No, You’re Not Expected To Wake Up At 5 AM — Quit Toxic Productivity

Don’t fall for the toxic productivity.

Bryan Dijkhuizen
Mind Cafe
Published in
3 min readMar 29, 2022

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Image by Diego Lozano on Unsplash

I see it a lot on Twitter and Instagram, motivational posts that guarantee you happiness and productivity if you start waking up at 5 AM and take cold showers every day.

It feels like a checklist that everybody’s trying to complete.

I’m sorry to ruin it for you, but waking up at 5 am doesn’t make you any more productive.

Additionally, waking up that early makes me feel miserable, not happy.

We’re Not All Morning People, Only Some Of Us Are

Waking up early is a business model, and it’s about productivity.

We’ve been told that it’s good for us to wake up early and go to bed around the clock of 10/11 — doesn’t work for me.

I’m productive when it gets dark.

Selling you courses about how you should live your life are popular among young people, especially now that a lot of people are doing some research about their (mental) health.

There’s a market for that, but what they don’t tell you is that every human body works differently — it’s not that hard to understand.

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