Five-to-nine: Why Gen Zs like me are stealing back time for side hustles, wellness and exercise

I settle at my office desk at 9am and smugly look at my colleagues wiping sleep from their eyes. What they don’t know is that between the hours of 4.45am and 8.30am this morning, I went to the gym, meditated, meal-prepped my lunches, worked on my side hustle, wrote in my gratitude journal and read a chapter of a self-help book. I even listened to a productivity podcast on my commute. I’m fulfilled, energised and comfortably in the swing of my day.

My mornings are typically lazy, but not today, because I’m testing the viral “five-to-nine” routine, which sees corporate Gen Z-ers document themselves – either before work from 5am to 9am or after work from 5pm to 9pm – performing an action-packed step-by-step wellness programme made up of exercise, personal growth work, meal-prepping, skincare and side-hustling. These routines are regimented and seem strenuous, but they have a huge appeal: the five-to-nine video style has been replicated by thousands of creators online, with the hashtag #5to9routine having 35 million views on TikTok alone. Under this tag, you’ll find thousands of Gen Z workers showing how they reclaim their time – and their personalities – back from their corporate jobs.

Gen Z’s interest in maximising productivity in these four golden hours has taken inspiration from the rise of the “5am club” – a special group of uber-productive superbeings who celebrate the benefits of rising at dawn. Sure, people have always been early risers (famed Vogue editor Anna Wintour, obviously, is one of these people) but the very act of waking before the rest of the world is increasingly common, with celebs including Jennifer Aniston, Mark Zuckerberg and Michelle Obama all claiming to be members of the club. There’s also Gwyneth Paltrow, whose morning routine consists of a 30-minute tongue scrape, Ayurvedic oil pull, a 20-minute transcendental meditation and a dance workout. The meeting point between productivity and wellness has risen in popularity as a cultural phenomenon in recent years, thanks to bestselling self-help books including Robin Sharma’s The 5am Club, Hal Elrod’s The Miracle Morning, Adrienne Herbert’s Power Hour and James Clear’s Atomic Habits. You can see the same thing happening with the 5pm club, too, who use their evenings to maximise their wellness through the act of winding down mindfully yet efficiently.

Elena Assimakopoulos, a 27-year-old marketing consultant who lives in London, began rising at 5am when she was 20 to get ahead of studying for her university exams. That routine stuck when she started a nine-to-five as marketing lead for a fintech startup, dedicating the hours between 5am and 8.30am to working on her range of side hustles, which include selling books on Amazon and making user-generated content for brands like Colgate. “I’ve found that waking up at 5am is the only way to be consistent with my side hustles,” she explains. “I did some research about how when the best time to get into flow state is and apparently it is 90 seconds after you open your eyes.” It’s not for everyone, she admits. “I feel like such a granny because I go to bed at 9pm each night, but I manage to fit in seeing friends earlier in the evenings.”

It seems to be paying off, though. Thanks for her strict 5am routine, Assimakopoulos has managed to subsidise her salary with her side hustles and has since gone freelance. “I’ve made over £100,000 with my side hustles in the last couple of years and if I hadn’t had that discipline to wake up early, I would have never done it.” Assimakopoulos has been sharing her wisdom online through her five-to-nine videos, and encourages people to start gradually setting their alarm 10 minutes earlier each day until they reach 5am. “Obviously, you can’t be too harsh on yourself," she says. "It’s not a big deal if you fall out of it, which I do sometimes.”

Any mere mortal who may prefer to doomscroll in bed each morning or binge Love is Blind in the evenings may feel ashamed when faced with the five-to-nine trend. Ketki, a 24-year-old analyst for a tech policy firm, is one of them. These videos make her feel inferior to her corporate peers. “I watch these videos and feel inadequate,” she says. “Everyone seems to be running marathons or balancing some sort of creative pursuit alongside their jobs, and I watch these videos and feel a weird pressure like… am I going to be left behind?”

The five-to-nine lifestyle appeals to Ketki because she also desires to regain control of her life outside of work – it’s just an impossible balance to strike. She graduated from studying classics at a Russell Group university in 2022 and began her first graduate role a year and a half ago. But adjusting to the demands of a full-time job was more difficult than she imagined.

“When I joined my job, I got this weird feeling of wanting to reclaim my personality,” she explains. “Corporate takes so much from you and you have to be switched on all the time. You have no time to go outside, get a full lunch break. I always work through lunch.” A huge part of adjusting to having a full-time job was mourning the open-ended free time that she had become accustomed to as a student. “At university, you get to see friends or do a sport – things you just don’t get out of a corporate job. Now I’m working, it almost feels like you have to sustain the lifestyle you had before but just squeezing it into those two gaps before or after work.”

This squeeze is being experienced by more than just one generation. Anouska Shenn, a workplace wellness specialist who delivers workshops at corporate offices through her business The Office Yoga Company, tells me that the five-to-nine trend is a direct reaction to our changing relationship with work. “We’ve gone from having a lot of freedom over our personal and work time during the pandemic, to having much of that autonomy eroded in a short space of time,” she explains. Corporate organisations are increasingly abandoning flexible working models and imposing full return-to-office mandates  – JP Morgan, Amazon and Goldman Sachs have all done this – leaving employees feeling as though work is encroaching on their freedom. “The power dynamic between companies and their staff has shifted, with a return to more traditional power structures through trends like return to office mandates,” explains Shenn. “When we feel defined by elements outside of our control, we can feel boxed in.”

It’s funny, then, that as young people try to escape the confines of work, they are imposing strict schedules upon themselves in the process. Isn’t that counterproductive? Shenn explains that implementing new habits into your non-work schedule can “expand your sense of self beyond your nine-to-five work persona”.  “It gives you more agency over your life,” she explains. “For those who don’t feel happy or aligned with their current jobs, pouring themselves into a rigid five-to-nine routine can be a distraction, or a way to feel more accomplished or fulfilled away from work.”

Jordan Conrad, a psychotherapist and founder of Madison Park Psychotherapy, tells me that people are maximising their lifestyles to be more “self-directed and meaningful” in the face of changing work conditions. “People are living their lives within the margins of work,” he explains. “The reality is that many people feel so overwhelmed by their careers that they leave work late, spend their commute home checking their emails, and then spend their ‘down time’ either working more or numbing themselves with television or social media.”

He explains that many people can feel stagnant, which is why learning something new in your free time can be so important. “People want to feel that they are engaged in something that they chose to do and that they are getting better at it over time. Work, even work you enjoy, does not scratch that itch for most people. And that makes sense – life is not just one thing. Your career is important, but you need to feel that your relationships are developing and that you are growing as a person as well.”

On paper, the 5am to 9am routine sounds ideal. There is plenty of research indicating that being an early riser can make you happier, feel more motivated and even influence healthier eating habits, but there’s a limit. Early risers must sacrifice their evenings and impose a 9pm bedtime if they want a full night’s sleep, and take it from me: the five-to-nine lifestyle is not for the weak.

“As for whether or not this is healthy, that depends,” says Shenn. “So many examples of this trend involve a fitness regime, so it’s important to factor in rest days and time for recovery. Our bodies need time to repair themselves and our minds need a break from the constant hustle,” she says. I abandoned the routine after a poor two-day attempt. The early bedtimes meant I was missing out on socialising with my friends after work, plus, I’m not a morning person.

Sticking to a schedule as compact as 5am to 9am isn’t realistic, either. Ketki agrees: she can admire these schedules from afar, but she knows that it’s impossible to keep without facing burnout. She wishes for more honesty from Gen Z content creators about the reality of their schedules alongside work. “I would never begrudge someone for being an early riser, but I’d love to see more transparency around when things don’t work out,” she explains. She’d be delighted to watch a productivity vlogger document the mundane, everyday failures that come with life, like missing a train or not having time to make breakfast and having to scoff a crusty Greggs bake en route (and getting covered in pastry in the process). “Those experiences are far more common than having your s*** together all the time,” she says.

The most accurate “five-to-nine” video I watch shows a dishevelled young woman coming home after a long day, throwing her bag on the floor, changing into an oversized T-shirt, heating a microwave meal and flopping on the sofa for the duration of the evening. In another video that satirises the trend, a woman comes home and immediately switches off the lights, screams into a pillow and sits in the darkness. It feels more relatable, certainly: on some days, my 5pm to 9pm involves binging Gilmore Girls while eating a share bag of Doritos for dinner. But the next day, I might actually go to a gym class and eat a nutritious salad. And I’m completely fine with that balance.