The 5am club and other minor illnesses

There's a bloke on the internet who wakes up at 5am.

By 5:03 he's journalled his intentions. By 5:07 he's done the gratitude ritual. At 5:12 he gets into a plunge bath that looks bloody freezing. Then it's the markets, the portfolio, and by 5:45 he's "won the morning."

By 7am he's apparently turned into the Wolf of Wall Street.

I watched this for three weeks. And here's the honest part: I didn't watch it to mock it. I watched it because some part of me, the part that still sets ambitious targets and feels vaguely guilty about the snooze button, wanted it to be true. There's something genuinely compelling about someone who seems to have found a formula. Even when the formula involves voluntarily lowering your body temperature before the postman's even up.

Three weeks of watching. Then one Tuesday I thought: fuck it, why not.

The house was properly dark. The kind of dark where you're not entirely sure you've actually woken up or it's still a dream. I made coffee, sat down with a notebook, and stared at the blank page.

What exactly does one journal at 5:07am?

"I am awake and I regret it" seemed the honest answer. "Today I will be intentional and focused" felt a bit much before the coffee had cooled. I wrote: "Coffee good. Everything else TBC."

By 5:12 I was supposed to be in the plunge bath. A nice little £99.99 number from Amazon. The internet says cold water immersion boosts mood, sharpens focus, speeds muscle recovery, reduces anxiety and improves sleep. It sounds, frankly, like a fucking miracle worker.

Researchers in South Australia have since gone through eleven separate studies and found that mood, in fact, stays exactly where it was. Inflammation goes up rather than down. And the stress relief, when it turns up, turns up about twelve hours later, meaning the man in the plunge bath at 5:12 in the morning is scheduled to feel serene at around teatime, by which point he's back in his emails with everyone else.

I didn't know any of that yet. I'd filled it the night before. Proper cold, ice and everything, just moving the ice from the chest freezer to the bath knackered me. I knew then I should have knocked it on the head.

Here's what the influencer doesn't mention: the gap between standing next to the bath and getting into the bath is not a physical problem. It's a philosophical one. You are warm. The water is not warm. Nothing about your body, your instincts, or your fifty-odd years of accumulated common sense is suggesting this is a good idea. You do it anyway, because you've watched a stranger on the internet do it forty-seven times and somewhere in your brain a wire has crossed.

I lasted twelve seconds. Well, I wasn't counting, so it might have been ten. Not twelve serene, meditative seconds. Twelve British seconds of standing in freezing water thinking "why would anyone voluntarily live like this" while the dog appeared in the doorway and looked at me with an expression I can only describe as professionally concerned.

I was having flashbacks. Not of a YouTube video but a documentary about interrogation techniques. Cold water used to break a person down, which is presumably why the CIA went in for it, and why nobody at the time described it as a wellness routine. Or maybe it was one of the Rambo films.

I got out, stood there dripping in the garden and had a quick look round hoping none of the neighbours saw it. Especially Trevor. He'd rip the piss out of me for a fortnight.

The internet had promised me a sharpened mind. What I had was a sharpened awareness that I'd made a significant error. The plunge bath sat there while my mind went: is there any way of getting this back in the box for a refund? I could say it arrived damaged. Rather than the truth, which is that I lost my bottle. Not sure they do refunds for that.

By day four I wasn't sharpened. I was knackered. Properly, bone-deep tired. Turns out when you're 52 and you shave ninety minutes off your sleep because a man with a YouTube channel swears it'll change your life, you don't get optimised. You get tired.

The mornings felt stolen from the wrong end of the day. I'd had emails at 10:30 the night before. Something mildly violent on Netflix at eleven. Lying awake at twenty to midnight wondering whether I'd locked the back door. Then the alarm at 5am and the specific despair of someone who has done this to themselves voluntarily.

Day six: a throat like sandpaper.

Not the "I've been talking too much" kind. The unmistakable "something is coming" kind that your body delivers with the quiet authority of someone who's been trying to get your attention for several days and has now decided to be direct about it.

I cancelled the ice bath. I cancelled the journalling. My morning was taken up locating the only 24-hour Tesco that was actually open, which, it turns out, has not signed up to the 5am programme either. Bought Lemsip. Went home. Got back into bed.

First sick day in seven years.

The same researchers found that people who do this regularly take about a third fewer sick days. What they don't find is that the sick days get any shorter.

Around 10am I made coffee and watched something completely mindless on television. No intentions set. No gratitude ritualised. No portfolio reviewed. Just a man on a sofa with a duvet and a mild temperature and, somewhere underneath the general discomfort, the faint sensation of having been let off something.

There's a version of that morning — the slow coffee, the aimless television, the absence of any agenda more pressing than getting through to lunchtime — that I couldn't have chosen for myself. I'd have felt guilty about it. The flu removed the choice entirely and handed me back a morning that felt, against all logic, like mine. No structure borrowed from a stranger. No ritual designed for someone else's life. Just the specific, unremarkable texture of being a person in a house with nowhere to be and nothing to perform.

A couple of weeks on, everything is back to normal. No ice, no rituals, no alarm set for a time that begins with the number five.

I still see the bloke on the internet. He's still at it, still up at 5am, still winning mornings with apparent sincerity. I'm not even sure it wouldn't work for me, given different hours, different evenings, a different version of the week.

But I'm winning somewhere around 6:30 to 7, depending on the night before.

The dog seems fine with this arrangement. I still feel guilty about the snooze button.

Dispatches from a life still in progress.