but its taking some time to finish this task.

It won't make any discernible difference on such a small dataset as your sample, but avoiding the sort for much larger datasets should be a win:

#! perl -slw
use strict;

my %hash;
++$hash{ <> } until eof();

my @top5;
for( keys %hash ) {
    for my $i ( 0 .. 4 ) {
        if( !defined( $top5[ $i ] ) or $hash{ $_ } > $hash{ $top5[ $i 
+] } ) {
            splice @top5, $i, 0, $_;
            pop  @top5 if @top5 > 5;;
            last;
        }
    }
}
print @top5;
__END__
many hardships
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love life
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Note: the difference between my output and your expected is due to there being no clear winner for 5th place.