends of the clock, night owls and early birds are after the same thing – quiet, uninterrupted, solitary time. More and more, people are carving out odd hours and cutting into their sleep to find a moment of calm for themselves.

Still, in the push to do more before the sun rises, Ms. Harfoush sees a wider misunderstanding: People hustling harder to control what they simply can’t. Facing high costs of living, precarious gig work, child-care shortages, ballooning commute times and a crisis of inattention, people are getting a jump start on the day, trying to get a handle on it all.

“We’re overstimulated, over-connected and overworked,” Ms. Harfoush said. “Maybe the bigger conversation should be, how can we redesign work culture and the ways we look at our time so we have more peace during the day.”