Why America Is Obsessed With Famous, Rich People’s Morning Routines

I’m always surprised when friends tell me they think I’m a morning person. I fear these friends don’t know me at all. It’s true that I wake up at a timely hour. I drink water. I get outside to walk the dog. But I hate mornings, because they are the start to a recurring problem. It’s the same problem confronted by much of humanity at this particular moment in history. Which is, the things I want to spend my day doing (expanding the limits of human creativity, making memories with loved ones, lollygagging on the beach) do not match up with the things I actually spend my day doing (emailing, scrolling, waiting on hold for customer service). Every morning, the disconnect repeats itself. How to close this gap between aspiration and reality?

Luckily, you can spend about two seconds on the internet and find the answer flung at you: a morning routine. Its promise is that by starting the day with a sequence of healthy behaviors, you will ensure your prosperity and contentment into the afternoon and evening, and from there into the rest of your life until you die. These days, morning routines have evolved into strange, masochistic regimens, as with influencer Ashton Hall’s viral video earlier this year that captivated the collective internet — but it’s worth remembering that their enduring cultural relevance is tied to a question that is getting more urgent and less answerable as life seems to increasingly speed up and spin out of hand.

What kind of life do you want to live, and how do you go about living it? If the response this question provokes is one of panic, overwhelm, and bewilderment, welcome to the modern state of mind. But why have our attempts to answer it gone from the fairly intuitive maxim “early to bed, early to rise” to “at 8:45 am, rub banana peel on face”?

Americans today might define a good life as a “happy” one, by which we mean having the personal freedom to pursue whatever makes us happy. For much of Western history, though, your happiness was not something you had any particular say in. God made you happy, or he didn’t. But mostly, happiness was irrelevant — the important thing was to be virtuous. With the rise of democracy, happiness was framed as a public good, the right to which was ensured by government, and to which every voting man could theoretically make a claim by improving his personal station. Happiness was the freedom — for some — to pursue social mobility and self-betterment.

It’s in this context that Benjamin Franklin wrote his autobiography and published his daily schedule, launching a centuries-long obsession with personal routines. Franklin’s day took the form of a question and answer: In the morning he asked himself, “What good shall I do this day?”; in the evening, “What good have I done today?” The middle hours, devoted simply to “work,” with breaks for meals and chores, were presumably spent cultivating this good. Franklin’s schedule set the tone for rigor and repetition in work and in health as the way to a better life. And, crucially, he got up at 5 am.

Discipline was no longer the means to a goal, it was the goal: Can you prove you can win at being alive?

In the mid-twentieth century, Dale Carnegie made his career by teaching the cultivation of Franklin-inspired positive habits as a template for self-made success in both business and life. One of his publications provided a three-step guide to getting out of bed in the morning: “a good start” to the first activity of the day is “about 90 percent of the battle,” he wrote. His 1948 book “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living“ offered techniques for “how to eliminate 50 percent of your business worries” and “how to add one hour a day to your waking life.” Protestant clergyman Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 bestseller “The Power of Positive Thinking,” similarly posited that happiness was one’s own personal responsibility to fulfill, and could be summoned with the right mentality.

All of these authors promised happiness via the somewhat squishy applications of good habits, self-confidence, and religious faith. In 1989, Harvard Business School graduate Stephen Covey started codifying rules to define good habit formation in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” and introduced the concept of time management to the mix.

The true father of productivity culture in its data-driven, results-oriented contemporary form is Tim Ferriss. Ferriss was the owner of a supplements business who spent every day chained to his computer before he published “The 4-Hour Workweek“ in 2007. “Most people, my past self included, have spent too much time convincing themselves that life has to be hard, a resignation to 9-to-5 drudgery,” he wrote. His insight that people don’t want to spend forty-plus hours a week pushing buttons at a desk arrived in the “work sucks, I know” era of “Office Space“ and “The Office“; his proposed escape route — to untether your income from your time — held radical appeal. The book spent four years on The New York Times bestseller list. Ferriss’s time-management techniques are now often cited in LinkedIn epistles as ways to pack more work into a day for more money, but for him the purpose of efficiency was to tip the balance toward the pleasures of non-remunerative life. (His advocacy of remote work as a way to save costs and free up personal time has turned out to be prophetic.)

Ferriss’s acolytes mostly ignored the part about working less. They focused instead on the timehacking and bodyhacking tips he delivered on his blog and podcast by interviewing people at the tops of their fields in fitness, Silicon Valley, academia, and military leadership. A few nuggets of wisdom: Make your bed (William McRaven, retired Navy admiral and head of special ops during the Osama Bin Laden raid). Stand naked in the sun for twenty minutes (Rick Rubin, music producer). Write down four things you’re grateful for (Tony Robbins, motivational speaker). Read on the elliptical (Maria Popova, blogger). Don’t eat before 6 pm (Wim Hof, athlete). Count your morning boners (Kelly Starrett, fitness coach).

Ferriss’s interviews tended to resurface variations on the same themes — early mornings, weight training, intermittent fasting, ice baths, supplements, sleep hygiene — and this formed the tenets of male wellness. As these practices became more culturally familiar, the routines for sale became more prescriptive. Former Cutco salesman-turned motivational speaker Hal Elrod’s “The Miracle Morning“ (2012) packaged the morning routine into a replicable formula, and Robin Sharma’s “5 AM Club“ (2018) branded early mornings as the vital hour for self-care. More recently, Stanford professor Andrew Huberman’s podcast and newsletter has lent neuroscientific credence to the anecdotal benefits of waking up and working out early. Huberman’s morning protocol (with recommended supplements) doesn’t just make you feel better, it promises to measurably improve the performance of your brain and body.

Meanwhile, a distinct tech creep was happening, a drift toward optimizing ever-smaller increments of time. Elon Musk has endorsed breaking schedules into five-minute segments; productivity influencer Ed Mylett “stacks” his days, a method he claims will fit the productivity of an entire day into just six hours, thereby cramming 21 days into a single week. James Clear’s “Atomic Habits“ suggests aiming for 1 percent improvement per day, then after a year reaping a compounded interest of 37 percent improvement. Or, you might portion out your sleep into twenty-minute naps every three hours, as Kramer did in a 1996 episode of “Seinfeld.” The Da Vinci-inspired sleep method, Kramer said in an early display of productivity bro math, “works out to 2 ½ extra days that I’m awake per week, every week, which means that if I live to be 80, I will have lived to the equivalent of 105 years.”

All of this was already adding up to a distinctly masculine, unhinged culture of productivity in 2018, when Mark Wahlberg posted his daily routine on Instagram stories. For the star of “Boogie Nights,” the day started at 2:30 am and included prayer, two workouts, golf, and cryotherapy. The post dispensed with any contextual pretense to self-betterment and made the routine itself into the performance. Discipline was no longer the means to a goal, it was the goal: Can you prove you can win at being alive? Seven years of #morningroutine content later, we arrive at Hall’s ambiguously absurdist routine, a more intense and meticulously produced extension of the same formula, only with innovations like mouth tape, a banana peel, Saratoga Spring bottled water, and a faceless crew of attendants to serve up all of it. According to The New York Times, the video has been viewed nearly a billion times. New York City mayor Eric Adams joined the trend in June with an Instagram video that showed himself making his NutriBullet morning smoothie with, yes, Saratoga Spring bottled water at an hour timestamped 9:01 am while the analog clock behind him clearly displayed 11 am.

The morning routine still has its true believers. The man who has most perfected it is, unsurprisingly, longevity guru Bryan Johnson. As he shared recently with Wired, Johnson’s routine is biometrically designed using the latest scientific advances and a budget of $2 million a year. His morning begins the night before, because, as he sagely notes, “I have built my entire existence around sleep.” He is dormant for 8 hours and 34 minutes and during that period enjoys 94 percent sleep efficiency, whatever that means. While Kelly Starrett merely counted his morning boners, Johnson measures his overnight Johnsons and compares them to his son’s. (Early to bed, early to rise.) He wakes up between 4:30 and 5:00 am, rises from bed within 60 seconds of becoming conscious, and, because daylight is not yet available, exposes his eyes to 10,000 lux of artificial light. He applies a serum to his hair. He showers, hydrates, eats, works out. He does red light therapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, sauna therapy. He works. At noon, he stops eating. After that, we assume, his day is functionally over. His plan is to relive that day exactly, again and again, actually for forever.

All of this — the routine, the measurements, the precision — is so that Bryan Johnson will never die. One longevity community leaderboard gives his rate of aging as 0.5 years per year. In that way his productivity hack is the most radical of all. His solution to not getting enough done, to not achieving enough, to not having enough time, is to simply never run out.

In these daily routines, there is one thing that never appears: women. “Family” gets the occasional acknowledgement. In Wahlberg’s routine, the kids get picked up from school; in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, the miniature pony gets fed. In Hall’s videos, he is served by manicured hands intruding briefly into the frame. But basically, in the world of men being productive, women seem not to exist.

Parenthood blows a hole right through personal routines. A friend of mine told me wistfully of a 90-minute pour-over coffee she used to make before she had kids.

Women are, to be clear, the creators of a thriving productivity culture that runs in parallel to these videos. Indeed, the fundamentals of toxic productivity — the control, the self-denial — has long been the province of women. “I wish I was anorexic,” a friend told me just last month. She didn’t mean the thinness, or not only that; the discipline was what she admired. She scoffed at Ozempic — only the weak-spirited would resort to medication. Who needs semaglutide when you can just command your body not to eat?

On places like TikTok, the culture of women’s morning routines takes the form of a polished “that girl” aesthetic: a perfectly made-up woman who dutifully applies skincare, writes her morning pages, sips turmeric tea, and avoids the news until 10 am. Her discipline is in service of presenting her best (prettiest, most compliant) self to the world. A woman braves the day; a man attacks it. These Goopified rituals of enthused self-care — Get Ready With Me! — are marketed to women as online content, then deployed to soothe the isolating, confidence-destroying, anxiety-inducing effects of that content. The problem repackaged as cure.

The obvious critique of the morning routine is that your time is so often not your own. In her book “Saving Time,” artist and writer Jenny Odell breaks down the economic inequalities contained in the stock sentiment that everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. Kim Kardashian’s advice for women in a 2022 Variety interview — “Get your fucking ass up and work” — was poorly received by women who labor for wages, endure two-hour commutes, and have housework to look forward to at the end of the day. Parenthood, too, blows a hole right through personal routines. A friend of mine told me wistfully of a 90-minute pour-over coffee she used to make before she had kids. But another mother I know has clung even harder to her morning routine, insisting on waking up to GRWM videos so as not to totally lose herself, skin unprepped, hair unwashed, into motherhood.

Both men and women have been pushing toward hyperdisciplined extremes. Fitness is crowded with ultra-rigorous workout clans like CrossFit, Hyrox, and Reformer Pilates that promise complete transformation of the body, as well as no-exceptions-allowed dietary challenges like Whole 30 and 75 Hard. For men, though, the intensifying level of discipline is accompanied by a troubling tendency to view women as either distraction or indulgence. More than one cultural critic has noticed the uncomfortable shift in young men from understanding the character of “American Psycho“ serial killer Patrick Bateman as satirical to straightforwardly aspirational. (As one young male “lookmaxxing” influencer noted to The New York Times: “Damn, I wish I had his skin-care routine, his morning routine.”) Even the lighthearted online meme about men who “rawdog” airplane flights by not plugging into the entertainment reflects this cultural obsession with discipline. The experience of waiting out dead time — something that was once common at bus stops and playgrounds everywhere — is turned into a masculine performance of willpower.

This leaned out, poker-faced image of ideal masculinity resembles nothing of the male figures who reigned over pop culture in the 2000s, when I was growing up. Then, MTV was dominated by smooth-cheeked boys barely out of adolescence and Hollywood ruled by doughy, middle-aged manboys. Movies like “Old School“, “Knocked Up”, and “The Hangover“ starred immature underachievers who got up to silly, inebriated antics with their friends to relieve the pressure of domestic boredom. Somewhere along the way, though, the men on the screens I watched got serious. They shaped up, stopped drinking, started to follow strict and inscrutable rules. Their jawlines squared, their necks thickened. They grew veins on their forearms. Now the men who dominate our culture look like MMA fighters and talk about “using pain as fuel.”

He hired five women to be his “productivity assistants” and take shifts sitting behind him and watching his activity for 16 hours a day, for a month.

The throughline from those manboy comedies to today is that the joke was always that women, with their sexy mind control, held the power to make a fool of any man. The difference now is that male submission to women is no longer seen as a joke. In this way, male productivity and fitness culture rubs elbows with the regressive, far-right political content of the manosphere propagated by the likes of Andrew Tate, gamer Adin Ross, podcasting duo Fresh & Fit, British YouTuber Hamza Ahmed, and to a less extremist degree Joe Rogan.

I think of a young software engineer I came across on Substack who chronicled all the productivity methods he could find and deemed them insufficient. He’d been able to improve his productivity by 20 percent, he wrote, but he found he would still take breaks from work to eat and nap. “I wanted to solve productivity top down — with a system that would enforce non stop productivity with zero effort on my part,” he wrote. So he hired five women to be his “productivity assistants” and take shifts sitting behind him and watching his activity for 16 hours, or all the hours he was awake. The experiment lasted about a month, and according to the charts he made, it tripled his productivity.

I couldn’t tell whether this post was satirical or not, though it seemed to be taken seriously by readers. (Another of this man’s posts begins, “Throughout my life, friends were always an unintentional byproduct.”) In any case, many people do seem to believe that knuckling down to follow ever-stricter routines will solve their problems. And those who don’t quite swallow it might try it anyway, because a routine at least creates the appearance of doing without needing to complete the doing itself. If you can’t actually live the life you want, maybe the best you can do is follow a set of arbitrary rules. That might be enough to stave off anxiety, a day at a time.

The psychology experts — not the gurus — say that the more you try to control your life, though, the more aware you become of all the parts that are out of your control. While measuring your productivity might make it go up, the increased attention tends to make your anxiety about not being productive worse. The lasting effect of devices that deliver biomarkers like the Fitbit and the Oura ring seem to be that they make their users not more healthy but more anxious; likewise, sleep trackers create a performance anxiety around bedtime that causes people to lose, not gain, sleep. Wendy Wood, a psychologist and author of “Good Habits, Bad Habits”, says that habits aren’t formed through self-control, they’re formed by what you do when you’re not even thinking about it.

To do more, do less. Viewed this way, though, the game seems unwinnable. Trying to make more time ends up pushing it further out of reach. Is the only solution really to just let it run out? Maybe a routine will help.

Camille Bromley is writer and editor based in Brooklyn.