Use This Morning Routine For Stress-Free Living
All I have is good days.
As I spring out of bed ready to tackle the day and all of the challenges in front of me, I think back to when it wasn’t like this - when the mortal coils of the daily grind seemed to close a little bit tighter around me day after day.
With the right morning practices in place you can inoculate yourself against a lot of the mundanity of daily life and start to find more joy in living mindfully and paying attention to the little things that matter.
Fortunately, I am a morning person and so I do understand that the feeling of a great morning is going to be different for some people. If you gravitate towards the night, then just being able to roll out of bed before 9 may be a victory for you if you’ve owned the previous night and gotten the most out of that quiet time.
Regardless of your disposition towards mornings or nights, we do live in a society that tends to require you to prepare yourself well for the mornings before distractions and stress start to creep in from every direction. If you feel yourself stressing out almost as if the cortisol were oozing out of your adrenals by just thinking about the daily grind, try taking action towards these following tips for starting your morning with a routine that can combat your stress all day.
First Thing’s First:
Keep your phone off. If you really want to start the day off right and without your cortisol levels spiking from a cascade of notifications, keep your phone powered off or at least on airplane mode as you go about starting your day.
Practice Gratitude
One of the simplest ways that you can improve your morning routine is by practicing gratitude. If you are also going to start journaling your thoughts (see below) it can benefit your to write down the things you are grateful for, or you may just want to think about and meditate on them. I find it more powerful to write the things I am grateful for down, an important practice that I will talk about more in the next tip on affirmations.
Tony Robbins talks about including a morning gratitude practice as part of his 10-minute routine to prime his body and mind for a great day. Robbins’ gratitude practice includes thinking about 3 things he is grateful for and spending about a minute on each one. When coming up with 3 things to be grateful for, he recommends that you include one that is a small, simple thing in the present moment to be grateful for.
This simple object of your gratitude could be the cool glass of water you’re drinking or the sun creeping over the horizon.
Whatever it may be, feel grateful for something in the present moment - this ties into living mindfully.
If you want to read more about Tony Robbins’ morning practice read this: https://www.businessinsider.com/tony-robbins-morning-priming-exercise-2017-7
Start Your Day with Intention - Affirmation
In addition to being grateful for 3 things and taking a moment to truly feel that gratitude, write down your intention either for this day in particular or for this overarching chapter of your life.
If you’re seeking a new job, write down that you will ace the interview:
“I will have a great interview today” or “I am the type of person who shows confidence at interviews."
If you’re trying to lose weight, you may write that your goal will be to lose 10 pounds, but also be specific in what steps you are taking on a daily basis to get there:
“I am the type of person who goes to the gym daily” or “I will not eat carbs before dinner.”
These “I am” or “I will” type of statements are more powerful than simply stating what you want because they tap into your subconscious and start the process of you actually identifying with the statement.
In Grounded in Gratitude, Josh Bryant talks about how writing down these intentions or affirmations is also very important.
By actually writing it down, the information is able to be shared by both the left brain and the right brain and so you can more powerfully work on making your goal a reality by synergistically combining the power of your whole brain.
The other benefit of writing your intention down is that by allowing your subconscious to start identifying with the statement, you will be primed to pick out more opportunities to act upon that goal in your everyday life.
Sound too good to be true?
Try it out and fully embody that intention and let me know how it goes.
Journal
Create a short, daily journaling practice to harness these affirmations and things you are grateful for. Tim Ferriss often talks about using a morning journalling routine to get the thoughts bouncing around in his monkey mind trapped on paper so that he can focus on what’s most important for that day.
I like to structure my daily journalling practice around the "Five Minute Journal" concept and then if there are thoughts in my head I need to structure better on paper I’ll write those down after I’ve completed the 3 steps.
The morning component of the 5-minute journal that I’ve adapted looks like this:
1. List three things you are grateful for:
2. List three things you must accomplish today (this is your Power List)
3. State your intention or affirmation for the day, or for this chapter of your life.
Move
Even if it’s just 3-5 minutes, move around and get your blood pumping as soon after you wake as you can. Do a brief yoga and stretching routine or chase your dog around the yard, as Aubrey Marcus suggests in Own The Day, Own Your Life. Moving, combined with the next tip, is more powerful than a shot of espresso to get you kicked into high gear and ready to start the day on a positive.
Cold
I saved this tip for last because it requires the most discipline to implement but is also the one that can have the most powerful effect.
"The Iceman” Wim Hof has popularized cold exposure on his quest to educate people on how powerful the cold and just breathing better can impact your quality of life and your health. Brief cold exposure in the morning fires up your nervous system and releases norepinephrine which will boost your mood and leave you feeling invigorated. Chronic stress exposure can wear down your immune system and leave you constantly battling illness. Research has now validated that the jolt to your body from brief cold exposure has a powerful effect on combatting chronic stress and will reduce your susceptibility to getting sick.
Tony Robbins also includes a cold plunge into his morning practice and has plunge pools installed at his homes to be able to do this daily.
That quick burst of firing your nervous system up in the morning leaves you feeling great and is one of the reasons that we built the contrast therapy room at Flow Spa. In this room, we have a hot tub along with a cold tub set to 5ºC. We will definitely be running the morning Wim Hof club for all of the morning warriors wanting to kickstart their hearts with a cold plunge.
There are a lot of different things that you can start to implement for having a better day and eliminating stress from your life. If you’re already stressed out it may seem like too many things to juggle at once, so instead of trying to add in everything at once, just pick the one idea that’s easiest for you to implement right away and start with that. Overtime as you start to feel the beneficial effect of the routine you can add in more steps to the harness the full power of a morning routine.