On Balance: Controversial Morning Routines

Morning routines are currently the talk of TikTok – but it’s not all mouth tape and 50 press-ups before 5 am. There is a darker side to the current trend, framed by toxic masculinity and the ‘manosphere’.

Fitness influencer Ashton Hall went viral last week with his 4 am wake-up call, consisting of dunking his head in an ice bowl, using banana peel as a face mask, and journaling at 5 am with a magnetic nose breathing strip on his face. Parodies of his routine appeared overnight – from TikTok fave Duolingo to Twitch streamers reacting to rappers doing their own. 

Comments ranged from “what is he writing at 7 am – he hasn’t done anything yet” to “who came from the parody” to “I don’t see anything wrong with this”. Most likely, the video was ragebait, created to garner followers to buy his workout supplements and newsletter (which it did), but even so, it calls into question why these extreme morning routines are infiltrating our feeds, and what the real sinister messaging behind them is.

Hall’s video showed a time-stamped six-hour morning routine, walking us through a range of fitness, mind, and nutritional habits he indulges in before the day has even started. What seems like an odd approach to preparing for the long day ahead is a thinly veiled attempt to promote a larger issue at hand: toxic masculinity. Vulture has slotted him into “the category of hustle-bro influencers… who play off the absurdity of the sigma grindset morning routine”; Unherd called it “a bleak new masculinity”; and The Cut’s Olivia Craighead asked, “Are men okay?”. 

With an alarming literalness that parallels the cautionary tale of ‘American Psycho’,  we begin at 3.53 am by ripping off mouth tape – shirtless, of course – to brush teeth and swill with a glass of bottled water. 4 am is outside on the balcony for a set off pre-sunrise press-ups, with 4.55 am journaling, 5.47 am ice facials, 6.38 am sprints at the gym, 7.40 am swim, 8.45 am banana peel facial, another 9 am ice facial, 9.15 am talking into a microphone about numbers, and finishing with a 9.25 am breakfast. 

In the video, other than Hall himself, the only two people we see are a woman handing him a towel when he gets out of the pool, and the hand of another woman placing an ice bath in front of him for his face, making his breakfast, and serving it to him at his desk. This act of service from women, as he shows off a level of strict discipline only preached about by male podcasters and manosphere creators, simply conveys the message that this is not a morning routine to aspire to, but rather an obnoxious display of toxic masculinity. 

The broader context is everything when viewing these videos. What seems like a relatively odd way to flex your pre-work rituals is actually damaging viewers. Though some are praising his levels of rage bait to sell his business, they are neglecting the very real and very harmful consequences that follow. 

Previously, the ‘extreme beauty’ rituals of women were mocked – characterised by mouth tape, satin pillowcases, and 15-step skincare routines. Unfortunately, this was nothing new. If anything, it highlighted the unpaid labour that beauty expects from women online. Take Naomi Wolf’s ‘The Beauty Myth’, which warned of standards trapping women into becoming a commodity to serve society, stuck in a rut of trends and cycles that prohibit advancement. Now, masculinity is being sold as the same, yet it allows men in these cycles to wake up, get on the grind, and progress in life… still at the hands of women. 

Now the controversial morning routine has left the confines of the pink-packaged beauty sphere and has been aestheticised and repackaged so it suits the manosphere. Whilst the standards it aligns with negatively effect men, promoting the likes of body dysmorphia and isolation for example, it is encouraging the feeling of dissatisfaction amongst everyone. 

With shows like Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’ sparking online discourse about who is affected by content that promotes red-pilled behaviours, we have to look between the lines. Some of the more abstract toxic masculinity creators like Hall are important to be wary of, using absurd methods of hiding their paid lifestyle plans in ragebait-style videos. 

On balance, controversial morning routines are usually hiding an ulterior motive. It is important to distinguish between harmless doomscroll content and mindless consumerism to avoid taking it too far. There is nothing wrong with taking inspiration from a creator who gets up at 5 am for a run, but it’s all about evaluating and weighing up your work/life/self-improvement balance. And after all, why are we normalising rubbing a banana peel on our faces at 4 am anyway?