Morning Routine For A Successful Day
A morning routine is a set of actions that you take before you start with daily activities. These actions taken first thing in the morning can help you to be focused and energized through the day or the opposite can make you groggy and exhausted.
By adopting a good morning routine you affect the rest of your day. We will present to you some ideas about how to start your day, and hopefully, you will like these morning routines and start implementing them in your life.
Simple Morning Routine For Success
1. Don’t hit the “Snooze” button
Hitting the “snooze” button is how many of us start the day, but it has a big negative impact. It messes with your circadian rhythm which can cause grogginess that lasts for hours. Further, if you think deeper that extra 2 or 3 minutes extra sleep won’t make any difference.
Your body won’t be able to go through the full REM cycle and you won’t get an extra rest from those 2 or 3 minutes extra sleep.
Go to bed early and find out some night routines that will help you to have the best mornings ever.
2. Make your bed
It is easy and takes less than a minute, but it will set the tone for the entire day. Making your bed may be a minor accomplishment, but it will encourage you to accomplish more throughout the day.
Still, think making your bed is not worth the time? In research for her book, “The Happiness Project,” Gretchen Rubin found that one of the most common changes that led to happiness was making the bed each morning.
Small changes make a big impact, and making your bed can have a huge effect on your day.
3. Leave your phone for the first 30 minutes
Instead of scrolling through your phone spend the first 30 minutes of your day doing something that makes you feel good.
If you check your texts, Instagram, or Facebook feed during your first 30 minutes, your mind goes into a state of FOMO.
Fear of missing out (FOMO), “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent”. This social anxiety is characterized by “a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing.”
So, leave your phone and don’t be afraid that you’ve missed something, you have a whole day ahead to check the news, mails, and everything else.
4. Start the day with gratitude
Gratitude can reduce stress, improve a relationship, boost happiness. If you want to know more about gratitude read this article: How Gratitude Transforms The Human Heart and Molecular Structure of The Brain.
You can start by writing down five simple things that you are grateful for and stick to this morning routine after you wake up every day.
“You can’t form a habit if it doesn’t have a routine to stick to”
Robyn Conely Downs
5. Move your body
We all know how exercising is important for our physical and mental health. In this case, if you are an energized person and ready to move in the mornings, schedule some exercises before your day gets started and enjoy a morning workout.
On the other hand, if you wake up slowly and are not so happy to get moving first thing in the morning, practice walking, or just do simple yoga stretches, that will be enough.
Remember, listen to your body and you know what to do in the morning, not every one of us wants to do hard fitness in the morning.
6. Meditation
When done in the mornings, meditation helps to set the right tone for the day in a relaxed and positive way.
Meditation helps you to calm down and stay focused. If you are new at this start with only 2-3 min. and increase the time after a while when you are ready.
It has been shown that meditation helps to rewire our neural patterning, and meditating for even 10 minutes can also boost energy and focus throughout the day.
7. Read
You probably think now, who has time to read in the morning? You have busy mornings and rushing to prepare and now READ? If you carve out 15 minutes every morning, you will be so glad that you did.
Devoting even 15 minutes every day makes a significant difference at the end of the week, and even more so at the end of the month when you’ve finished multiple books.
Reading is the easiest way to learn new things and develop yourself personally, and many of the world’s most successful people will attribute much of their success to reading many, many books.
8. Prepare everything the night before
Be prepared for the mornings. Layout clothes, set out or pack everything you need for a workout, or get your work-from-home station ready to go with a fully-charged laptop and your daily planner, pen, and blue light glasses on your desk or table.
You can even meal prep your breakfast beforehand by freezing individual bags of smoothie ingredients or chopping veggies for an omelet. While you’re at it, make sure the dishes are cleaned and your room is tidy before you head to bed, so you can wake up focusing on the day rather than cleaning up from yesterday.
“Habits and routines have nothing to stick to without mindset”
Robyn C. Downs
3 Timeless principles that will make your mornings more successful
No matter what morning routine you choose to do and how often there are 3 principles that you should always have in mind:
1. Start the day with one or two easy tasks
Schedule easier activities to start with. Admiral William McRaven talks about simply making your bed to change the world. It’s the same principle here.
Draw a little something, jot down some notes in your notebook, jam to a song you know, etc. Just make sure it’s not something reactive like replying to an email.
2. Work on your hardest tasks when you work best
Schedule your hardest task for when you know your mind is the sharpest. So many times we try to solve difficult problems when we’re tired, wasting precious time on something we won’t figure out at that moment.
Recognize when that happens, take a break, and jump back on the problem after. Take note of what time during the day you can’t function properly and, as much as possible, don’t schedule hard tasks during that time.
3. Prepare your next day the night before
When you write down the things you have to do for the next day slightly before going to bed, it puts your mind at ease, letting your subconscious work overnight.
The two main benefits are:
- You stop thinking about it, letting you fall asleep easier; and
- When you wake up, you get clarity on what you wrote down.
Conclusion: It is not as hard as it seems to build a strong morning routine. We all have routines but the question is: Are those routines giving energy and focus through the day or just the opposite?
Find out what works best for you. If someone can get up at 5 a.m it doesn’t mean that you should do that. Maybe your body is not prepared and your daily tasks are not the same as theirs.
So there is not exactly the time or what precisely to do. Make your morning routine. These mentioned above are just good ideas that will help you to change and start building your routine.
Good habits and the right believes are the core of success.