How to Hack Your Morning Routine
I think there’s enough writing and research out there about morning routines that we can agree on the the importance of this part of the day. For so many people who have hacked it, the way in which the morning goes, has a significant impact on the rest of their day. It’s how you’re choosing to set yourself up and hey, that matters if you care to slay on a daily basis.
So this is for anyone who is hitting snooze and feeling really rushed before they head into the world. I’ll share my routine with you first, and then I’ll give you a few pointers for how you can improve yours.
I have two types of morning routines. One is condensed because I open a yoga studio two days out of the week and need to be there for 6:30am. I’m not a 4am waker (yet?), so I choose to shorten and simplify my routine on the mornings that I need to get to work early. For the sake of this post, I’ll share with you the longer routine. This happens on the days when I start work later or work from home on The Courage Collective goodness.
Wake Up | 6:00am
I like to keep my sleep schedule relatively similar, no matter what day it is. This is tougher on the weekends, but I do pretty well with it Monday to Friday. Especially in the summer, when the sun is up, I am excited to get moving and start the day. Key Note: I never hit snooze. Ever.
Wake & Hydrate
First I head to our washroom where I do three things: dry brush my face with Province Apothecary’s daily glow brush, dry brush my body, and scrape my tongue. I dry brush to wake my lymphatic system, detox, and energize my skin. Learn more about dry brushing here. I scrape my tongue because at night, your body is at work removing toxins from the body and depositing them on your tongue. When you take the time to scrape, you help your body eliminate these toxins. Here’s more deets on that.
Next, I pop some lemon slices in a cup and pour myself a glass of room temperature water. I down this baby before I move on to ingest anything else. I always think about how dehydrated my body must be after 8 hours of no water! It makes me happy to guzzle some H2O and re-hydrate. Want to transform your digestive system? Seriously consider starting your day with lemon water. Read more about the magic here.
Meditate & Move
This happens in a different order each day, depending on how I’m feeling. If I’m a little lower energy, I’ll opt for some meditation first. I have a beautiful little meditation pillow from Indigo that I like to use for a comfortable seated position. Adam and I both gravitate to our bedroom for meditating. We get the most beautiful sunlight every morning and it’s an inviting, warm spot to sit.
I like to use Insight Timer for my meditations. It’s an easy-to-use app with lots of guided meditations themed around just about anything. You can search based on what you need or the time you have. I meditate anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes, depending on how I’m feeling. I don’t like to overcomplicate things or make the timing of meditations strict. It’s about the quality of the experience and consistency of the habit, not as much about the time you dedicate to it each day. I have 5 meditations available on Insight Timer, if you’d like to meditate with my voice in your ear! Check them out here.
For my sweat, I choose from a couple options. Either I go to the YMCA for a gym workout, or I do a stretch and yoga class at home. Depending on where I’m at in my cycle and how that’s impacting my energy, I’ll go for something more strenuous or something more chill.
Thanks to Adam, I’ve learned a lot about working out effectively at the gym. I do weight training and functional movement that contributes to my strength in the real world. It’s amazing how good it feels and how quickly I’ve healed pain in my body through this way of moving. If I’m staying home for a stretch, I like to use one of Adriene’s videos on Youtube from Yoga with Adriene.
Biohacked Coffee
For nearly a month now, I’ve been fasting every other day or so. This means that I eat in an 8 hour window and fast for 16 hours. This is called Intermittent Fasting and is getting a lot of attention lately within the wellness world. In the past, I’ve always been the type of person to feel light-headed if I worked out on an empty stomach. I wanted to try fasting to see if I could push past this, which was probably more of a mental thing, than what was actually true for my body’s needs. I wanted to get more in touch with my body’s hunger signals and understand when I am actually hungry, as opposed to just eating for routine’s sake. When I’m fasting, I don’t eat until 11am and I finish eating for the day at 7pm. I love Lee from America’s post about fasting, read it here. Make sure you do your research before jumping into fasting and listen to your body in order to make choices that are safe and healthy for you. What’s right for someone else’s body, might not be right for yours.
So all of this to say, in the morning, before I break my fast, I have a cup of bulletproof coffee. We use a french press and blend our coffee with grass-fed organic butter, MCT oil, cinnamon, and collagen peptides. This rich beverage is enough to sustain me until 11am and I really do feel much less brain-fog in the morning than I used to. When I’m not fasting and I do eat breakfast earlier in the day, I like to make a bowl of oatmeal like the one pictured at the beginning of this post. I melt coconut butter into the oats, add chopped apple, dates, and walnuts. And I top with cinnamon, hemp hearts, chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, and cacao nibs. Life’s too short for boring oatmeal.
The Other Stuff
Then last, I shower, get dressed, do my hair and make up. I like to listen to a podcast while I get ready and tend to cue up any new episodes I’m hoping to listen to that day. My lunch is made from weekend meal prep or the night before, so I grab that before I go, then I’m out the door. I love to commute by bike and find it’s another really great part of my routine that wakes me up and gets my mind and senses firing.
Some mornings, I find extra pockets of time to do other things that contribute to a successful day. One of them is picking a card from a Spirit Animal deck I have at home. It’s a sweet little deck of cards that has an animal image on one side and the significance of that particular animal on the opposite. This ritual is a nice way to get inspiration for a daily intention or to simply spark curiosity about what the day could hold.
One thing I can say is that I love the feeling of a full and early morning. When you create your morning to be what you want it to be, you begin to crave it. The more it’s made up of things that make you feel good, the easier it is to wake up for it.
Here are some tips for creating a morning that you love too.
1. Motivation is bullshit.
Mel Robbins said it first, and I’m gladly going to reiterate. We know we should do the little things every day that make us better overall. So why is it so hard to do them? Stop waiting for motivation to kick in and do it. When you hesitate and give yourself time for excuses, you are choosing a pattern that will not serve you. This is why I never hit snooze. Besides the fact that it’s bad for your sleep cycle and you end up feeling more tired after an extra 10 mins, hitting snooze is the first step to creating laziness. If hitting snooze is your first choice of the day, how can you expect that the choices that follow will be good for you? Start off strong by getting up. Just get up, put your feet on the ground, and start.
2. Wake up earlier in increments.
If you’re used to giving yourself just enough time to get ready and go in the morning, I wouldn’t recommend you jump the gun and set the alarm for an hour earlier, resulting in a shock your system. Take baby steps towards your desired wake up time. Consider how much time you’ll need to do the number of things you’d like to accomplish in the morning and then start with one of them. Let’s say you’re just going to start with a dry brushing and hydrating routine. Set your alarm for 10 minutes earlier than you’re used to and do that for a week. When you’ve mastered that, creep your wake-up back by another 5 to 10 mins and add something else. Do this at your own pace and see how building the routine slowly will have longer lasting effects.
3. Do the decision-making the night before.
Decision fatigue is a real thing. This is why guys like Steve Jobs would wear the same thing everyday. Don’t waste your energy on the small stuff. Unlike Steve, I don’t want to wear a black turtleneck on the regular, so I avoid decision fatigue by picking out my clothes the night before. Sometimes I’ll even put my gym clothes out too or lay out my bike helmet and headphones. Any little steps you can take to make the morning seamless, is beneficial. I used to be notorious for spending 30 mins on picking something to wear for the day — changing multiple times and tearing my wardrobe apart. When you do it the night before, you save those minutes and put them to better use elsewhere.
4. Stay off your phone.
Emails, texts, and social media can wait. If your phone follows you around the house all morning, you’re probably not aware of how much time you’re wasting by mindlessly checking it here and there. You deserve at least two hours of time off-screen before you begin your day. Do I even need to explain why? Please just disconnect. Your body and mind will thank you.
So that’s it! My take on morning routines and how to hack yours. I hope you’re ready to rock your day tomorrow starting with getting up confidently when your alarm sounds. You. Got. This.
Thanks for reading!
