Morning Ritual

When you think of mornings, what comes to mind? Is it thoughts of stress and anxiety? Or do you enjoy mornings and take your time to get ready? If you are anything like most people, present company included, you probably do not get all that excited to think about jumping out of bed and starting your day.

Even for the most avid night owl, mornings do not have to be stressful, painful, or something to dread. Instead, mornings can be a great way to kickstart your day and productivity.

One of the easiest ways to make your mornings more enjoyable is through a morning ritual. A morning ritual gets you in the swing of things without rushing into the day or filling your mind with useless information.

Instead, a morning ritual wakes you up, energizes your being, and sets the stage for the day. With a good morning ritual, you can increase your productivity, decrease stress, and improve your overall well-being. Still, it takes a little work to craft the perfect morning ritual based on your lifestyle and needs.

In this post, The Morning Ritual, we offer some suggestions to help you increase your productivity, energy, and happiness, all by building the perfect morning routine for your day.

The most beneficial aspect of a morning ritual is that it boosts your productivity for the rest of the day. Whenever you wake up and jump straight into your morning ritual, you maximize your time and get started the right way. Since your morning ritual adds something to your life, it helps you be productive from the moment you wake up.

If you are willing to be productive, the second you get out of bed, you will be more productive for the rest of the day. Momentum from your morning routine will follow well into noon, afternoon, and night, allowing you to have a beneficial and productive day.

Morning rituals can help boost your energy, allowing you to tackle the day and enjoy your mornings more.

Whether you like to read in the morning, take a shower, or work out, your morning routine helps wake you up. This cuts through morning grogginess, helping you feel more energized, alert, and capable during the morning and day.

One reason morning rituals increase happiness is that they lower stress. People find mornings stressful. Whether it is oversleeping, rushing around to get your kids ready, or not being able to see all of your needed items, mornings come with a lot of stress and anxiety.

When we use a morning ritual, we have taken many stressful parts of the morning off. They are completed the night before, or you wake up early enough to finish them stress-free whenever you wake up.

Having a morning ritual increases happiness because it also improves your relationships. Whenever you eliminate stress and focus healthfully on yourself, your relationships naturally improve, especially with those who are around you the most.

We are our habits. If our habits are unhealthy and damaging, we will be unhealthy. If you repeatedly hit the snooze button, you very well may have several unhealthy habits that you need to break and healthy habits you need to form.

Having morning rituals is a great way to develop healthy habits that last throughout your lifetime. Whether your new healthy habit is to work out in the morning or to wake up at a regular time, the practices will impact your life and extend elsewhere.

The only thing you should be doing differently at this stage is keeping a morning journal to log your experiences and feelings in the morning. This journal aims to connect how you feel in the morning and the rest of the day to how you approach waking up.

Your morning journal does not have to be extensive, thorough, or take up a lot of your time. You can keep it in the notes section of your phone or dedicate an actual journal to it. Just keep all of the thoughts in an organized place so that you can find them later on.

It is important to log your feelings and emotions right after you get started in the day. This will help you better reflect on how your current morning routine affects your self, body, and stress. Besides, track your energy and productivity for the rest of the day. You want to see how your current morning affects how you live your life too.

Now that you have your journal try to predict or imagine what you think your morning routine is already like. Do you perceive your mornings as being rushed or stressed? Or do you view them as being relaxing and a sound stage for the day?

Thinking about how you perceive your mornings will tell you a whole lot about them. In many ways, perception matters more than reality. If you view mornings in a negative light, you will often respond very poorly to them. Please take note of what you think your mornings are currently like so that you can compare them to reality.

Go about your morning routine as usual. Press the snooze button as many times as you want, do a few productive activities as possible, and not change a thing. Do not even feel pressure to improve in the slightest.

If you are dishonest about your current morning routine, you will not create a better ritual. In other words, do not even slightly act better than usual in the mornings during this step. Just go about your morning as expected.

After the observation period is up, you need to pull out your journal and reflect on it. Look at your emotions, productivity, energy, happiness, or anything else you tracked throughout the week. Do you see any trends? Are they good trends or alarming trends?

While you are reflecting on your journal, you might want to write more about anything you learned. Write about anything that surprises you or does not surprise you. Although this step may sound pointless, it will be beneficial when creating your morning routine’s specifics.

As you are reflecting on your journal, do you notice any brainstorming happening without you trying? If so, make sure to note them so that you can easily access these ideas at a later point.

To know what you want from your morning routine, you have to understand your current perceptions and how they affect the way you approach your mornings. You cannot have unrealistic expectations for your mornings, or else you will feel they are worthless and give up.

From the get-go, understand that a morning routine is not going to change your entire life. If you have bad habits elsewhere, a morning routine will not erase them. Although a morning routine will benefit you in several ways, it will not completely turn your life around on its head.

Finally, the last perception that you need to break is that a good morning ritual will stick now and in the future. Even the best morning rituals will need to be improved later. Since life changes, so too should your morning ritual.

If you do not want to change your morning ritual down the line, it will likely stop being applicable to your life. No matter what your perceptions about mornings may be, make sure that they are realistic. If you think that any of your perceptions do not match reality, take the time to try to adjust them and ingrain the new perceptions into your head.

You can now start thinking about the main objective for creating a morning routine. Although this step may sound scary, you probably already know the answer to this question, even if it may not seem evident at first.

The main objective will help guide you when selecting activities and goals for your morning routine. Unless you know what you want out of your morning routine, you cannot create a ritual that impacts your life and improves your needs.

The main objective for your morning routine should be why you want a morning routine in the first place. Do you want a morning routine to give you more time in the day? Do you want a morning routine to make your days less stressful or more productive?

As you were thinking about your main objective, you probably thought of several goals that you have. That is completely fine and normal. Very few people only have one reason for wanting to start a morning routine.

Even though it is normal to have multiple goals, you need to prioritize them. If you try to focus on too many goals simultaneously, it won’t be easy to create a morning routine that feels capable and not overwhelming. Prioritize your goals to keep everything manageable.

For example, start by focusing on your main objective. Your main objective is the most important goal. So, it should be the one you start with. You can add a secondary purpose if you feel that it is not too overwhelming. When you think that you have too much on your plate, go back to your main objective goal.

Now, you can start brainstorming based on your morning journal from chapter two. The morning journal’s point was to record and recognize trends about the relationship between your morning routine and your daily feelings, thoughts, energy, and actions.

Whenever you reflect on your morning journal, start noting what habits you want to keep and what patterns you want to change. Even if your morning is relatively rushed and stressful, you may have one or two things you want to keep in the morning routine. For example, most people want to keep their morning cup of coffee.

In addition to noting what you keep, pay attention to what you want to change. In many ways, knowing what you want to change will be the most important. It gives you room and time to add new activities that enhance your goals and well-being.

To keep this stuff organized, you might want to create a chart in your morning journal. On one side of the chart, list what you want to keep. On the other side of the chart, list what you want to change. You can even go as far as to cross out what you want to change to ingrain it into your brain visually.

There are countless morning activities you can add to your morning ritual. Some of the most popular include reading, writing, working out, sitting outside, meditating, mindfully eating or drinking coffee, and planning out the day. We will talk about more individual activities in upcoming chapters.

In your morning journal, write down a list of activities you may want to try. You do not have to try every move at once, but it will help you switch things later. I recommend having an entire section of your journal dedicated to activities you would like to try out for future reference.

As you are first getting started, select one Activity that excites you and best matches your main objective. With your morning ritual, be sure to add that in and try it out. Although you may be tempted to try a variety of different activities at once, refrain from doing this.

Focusing on too many activities at the beginning will feel overwhelming, and you will not be able to master any of them. Instead, selecting one Activity to focus on ensures that there is not too much on your plate and that you can adequately decide if it is right for you.

Begin to craft your morning routine by having a solid understanding of what you want from it. Determine the main objective and secondary goals to help guide you when selecting your new morning ritual activities. Make sure to only focus on one Activity at a time, not to become overwhelmed by and give up on the new morning routine.