Morning routines to improve your well-being
By: Santiago Burga
Tags: Personal Growth, Morning Routines

- You can choose how to feel throughout the day, all you need is a plan. -

We’ve all been guilty of hating mornings at some point in our lives, be it at school or work. And rightly so, waking up and having to make different decisions every day is exhausting. The low energy levels that most people experience in the morning work against the effort that goes into deciding what to do as soon as you wake up. Without a plan, mornings become a race against time to do whatever you want before starting the workday.

If we let our mornings feel unproductive, rushed, and stressful, we’re going to stick with those feelings for the rest of the day. Yes, we can decide how we feel every day, we decide by choosing what we do as soon as we wake up. That is why it is so important to have a routine in the morning that makes us feel how we want to feel for the rest of the day.

With a clear objective of what feeling we want to have all day, we can create a routine that helps us achieve that in the morning. Through our actions, we can choose to feel happy, calm, and positive or frustrated, rushed and negative.

There’s no one-size-fits-all morning routine, everyone has to create their own and iterate until they find the one that works best for them. However, there are activities that every routine should have to start off the day on the right foot. All routines should have space to include activities that help you improve your physical and mental well-being. The reason why you need to have space for these activities is that physical activity gives you energy and whatever you do to take care of your mental health is going to put you in the right mindset for the rest of the day. So this all comes down to finding the activities that give you the most energy and put you in an optimistic mindset.

It’s important to create a routine that you can repeat every day of the week and that makes sense to your lifestyle. You have probably found thousands of routines that promise to be the ideal ones. However, a routine is something very personal because it has to be one that takes you closer to the life you want to live and helps you become the person you want to be. Someone who is aspiring to be a Buddhist monk is not going to have the same routine as someone who wants to climb the corporate ladder. Each has to find what makes sense for him/her.

If you don’t know how to start and feel overwhelmed by the number of options there are, don’t worry, at first, you’re going to be wrong anyway. The important thing is to choose the activities that interest you and iterate until you find a combination of these activities that make you feel like you can deal with whatever the day brings you.

If you do not know how to start, I think that the bare minimum you can do is set aside 1 hour before your workday starts to do sports + meditation, journaling, or any other mindfulness activity that you might like. The important thing is to know that you have the flexibility to change it whenever you want, the worst thing you can do is see this routine as a restriction or a constraint. Personally, in the last year, I have gone through at least 4–5 variations of my routine and I am sure that I will continue to iterate on it.

Dare to try, start with something easy and short and go from there. Think that you have the choice to feel how you want at the start of each day, it is much better to choose the satisfaction of starting your day knowing that you have already worked on yourself. Think about how each activity you do in the morning, no matter how short, is going to take you closer to the person you want to be.

I could write about Morning Routines all day because of how much I believe in them. However, I prefer to leave you with examples of routines and activities that you can try for yourself until you find the one that best suits your lifestyle right now. Feel free to mix up these activities and change their durations as you will. Don’t expect to create the perfect routine on your first try, but please have faith in the lifestyle where you prioritize yourself before everyone else.

Routine #1

Duration: 45 min (+- 10–15 min)

Workout — 30 minutes

Stretch — 10 minutes

Meditation — 5 minutes

Routine #2

Duration: 1h and 10 min (+- 10–15 min)

Workout — 45 minutes

Stretch — 10 minutes

Meditation — 15 minute

Routine #3

Duration: 1h and 40 min (+- 10–15 min)

Workout — 45 minutes

Stretch — 15 minutes

Meditation — 15 minutes

Morning Pages — 25 minutes

Routine #4

Duration: 2h and 20 min (+- 10–15 min)