The perfect morning routine

In this weeks blog post I want to talk about the importance of building a solid morning routine and give you some inspiration what to implement into your own morning routine. The title of this article is a bit misleading, because the perfect morning routine that fits for everyone simply does not exist, but I think there are some essential building blocks, which should be part of every morning routine.

First of all I want to answer the question why I think a routine, which you follow every morning is even beneficial. A morning routine will prepare you for the rest of the day, because how you spend your mornings will influence the rest of your day. Further more it gives you less room for decision, which sounds bad in the first place, but we as humans have a limited number of "good" decisions we can make each day and if we limit the number of small decisions we have to make every day by building routines we have more mental capacity to actually make the big decisions, which actually matter. Last but not least the morning is a good time of the day, where you you can practise and implement good habits, which you otherwise would not make the time for at the end of the day.

In the following I want to explain the morning routine I follow almost every morning and I want to draw your attention to the aspects, which I think everybody should implement into his or her morning routine. A good morning starts the night before. This is the reason why I make some preperations for the morning in the evening. I tidy up my room the night before, so I have one thing less to worry about in the morning. I personally can work and think best in the morning and to get the most of my most productive time I try to get the minor tasks, whicht don't take a lot of mental capacity, done in the evening so I can focus on my most challenging tasks without having to think about housework I still have to do. More important is going to bed early enough, so you get your 7-9 hours of sleep, because without a night of good sleep you wont have an energized start in the day.

The time you wake up should be personalized to your own circadian rhythm, so if you work most productive late in the evening don't force yourself to wake up early when you are simply not a morning person. Listen to your body and focus on your needs. The thing I would recommend you is waking up and going to bed at the same time every day.

Don't hit your snooze button and get out of bed immediately when your alarm wakes you up. Hitting your snooze button is completely messing up your sleep schedule and this half hour of extra sleep wont make you more energized. The easiest way to completly avoid this is to put your phone in the other corner of your room, so you have to get out of bed to turn off the alarm. This has the additional benefit of not scrolling through your phone when you are still in bed first thing in the morning. To avoid that, put your phone into flight or do not disturb mode in the evening, so you don't get overwhelmed by all the notifications that came in during the night. Not interacting with your phone first thing in the morning is one of the most essential part of my morning routine. The time right after waking up should be time you spend with your own thoughts and not with worrying about the latest news or by comparing yourself to people on social media. You don't want to start your day with negative thoughts.

Drink a glas of water and get some light exposure. Your body dehydrates during the night and to counteract this dehydration and start your metabolism you should drink a glass of water. In addition you should open your blinds and window to get some light into your eye and signal your body that it is day time.

After that I do the usual stuff in the bathroom like taking a shower and brushing my teeths to clean my body and wake myself up with some cold water. When I am back at my room I make my bed, which is a gamechanging morning habit in my opinion. You accomplish your first win of the day and it makes it less likely that you get back into bed.

Then I continue with my meditation and gratefullness practise. Doing 10 minutes of meditation in the mornig calms my mind and lets me focus better in my work sessions and there is a whole lot more benefits of daily meditation, which I will be discussing in a future blog post. To wrap my morning routine up I write down 3 things I am gratefull for and journal a bit to clear my head and put me in a good mood for the day.

I hope I didn´t bore you too much with my detailed description on how my mornings look like, but I just wanted to give you some inspiration for your own morning routine. My morning routine is constantly changing and it probably will in the future except for the key elements I talked about. Just build up a morning routine, which i easy to follow, doesn't take too long and puts you in a positive mindset to tackle the day.

Cheers Emil