I love my mornings. They’ve become my favorite part of the day, hands down.
According to Gretchen Rubin, some people are inherently night owls, and others are inherently early birds. If that’s true, I am absolutely the latter.
This is how I’ve structured my mornings in such a way that I feel prepared to move into my day from a calm, rooted place. I hope it inspires you to think about how you can do the same, in your own way.
Wake Up
Most weekdays, around 6:00. Counterintuitively, I actually like waking up this early more in the winter, when the sun isn’t up yet. There’s a calm solitude about waking up before the sun, like I’m in my own little universe.
An important element of my waking up is that I don’t look at my phone right away. I still have my alarm on my phone, but as soon as I turn off the alarm, I put it back down and leave it alone. No checking texts, emails, socials, nothing. There’s all sorts of science behind the health of avoiding the “morning scroll”—for me, it just feels good to start my day on my own terms, rather than reacting to whatever notifications happen to be waiting for me.
Meditate
The benefits are real. I use the Headspace app and absolutely love it.
Make Coffee
This ends up being sort of an extension of meditation. The acts of measuring out the water, grinding the beans, and brewing the coffee feel methodical and meditative, almost like an embodiment practice.
Read
I set aside around an hour each morning to read by the fireplace. It took a while for me to get comfortable with this practice; my old habit was to get moving and start being productive as early as possible in the mornings, especially if I had somewhere to be. Intentionally taking the time (and making the time) to sit down with my coffee and read for pleasure every morning sets the precedent for me to claim space for myself throughout the rest of my day, too.
Write
This one doesn’t always happen in the morning—sometimes, I get caught up in my reading and run short on time. But often, I’ll try to sit down and write, at least a little bit, in response to whatever I’ve just read or have been thinking about recently. Sometimes, those musings end up turning into blog posts; other times, they’re just personal journal entries for my eyes only. The important part is getting to work on the business of creating, before diving into whatever other work I have going on that day.
Eat Breakfast, Shower, etc.
Once I’ve set my mind up for the day, then I do the breakfast/shower/get dressed routine. I’m sure it works better for a lot of people to flip those around—get the body feeling good, and then work on the mind. For me, I find that if I start by getting physically ready for the day, my mind resists the calm required to meditate, read, write, etc. It’s like the shower and getting dressed are cues to my brain that it’s time to go, go, go, especially if I haven’t already taken the time to breathe and be still for a while.
If there were a thesis statement for my morning routine, it would be this: Start the day by generating something from inside, rather than by reacting to something from outside.
(Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash)