Improve your mornings by creating a morning ritual

We all have crazy mornings.

Some of us have classes to attend, some have to reach work on time. Some of us have to get the little ones dressed and ready for school, and a few superhumans have to do all of this and more.

Now I have talked about the importance of waking up early in my life. This blog post isn’t about waking up early.

This article is about giving a better, more mindful start to your days, whether your day starts at 5.30 AM or 12 PM.

The time you wake up till the time you have to rush out the door (or in today’s case, rush to work from home) is time that you can dedicate to yourself. Your morning ritual can be 15 mins or 2 hours, but what’s important is that it starts your day on your terms, instead of an externally imposed deadline.

A good start to the day, no matter when you wake up, can set the tone for your entire day. It can help you re-energize your body and mind, and even help with building self-esteem bit by bit. It’s also known to lead to less fatigue and better sleeping patterns.

And if not that, it can at least be a little moment of joy and solace before the day begins.

While there are many tasks you can incorporate in your morning, trying to do it all can be overwhelming. You’ll find long lists of activities to fill up your mornings with. I’d suggest taking it as what it is, a source of ideas for what you think you’d like to do every morning.

• If reading a book makes you feel grounded, do that
• If it’s having your morning coffee (a new addition to my routine thanks to the Dalgona trend)
• And what I have always recommended as my preferred way to wake up: Exercise.

I used to love exercising first thing in the morning, but nowadays with the quarantine, home workouts are becoming increasingly monotonous and frankly, boring. I have replaced it with another kind of movement, which is doing the chores around the house. Spending my time in a clean environment gives my mood a boost, and the less clutter I have in my surroundings, the less cluttered my mind is.

A mistake that I have made in the past is to keep trying to add activities in my morning ritual, and thereby trying to add more time it takes to do it.

Trying to increase an hour in the morning by waking up early makes sense if you have the physical and mental space to do so. Sacrificing sleep to wake up early, which seemed like a great idea at the time, is essentially stupid. I ended up more lethargic than ever, with shooting headaches throughout the day. Not a good day overall.

Hence, here are some ideas to guide you through having a great morning, and a great day by extension.

We know this all too well. I’ve snoozed my alarm a million times, only to wake up frightfully late. Then it’s all a jumble of brushing my hair, brushing my teeth, stuffing some snacks as an excuse to nourish my body, and dashing out the door to get to class.

Honestly, this has happened to me more times than I care to remember, as recent as 2 months ago ( you know, when I was not working out of my bed :P )

Such days feel like they passed me by without anything meaningful happening to me. My mood isn’t great on such days, and I even tend to want to eat more junk food just to make myself feel better. Then I feel heavier and hate my life even more. What a cycle.

Hence, keep it simple. If you just have 15 mins, don’t try to add reading and exercise and coffee and decluttering and getting dressed, into your routine. I have done this, and to tell you the truth I was just setting myself up for failure.

Be mindful of your own expectations

I oversleep. I stay up late on some days and wake up later than I would like. And then I criticize myself for not having enough time to do everything I would like to do in the morning.

The thing is, it isn’t even that I didn’t do all the things I usually do in the morning (like reading, exercise, etc.) It was the fact that I had set unrealistic expectations of doing all those things, even when I knew I had been up late the night before.

One day does not define who you are. Just, check in with your expectations and make sure they align with who you want to be.

Experiment with small chunks of time

If you want to add to your morning routine, start small. As small as 5 mins. Even a minute can work fine.

I wanted to add reading into my mornings, and I started with just doing 5 minutes of reading while having my coffee. Even if it was just one minute, it would have worked just as well.

The reason is that the important part of forming a habit is showing up. Once you start showing up to read, extending one minute to five minutes to 30 minutes to one hour is just adding to an already existing habit.

The second benefit to this is I got to know if the habit was for me or not in very early stages, without sacrificing sleep. For example, I started meditating for a minute in the morning and realized it just wasn’t for me. It made me more anxious, and I would probably do better with something else like journalling.

Try music!

The first thing I do after waking up — play music. It could be as easy as some instrumental jazz, Lo-Fi beats, or something more upbeat. Nowadays I listen to a lot of Hozier.

Let me know if you’d like a rundown of all the music I listen to. I have playlists for my dance mood, travel mood, to sleep, to wake up, to work, to relax.

Basically, music is a very important part of my day. It might be for you too! Try new genres and have fun with it!

Reduce your screentime

Cutting down on screen time is tough. More days than not, staring at my phone screen in the morning is how I jolt my brain to be awake. But I have been trying to limit my time on WhatsApp and other social media in the morning because honestly, time flies when I am scrolling Instagram. I sometimes even cripple my mood by reading the news. I tend to keep all of that for the end of my mornings.

So every morning, I play whatever song I am feeling on Spotify, and get to my day. I have come to a point where I can go without checking my phone for hours on end. It’s a bit frustrating for friends and family trying to reach me, but they understand that I am not tethered to my phone and it’s okay.

Something that I came across while researching for this article is an e-book — Amy Landino’s ‘Good morning, Good Life’. Here she outlines the three buckets your morning ritual must fill for it to be truly gratifying.

I seem to be saying this too many times throughout this article, but it can be as simple as 15 mins, and as long as 3 hrs. I did not realize I was filling these buckets unintentionally while figuring out my morning ritual. Hence, I thought I’d include it here.

The three buckets are:

Mindfulness

It’s a cliche word and I am not a fan. I don’t find myself very interesting and ‘looking in my soul’ is not something I would do every day. There is not much to look at.

But as I read more about this, mindfulness really only means being present in the moment.

How many times have you found yourself thinking about your friend’s new vacation pictures while doing chores around the house? This is the exact opposite of mindfulness.

Mindfulness means being focused on the task at hand, even if it’s as menial as drinking your coffee. I tend to overthink a lot, and I worry about contingencies and what-ifs all the time. Hence, giving my head some rest while just enjoying my morning coffee, feeling the taste and the jolt of caffeine in my body, makes this simple act pretty special.

I also tend to get my best ideas when I am not thinking all the time. Give your head a moment to get inspired.

Movement

The second bucket is ‘movement’. It doesn’t need to be a 2 hr workout routine. Just walk around the house. Do your chores or clean. Jump for 5 minutes. Stretch your body.

Even something as simple as making your bed can count as movement. It just means not staying still, and using your arms and hands and legs to do something. Anything.

Mastery

I think the first two are precursors to mastery. It’s mastery that really makes your morning special.

We as humans are creative and inspired. We create. Our brain is probably our most precious asset.

Hence spend a little time doing something you love. It could be something creative like singing or writing. It could be learning a new skill or language. It could be trying new recipes for breakfast.

It could even be just putting on your makeup and choosing your outfit.

Just making sure that a component of your morning inspires your creativity and learning can make a big difference in your sense of self-worth. And if you dedicate 15 mins every day to learning something, that’s 91 hours of learning per year right there.

These three buckets need not even be three different tasks. I know people who love doing their makeup in the morning, and they define the time they do that as being present and mindful. That’s two buckets done with one task!

Hence, it’s not about how much time you are spending in your morning, it’s more about the quality of how you choose to engage the time you do have.

Simplify your mornings, and make them count.

Originally published at https://www.meghnabhave.com on May 4, 2020.