5amclub

Last night, on a whim as is so characteristic of me, I committed to join the 5 AM club.

This morning, after several hours of struggling to manage a nonsensical level of emotional agony, I committed to blog about it.

I note past precedent for gamifying myself out of a life rut through through latching onto a self-help book fad, finding some ironic way to apply it, and blogging about it. Not that I can say my “six months of rules” in 2010 led to any lasting positive change in habits or the way I approach relationships… but it did the job for which it was created, which was to empower me sufficiently to avoid being subsumed by nonsensical emotional agony during that timeframe. And for what it’s worth I wound up marrying one of the guys I referenced in the blog.

I have used the phrase “nonsensical emotional agony” twice now. I don’t think I have deployed this particular combination of words to describe it before now, and yet it seems to capture the biggest and longest question of my life as well as any linguistically available descriptor. I’m sure I’ll unpack it more later; right now what’s relevant is that it’s physiological, it’s debilitating, it’s out of all proportion to anything happening in the moment or that has happened to me in the past, and I have never found a reliable means of exerting power over it beyond treating the symptoms and anticipating the types of rejections, failures, and disappointments that might unleash it.

I have not read “The 5 AM Club,” but I recently attended a talk by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. I had never heard of him before and was not particularly in the mood for a wellness talk at the time. But I found him to be just the right combination of wise, absurd, delightful, and Taylor-Swift-prolific to engage me. So I listened to a few of his podcasts, mostly at random, including a long-form interview with 5 AM Club’s author Robin Sharma. Sharma, whom I found nauseating and self-righteous, was there to promote his new book “The Wealth Money Can’t Buy,” which I will not be reading. (For example, from what I remember of the podcast, one of the “types of wealth money can’t buy” is apparently money, which reminds me of the time I was at one of those restaurant cook-your-own-dinner parties and the chef taught us how to make mayonnaise using six ingredients, one of which was jarred mayonnaise.) The “5 AM Club” concept was intriguing, though; I’d heard of it, and Dr. Chatterjee had referenced it in a recent episode on circadian rhythms, with Kristen Holmes, a much less-off-putting guest.

We’re about to wrap up the Jewish calendar month of Elul, my favorite month because it normalizes throwing personal growth spaghetti at the wall as a part of atoning for past wrongs. So the time is right for harnessing something like this.

After a crappy day yesterday in which I was cranky with the kids in the morning, and then midday a stupid thing completely derailed me from a long list of urgent tasks, and I even blew off an important meeting over it, and was irritable the rest of the day… I thought to myself, “I know! I’ll join the 5 AM club! Starting NOW!” Remembering Dr. Chatterjee’s voice in my head, I said, “I have to try it for at least a month.”

So. A minimum monthlong commitment during what promises to be an absolutely insane several weeks of Jewish holidays. My initial disdain for this Sharma character.

The makings of a decent blogsperiment, perhaps.