The quality of your days depends largely on the quality of your mornings. If you wake up too early, you’ll be too tired to do anything. If you wake up too late, you won’t have enough time for everything.
A good morning ritual helps make mornings less stressful.
- Set your alarm early, if you can. That means waking up earlier, of course, but also that you’ll go to bed earlier. When you go to bed early, you can wake up early. Set your alarm, if you want, but set it for fifteen minutes earlier than necessary. Waking up at seven in the morning, for example, is easy. Waking up at six-thirty is easy. Waking up at five-thirty, not so much. So set your alarm for 5:45.
- When you get up, don’t immediately start checking your email.
- If you have to do any thinking in the morning, do it in the shower. The hot water helps wash out the cobwebs from your brain.
- Instead of checking email, spend a few minutes reading something fun. A short story or a poem or an essay. Something that makes you laugh. If you’ve skipped breakfast, eat something light.
- Eat something with protein, but avoid fatty foods.
- Exercise. This doesn’t mean you have to go to the gym. The easiest way to exercise is to walk. If you live in a city, that’s easy; walk for half an hour, and you’ve exercised. Walk anywhere.
- Prepare your clothes the night before. If you get into the habit of preparing the night before, you will not only feel less stressed in the morning, but your day will be more productive as well.
Because your brain is wired to associate your evening with relaxation, it perceives any task that requires extra effort to begin the day after a restful evening as less urgent.
