The morning hours are some of the most critical hours of the entire day, as they set the tone for how productive you will be in the hours that follow.
This means that a healthy morning routine can go a long way toward boosting your productivity.
If you would like to take advantage of all that the morning hours have to offer, consider implementing these ten-morning routine ideas into your morning schedule.
Wake up Early
The early morning hours are only beneficial if you are awake to see them. If you roll out of bed just in time to shower and get dressed before work, you are missing out on the most critical hours of the day.
Even worse, you are jumping into the workday without any preparation. If you want to be more productive throughout the day, you need to wake up early enough to make use of the precious morning hours.
Of course, not everyone is a morning person by nature, and waking up even earlier than you have to may very well be a tricky proposition at first.
Instead of trying to adjust your sleep schedule by several hours all at once, start by waking up just thirty minutes early than you usually do. Once you’ve had a few days to adjust to this new schedule, subtract another thirty minutes from your morning alarm.
Eventually, you will be fully adapted to a new schedule that will lend itself to a much more productive morning routine.
The Miracle Morning
by Hal Elrod
⏱ 10 minutes reading time
🎧 Audio version available
Put Away Your Phone
Your smartphone is a distraction that can quickly eat away the hours that you have available each morning. To avoid this pitfall, put your phone away and don’t check it until after breakfast.
Doing this will enable you to take full advantage of all the benefits that the early morning hours have to offer rather than falling down the rabbit hole of time-wasting distractions that your phone creates.
Setting your phone aside for a few hours every morning allows you to enjoy a block of time to yourself each day without being sucked in by outside distractions. Being constantly connected to an entire world that is always at your fingertips comes with plenty of advantages.
Still, it comes with several drawbacks if you don’t ever truly take time to yourself and enjoy the real world without being distracted by the online world.
If you can condition yourself to put your phone aside for just a short period of time each morning, though, you can take time to truly enjoy what a world without the internet has to offer.
Exercise
The early morning is by far the best time to workout. Not only are you much more refreshed in the morning than you are in the afternoon following a long day at work, but exercising in the morning enables you to get your blood flowing and your energy buzzing before you start the workday.
In this way, exercising in the early morning as opposed to putting it off until later offers dual benefits.
For one, people who set aside time to exercise in the morning are more likely to reach their exercise goals than those who put it off until later in the afternoon when they are already worn out from the day’s earlier tasks.
Simultaneously, exercising first thing in the morning can also provide you with a jolt of energy that will shake out any cobwebs from the night’s sleep and leave you ready to take on the day.
Stretch
Stretching and exercise go hand in hand, and before you begin your exercise routine, it’s a good idea to start with a stretching routine.
For one, stretching before you exercise can dramatically reduce the likelihood of incurring an injury such as a pulled muscle during your exercise routine. But the benefits of stretching in the morning don’t stop there.
In addition to helping you avoid workout-related injuries, studies have shown that stretching regularly can go a long way toward keeping your joints loose and limber as you age and may even be able to help prevent the onset of conditions such as arthritis.
If you don’t know how to get started stretching, there are plenty of great resources online that outline beneficial stretching routines.
Taking up yoga is another great way to get your stretches in, though simply adopting a short but effective stretching routine and completing it every morning will work just as well if yoga isn’t for you.
Take a Cold Shower
Research has shown that taking cold showers can provide you with a rush of adrenaline that will wake you up and help you be more productive.
It certainly won’t be very comfortable at first, but if you can handle taking a cold shower in the morning, the benefits are noteworthy.
The best way to get started taking cold showers is, to begin with, a normal warm shower, then switch the water from cold to cold for as long as you can stand it. If you do this regularly, you should eventually get to the point where you can endure the cold water for longer and longer periods.
In addition to providing you with a rush of adrenaline that will help you start your day on a high-energy note, there are several other benefits to taking a cold shower in the morning as well.
For one, cold water is incredibly healthy for your hair and skin. Research has shown that taking cold showers in the morning can also improve your circulation, reduce muscle soreness, and potentially even promote weight loss.
Avoid Hitting the Snooze Button
Hitting the snooze button on their alarm multiple times before they wake is a morning ritual for many people. However, this habit causes much more harm than good.
For one, the process of waking up and falling back asleep multiple times in the morning makes it difficult for your body to fall into a routine sleep pattern and is a big reason why so many people wake up in the morning, still feeling groggy.
If you wake up at the right time in your sleep cycle, you will feel much more alert and refreshed.
Because of this, eight hours of sleep can sometimes feel much more refreshing in the morning than eight and half hours of sleep if you are forcing that extra half hour by disrupting your sleep cycle and mashing the snooze button repeatedly.
Eat a Healthy Breakfast
There are plenty of good reasons why breakfast is considered the most important meal of the day.
If you want to be productive and energetic, you need to give your body the right fuel to start the day by eating a healthy breakfast each morning.
Thankfully, healthy doesn’t mean that you have to put a ton of time into preparing your breakfast each morning. Typical breakfast foods that tend to require a lot of preparation, such as pancakes, hash browns, and bacon, aren’t all that healthy.
Instead, stick to genuinely healthy breakfast items such as oatmeal, fruit, and whole-grain cereal to make the most of this all-important meal.
Do the Most Difficult Thing on Your to-do List
If you have a task to complete that you are dreading, finishing it when you first wake up in the morning is your best bet. When you complete the most challenging thing on your to-do list first thing in the morning, everything else that you need to get done that day will pale in comparison.
In other words, starting your day out with your most challenging task enables you to rest assured that the worst is behind you rather than going about the day dreading what’s to come.
Inspirational author and motivational speaker Brian Tracy refer to this act of tackling the most challenging thing on your to-do list first thing in the morning as “eating the frog.”
This expression comes from an old Mark Twain saying that says, “If the first thing you do in the morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the rest of the day knowing the worst is behind you.”
While this may be a difficult mindset to adopt, if you are prone to procrastination and putting off your most dreaded tasks for as long as possible, the benefits of starting each day by “eating the frog” are too considerable to ignore.
Meditate
When it comes to boosting productivity, the benefits of meditation cannot be understated. Meditation enables you to clear your mind of the clutter that holds you back and adopt a frame of mind each morning that will lend itself to a successful, productive day.
Thankfully, there are several tools and resources that make enjoying the benefits of meditation easier than ever before.
Whether you research good meditation practices online or download a meditation app on your phone to help guide you through the process, these tools and resources make learning how to get the most of meditation a quick and simple task.
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