– COLLABORATIVE CONTENT –
Mornings, you either love them or you hate them. No matter if you’re an early riser or a night owl, you will have to wake up in the morning during some period of your life. For this reason, no matter if it’s for work, trying to simply get a headstart on your day or trying to wake up at the same time as your children, it’s important to know where to begin and how you might change matters for the better. Leaving the house with a spring in your step is not something you can easily brush off as a silly desire. If you achieve it right, you might find your entire life starts falling into place with those simple morning decisions at your back. But what does the perfect morning routine look like? Can it change from person to person?
If you’re not feeling one method, how might you experiment? Well, here we believe that a well-used morning can truly help you feel your best self, and so to that end, let us grant you some loving advice:
A Reliable Wake-up Time
We all need to wake up at different times. This might be for work, for school, to hit a particular commute, or to do something fun in the morning while we wait for our evening shift. Our bodies run via our circadian rhythm, and that means we are best suited to rising with the sun and sleeping when it goes down. We can turn this on its head, of course. But what matters most here is not the hour in which you get up, nor the hour at which you retire, provided you have at least 7-8 hours of sleep in that time. What matters is how reliable we are with that on a cyclical, repetitive timeframe.
This means it’s much better to go to bed from 10pm-6am each and every day rather than going to bed at 11.30pm one night, 10.00pm the next night, and midnight the following night. Of course, disparate bedtimes are hardly going to harm you deeply provided you get enough sleep, but here we’re focused on getting the perfect morning going from the moment you wake up, and for that, we need a reliable wake-up time. Implement this effort, and see how it helps! You’d be surprised just how polished and aware you feel once you settle into this schedule.
Give Yourself Enough Time
It’s important to give yourself enough time for the morning preparations you need to make. You might wish to shower each morning, to groom yourself, to use your hair dryer, to give yourself enough time for a comforting breakfast and a cup of orange juice or coffee. If you have time, you might even meditate for ten minutes and/or read a chapter of a book. This way your mind kicks into gear before you even leave the house. Then, well prepared, you can enjoy that long-form sense of morning preparation and buzz that most everyone appreciates, and you’ll have a spring in your step for sure.
Exercise
It’s also quite important to exercise in the morning. Of course, we’re not talking about throwing heavy weights around or running a 2k, unless you absolutely have time for that and wish to get a headstart on your day. We’re talking about simple techniques anyone can achieve with ample room space. Just think about it. If you’ve slept for eight hours, that’s your body immobile for some time. Of course, your body is repairing, but your heart rate hasn’t been elevated. Then, you get in your car. You drive to the office parking lot. Then you get out and sit at your desk for four hours before lunch. Then you walk to the break room, eat something, and sit down for the rest of the day, driving home to sit down and watch television in the evening again.
Exercise is always a deliberate choice to avoid this sedentary lifestyle. Even if you have a plan in the evening such as attending a class or the gym, when the morning comes, you need to shake yourself out of lethargy. This can be rather simple. Doing a few press-ups, situps, and other calisthenics exercises (even if you can only do a few right now) can help you feel a little bit more awake and alive than you might have done in the morning. This might sound like blasphemy so we apologise ahead of time, but a good morning exercise could potentially even rectify your ravenous desire for a strong coffee in the morning. Just food for thought.
Fresh Air
In our air-conditioned vehicles, it can often seem like we wake up in a fugue state, enter our vehicle and then our workplace without ever fully waking up. To some degree, this can be because we actually haven’t given ourselves true contact with fresh air upon waking. This is where getting outside first and foremost could be the most important part of your morning. Even if you’re just letting out your dog in the morning, stand outside, and take a deep, deep breath. Let the cool air fill your lungs. Then exhale. Then repeat, perhaps ten times or however long feels comfortable. These deep breaths can help invigorate you, help your body wake up for the day.
If you’re feeling extra spicy and in the need of some true alertness, you might decide to follow the Wim Hof method, a practical guide designed by the well-known ‘real life Iceman,’ a man who climbed Everest in his shorts. He recommends a set of breathing exercises where you fill and empty the air in your lungs multiple times over. This can help you wake up your dormant sense of power, and also the practice will help your posture as you stand up to achieve it. This can help you start whatever responsibilities you have, once more, with a joyful energetic dance to your step.
With this advice, we hope you’re able to make the morning truly yours. What do you do in your morning routine? Let me know in the comments below.
*Disclaimer – This is a collaborative post. This post has been pre-written.
