Improve Your Morning Routine

Alarm, snooze, alarm, snooze, wake up, coffee, supplements, breakfast, shower, we all know the standard routine of a morning.

However, we want to look at some other ways to potentially enjoy a more productive morning routine and as they say – ‘if you win the morning, you win the day’.

So in this article we are going to take a look at some real simple tips to get your day off to the best possible start.

MAKE YOUR BED

This sounds simple enough and it is, however, the process of making your bed has more benefits then you could imagine and as Admiral William H. McRaven points out-

‘If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed.’

Plus there are other proven benefits, such as, encouraging you to keep the rest of your bedroom tidy, lowering stress and improving your mood.

Not a bad return on investment for 10 seconds of work

AWAKEN PHYSIOLOGICALLY

What we mean by this, is to awaken your body through some sort of movement or exercise to get the blood pumping.

This can be 10 push ups or pull ups, a few sun salutations or whatever you want to do to awaken your body.

These small movements bring your body into a state that allows you to think more optimistically and become in turn become more productive.

MORNING JOURNALING

At 1^st this can seem like a ‘would love to be able to, but who has the time’ kind of idea, yet when embraced, this technique can really help destress you, helping to remove anxiety and unproductive thoughts in your head and allow you to get on with the day.

A technique called Morning Pages, is an idea where every morning you write 3 A4 sides of paper of anything you want. Your thoughts, your fears, your dreams, everyday things happening in your life.

The concept is that by writing exactly 3 A4 sides of paper - even if you start by having nothing to say – by the end you will have released the tensions you didn’t know existed.

Yet as the inventor Julia Cameron points out, you must end on the 3 pages to avoid "self-involvement and narcissism".

MEDITATION

Again ‘who has the time?!’, a good point with the fact that most of us have to rush around in the morning, but if there is a chance of finding some time, the benefits of 10-20 minutes of meditation can be boundless.

Meditation can let you not only relax, but it allows you to be more ready for the day, by observing the patterns within your own head, so that when something frustrating happens or someone does something to annoy you, you don’t respond in the worst way possible and make things worse.

There are some great tools to help you get started, such as the Headspace app or if you would like some guided mediations they are out there to, people such as Tara Brach who offer free guided videos.

A COLD SHOWER

No, I am not talking about having a full cold shower. Whilst that would certainly wake you up, I think that for 99% of the population it is too daunting to be effective.

What we recommend is end your shower with 20 to 30 seconds of cold water, you’ll be amazed at how easy it is and in a strange way pleasant.

There are a lot of advantages to ending your shower with cold water. These include-

Awakening the body further by improving blood circulation
Increasing your metabolism, leading to weight loss
Reducing hair loss, the increased circulation pumps blood to the hair follicles
Research shows it also helps fight of illnesses

It is amazing what small changes can do to make your day more productive, give them a go and hopefully some of them will become part of your new routine.