Morning Routine — How To Create Your Perfect Morning Routine
People say: How you start your day is how you’ll run your day.
The truth is, your morning routine does set the tone for the rest of the day. And if you live each day right, you’ll more likely live your life right.
There are many opinions out there about how you should start your day.
Some say you should get up at 5 am, and others say you should sleep until you wake up naturally.
Some say to workout firs, others to meditate first.
There are probably as many morning routines as there are people.
Well, there is a clue right there.
Over the years, I must have tried most of them.
The most intense one was 3.5 hours long.
None of them felt like the right one for me.
I had to create my own.
In this article, I won’t give you a template.
I want to help you create your own morning routine that will work for you, rather than you struggling to stick to someone else’s.
Ground rule no.1: What time should you wake up in the morning?
Whether you’re a morning person or a night owl, research shows that people sleep anywhere between 5 and 9 hours with the sweet spot somewhere around 7 hours.
The best advice I can give you is to listen to your body and mind.
Listen to your body
Your body will tell you how much sleep it needs.
Some day you will need a bit more sleep than other days as not all days are equal. But you should always get enough sleep.
Try to be as consistent as possible, especially with your wake-up time. If your sleep time varies a lot, you’re putting yourself in a jetlag situation all the time. If you need extra sleep, go to bed earlier rather than getting up later.
Listen to your mind
I think deep inside we all know what would be the best time for us to wake up to have enough time to start the day right.
I personally hate sleeping in because I know I didn’t need it, and I would have much rather used the time for something else than sleeping.
If you have to rush right from the start and you don’t have enough time for a proper start of your day, you’re getting up too late.
If you’re forcing yourself to get up so early that it’s making you cranky, you’re probably pushing the early morning a bit too much.
Listen to your mind and your body and find the perfect wake up time that will give you enough time to do all you need.
Ground rule no.2: Don’t pollute your mind right from the start.
Your mind is super susceptible after you wake up.
So keep all the stressors away for the first hour or two.
Your emails, social media, TV and other drama stuff, can wait for a bit. It’s not going to go anywhere.
Your mind is like a blank canvas in the morning, so don’t splash some dark colours on it right from the start.
Now here is the main part.
Whether you’ll dedicate 15 minutes or two hours for your morning routine, I suggest you fill it with at least one activity from these categories: Health, Mind and happiness, Growth, and Focus.
I’ll tell you why each of these categories is important and give you a few ideas of what you could do.
Health in your morning routine
Needless to say that health is the most important thing in your life.
So spend a bit of time every morning looking after your health.
It may be:
Not only that doing one or more of these activities every day will have a great cumulative effect over time, but you’re also sending a very important message to yourself, that you care about you.
Mind and happiness in your morning routine
Your mind is incredibly powerful. You live in your mind.
But if you don’t learn how to run it, it will run you. And as surprising as it may be, happiness is not it’s a priority. If you let your mind just be it will regress to being reactive, a bit negative, sceptical, and fearful. It will then project this mindset on everything.
So make sure you spend a bit of time every morning to focus your mind on being positive and calm.
Here are a few options:
- Meditation ( You don’t need to meditate for an hour. 10 minutes is plenty.)
- Gratitude ritual — refocus on the things you have and can be grateful for.
- Journalling — journalling is a great exercise to think through your ideas, thoughts, goals or concerns.
- Do something good — little act of kindness does miracles to the mind.
Growth in your morning routine
There is a saying that when we’re not growing, we’re dying. Growing and learning new things is extremely important and exciting because it allows us to improve your life and yourself. Feed your mind every day with inspiration and new ideas. This knowledge will enrich you as a person and will make you more resourceful.
Here are a few ideas of what you can do:
- Read books (10 pates a day will get you through 12+ books a year)
- Listen to audiobooks or podcasts
- Watch documentaries
- Be creative
Focus time in your morning routine
If you don’t want your day to just happen to you, you need to decide how you’re going to go about it and who you’re going to be.
It makes a tremendous difference to your day when you plan what you’re going focus on, what the key tasks are, and who you’re going to show up today.
I suggest you do all of these every morning.
- Decide what the most important tasks you want to get done today are.
- Decide on what you’re going to focus today.
- Decide on who you’re going to be today (confident, supportive, loving, brave, etc.)
Becoming aware of your focus and intentions will help you be much more self-aware and intentional during your day. Otherwise, we tend to end up being a reactive puppet to what our day throws at us.
So, there you go.
How much time you dedicate to your morning routine is up to you.
Here are a few final tips:
- You don’t rush
- It shouldn’t feel like a chore (you should enjoy it)
- Include one or more task from each category, whatever you’ll enjoy the most. Ideally, include all three from the last one.
- It should help you start the day right.
- Adjust it whenever you need to.
- Stick to it to see the benefits.
Originally published at https://tomassvitorka.com on August 26, 2019.