I Accidentally Started Waking at 4 AM, and Spent a Decade Finding My Way Back to It

People ask how I became a 4 AM person. They expect a system, a book, a vow. The truth is funnier and messier: I stumbled into it in 2008, while my life was falling apart, and then I spent years choosing it on purpose.

It was an accident. I worked to make the accident permanent.

The week everything slipped

I was a software engineer who cared about the work. Then a breakup hit hard, and focus left with it. Evenings became PlayStation and FIFA until two or three. Mornings became seven or eight with almost no sleep. I showed up late. I underperformed. I knew a firing was coming before it arrived.

When it did, the picture was simple and ugly: no job, relationship gone, brain foggy. I still trusted the craft. I did not trust my current head. So I changed the scenery.

Helsinki, 8 PM, then 4 AM

I bought a ticket to Helsinki. Landed around 7:30, hotel about an hour later. I had barely slept for days. I did not shower. I told myself I would nap and figure life out later.

Later never came. I woke at 4 AM feeling like I had slept a clean seven or eight hours. Body light. Mind weirdly clear. Unemployed, single, alone in a hotel room at four, I asked the only useful question: what now?

I opened the laptop. Rebuilt my site. Rewrote my CV. Posted it everywhere I could find. I needed a job ASAP. From about 4:15 to 6:30 I moved like someone who still had a future. Two hours felt like a full workday. Focus that high after a week of fog felt almost unfair.

Sleep was an option. My body refused it. Adrenaline was too loud. So I put on running shoes and went to meet Helsinki in July light. I was not a runner. I probably did not even crack 5K. I just moved through a quiet city and felt, for the first time in weeks, like a person again. Breakfast. A crash later that morning. And a new question: could I do this on purpose?

Four days that proved it was real

The next night I went to bed early on purpose. Same wake. Same charge. I spent the morning learning C++, tinkering on a game, feeling almost offended by how much I could finish before 6:30. Another run, different route. By mid-morning, recruiters were flooding in. Interviews. Offers. Paris. Belgium. The world opened because two early hours had given me my edge back.

I held the rhythm for four or five days. Then life got good again, and the structure got harder. Paris meant late dinners, friends, a long ride home to the suburbs. Arriving at 10:30 or 11 and aiming for 4 AM was a bad bet. I let the mornings go. I missed them immediately.

Belgium: choosing the accident

In 2010 I moved to Belgium for work, mostly alone, on purpose. Familiar places had expectations. I wanted a clean slate. First promises to myself: wake at 4, build a life outside the office that kept me honest (running when I could, basketball a few times a week, English instead of defaulting to my mother tongue). Not every promise stuck perfectly. The 4 AM one did.

From late 2010 into 2011, the machine was on. By the time cars started on the street at seven, I was already miles into the day I had planned the night before. That edge helped me launch a company, ship product, get to San Francisco, and grow Hackages into something real: millions in revenue, sixty-plus people at the peak.

The team joked about it, then relied on it. Email me at 9 PM and you would hear back around 4. We even used 007@hackages.io for late support: the promise was simple. If it landed overnight, Davy would be up. That was not hustle theater. It was identity.

By seven, when the world wakes up, I wanted to already be proud of what I had done on purpose.

Then life got louder

Companies hit hard seasons. Families grow. Two people who love each other still have to negotiate clocks: one of you may live by a hard start line, the other by more flow. Neither is a moral win. It is just two nervous systems learning to share a house. Sleep got messy. For a stretch I was in limbo, and the clean 4 AM streak was gone.

Even when my body still woke early without an alarm, going back to bed to match the house often left me more wrecked than if I had stayed up and moved. The lesson was rude and useful: half-keeping the habit can cost more than losing it cleanly and rebuilding later.

Crisis, 5 AM, and starting again

At the end of 2023, a serious car accident put my kids' mom in intensive care. For weeks it was hospital runs, school runs, and holding the line at home. Work fell away. Mentally I was not shipping anything. Structure was the only thing I still knew how to reach for.

With help, the boys' sleep got steadier. I tried for early mornings again. It was 5 AM, not 4. I watched tutorials. I read. I could not do deep work yet. That was okay. Showing up at the hour still mattered while everything else was on fire.

When home life calmed a little, focus returned. I built again. Then another hard chapter at the end of 2025 knocked sleep and attention sideways. Same old truth showed up in the wreckage: my superpower was never perfection. It was go to bed early, wake early, do the thing I named the night before, and by seven have a stack of intentional wins.

What I am doing now

The last few months are that practice again. Kids one week with me, one week with their mom. Sport, because I still want to become an athlete later in life. Consulting. Products. Evenings that arm the next morning so 5 AM-me (and yes, often 4 AM-me) does not invent the day from scratch.

I did not wake at 4 AM every single day for ten unbroken years. Life does not sign that contract. What I did was discover an unfair hour by accident, turn it into identity for a long stretch, lose it when life got heavy, and keep knowing the way home.

If I can get back to the early hours, everything else becomes possible again.

That is the story. Not a perfect streak. An accidental door in Helsinki, a decision to walk through it again and again, and a reminder for anyone whose mornings feel broken right now: you do not need a flawless history. You need tonight's plan, and the courage to meet yourself before the world wakes up.