By Carla Oates
Taking part in our #30DaysToGlow Challenge? Read on to discover our top tips on how to cultivate—and successfully stick to—a morning routine…
We’ve all read the books, seen the social media posts, downloaded the apps and listened to the podcasts that advocate for the importance of the perfect morning routine—we’re told it’s backed by science, after all.
But what if you’re simply not a morning person? Or hate the idea of noshing on a healthy breakfast? Well, the good news is cultivating new habits and setting up a successful (and satisfying!) morning routine can be far more simple than you might think. It’s all about discovering what works for you—as well as doing more of what you enjoy. After all, as with exercise, work or hobbies, if we don’t enjoy them—we simply won’t stick with them.
If you’ve been looking to implement a little structure to your life, we promise that cultivating a morning routine will help set the tone for your day—and result in a far more productive morning across the board. Here are our top tips on how to create healthy habits and successfully stick to a morning routine…
Step One: Start Your Morning Routine The Night Before
You’ve likely heard this tip before, but it’s because it actually works. First of all, if you’re more of a night owl than a morning person, using that to your advantage by getting yourself in order the night before, makes perfect sense. It doesn’t need to be a slog, either. Start by taking care of a few essential things—and let’s be clear, this will look different for everyone—but it could be choosing your outfit for the next day (which is just as helpful even if you’re still working from home post-COVID!), prepping your lunch, or writing your to-do list. This single step will help to ensure you have enough time in the morning to get ready for the rest of the day without rushing around like a headless chook.
Step Two: Wake Up At The Right Time, For You
It may be true that the ‘early bird gets the worm’ but if you’re hitting the snooze button on your alarm clock seventeen times before you roll out of bed, that’s achieving nothing more than making you feel like you’ve started your day on the back foot. Not only that, but if you add up all that snooze-time, you’re wasting days—if not weeks—each year that you could either be sleeping, or doing something productive. If you know that waking up early makes you feel rubbish, don’t do it! Our circadian rhythms all differ so a good night's sleep might be far more beneficial to your health than dragging yourself out of bed at dawn. Put strategies in place to support your ideal wake time so that you’re not rushing around in the morning (see step one!). Then, be consistent. Get into the habit of getting up as soon as your alarm goes off, rather than falling into the temptation of snuggling back under your doona.
Step Three: Do Something You Enjoy
Often morning routines are filled with things we think we ‘should’ be doing—aka that 5:30am F45 class that we continue to hate even though we’ve been going for months. Instead, take a moment to consider what your ideal morning would actually look like if you had the opportunity to do anything that you want? For some, it might be that 5:30am gym class, but for others, it could be reading a few pages of your book while sipping your morning coffee, drinking a glass of water on the balcony, or it might be sitting down at your desk to bust out a few emails so that you can feel like you’re starting your work day on the front foot. The point is, it doesn’t really matter what it is you do, but instead of dragging your feet through your morning, if you have something you look forward to doing as part of your routine, you’re more likely to kickstart your day on a positive note—improving not only your own mental health and wellbeing, but making you a nicer person to be around, too. Think of it as an act of self-care.
Step Four: Practise Mindfulness
And no, this doesn’t mean you need to rise before dawn to sit on a cushion and meditate for 20 minutes. But it can, if you want it to! More importantly, the morning is a great time to practise the art of mindfulness. Proven to help reduce and improve our body’s stress response—mindfulness is essentially the practice of maintaining awareness of the present moment including all our thoughts, feelings and the external environment. Research has also shown that mindfulness can help reduce depression, improve sleep quality and even increase work productivity. As mentioned above, mindfulness doesn’t always have to mean meditation, either, you could practise mindful exercise, mindful journaling or even just practise being more mindful as you sip your cup of coffee—savouring its warmth and comforting flavour.
Step Five: Be Flexible
Life isn’t linear—if we’ve learnt anything from the global pandemic, it’s that we can’t always be in control of our external circumstances. Which is why it’s important to practise and maintain flexibility. While consistency is important for creating habits and cultivating a morning routine in the first instance, if things don’t go to plan—say your toddler is sick and has to stay home from daycare or your boss has scheduled a super early Zoom call which wipes out any chance of that morning beach walk—the key is not to scrap your morning ritual altogether, but instead, hang onto the bits and pieces that work that day and then let everything else go. After all, tomorrow is a new opportunity to get back on track.
