Lessons From My New Morning Routine

The first of May I started experimenting with a new morning routine for reasons outlined here.

It’s been a very positive, interesting experience and I’a like to chronicle some stuff I’ve learnt here.

My Morning Routine Before

As much as my mornings weren’t structured, humans are creatures of habit and I was in fact doing pretty much the same thing every morning upon waking up.

Waking up naturally (no alarm), at whatever odd hour of the morning, I’d reach for my phone and turn it off of airplane mode. The notifications would come streaming in.

E-mails. Whatsapp messages. Instagram comments. Facebook likes. Facebook comments. Facebook messages. Even Facebook memory notifications (this is what you did so and so years ago on this day).

With one eye open I’d eye all of those notifications, sometimes responding. My friends and family are in various timezones around the world, so sometimes entire conversations would start before I was up for even 5 minutes.

At some point I’d be curious to check out what’s happening in Israeli news. I’d open up the two websites I go through the most – Ynet and Haaretz and read some headlines and stories. By this point I was usually up for 30 minutes and still in bed.

I’d get out of bed when I really had to pee. Probably put my contacts on at some point and get on with whatever I had to do during the day.

That’s how things used to be, and I wanted to change it.

New Morning Routine Specifics

My current morning routine was created in order to get out of bed in a deliberate, structural way and get over “sleep inertia” – the perceived difficulty of starting to do things as one wakes up.

The idea was that if I had a ritual I repeated, it would eventually become easy and take no willpower to do.

I can break my morning routine into 3 parts – water and bathroom, writing and stretching. I’ll cover each of them in their own section.

Water and Bathroom routine

Drinking water

First thing I do when I wake up is head to drink a lot of water. (30 seconds).

Supposedly, we wake up pretty dehydrated. Drinking a lot of water (about half a litre) helps flush the body out from the inside first thing in the morning.

Drinking water upon waking up is a very easy part of the routine to follow. I just leave a cup in the bathroom, which is the first place I head after waking up. I fill it up and gulp down the water in less than 30 seconds.

Honestly, I haven’t experienced any specific benefit. I don’t even wake up thirsty most days.

However, it’s very quick and easy to do, and is supposedly very good for me, so I’ll continue doing it.

Cold shower and other bathroom stuff

This part of the routine includes going to the bathroom, a cold shower, brushing my teeth and putting my contacts in.

I love cold showers so there’s no real resistance there. The temperature of the water is a positive shock to the system and really wakes me up.

The day really begins when the cold water hits my body, and I can feel my brain already thinking of the next part of the routine – the writing (see following section).

Going from sleep inertia to taking a cold shower isn’t always easy. I’ll admit it – sometimes I’d look at the tap and count to 3 before doing it.

As for the rest of the bathroom routine – brushing my teeth and putting on my contacts – it feels pretty effective doing everything in the first 10 minutes of waking up. Definitely keeping this entire routine going.

Writing

750 words

The next element of my morning routine is writing.

I start off by writing 750 words on 750words.com

The idea is just to write 750 words about anything, train of thought. The website helps concentrate on that with its minimalistic interface and little word counter.

 

750words

Writing the 750 words is usually the part that takes the longest in my morning routine. When I’m quick and just typing away non-stop it would take about 10 minutes. On other days when I’m drowsier it can take up to 20 minutes.
But I feel like writing those 750 words is worth it. In fact, I think it’s awesome.

Usually, I end up writing a journal of the day before. It helps to write it at the following day to get some perspective of it.

When life gets hectic (which it often does) it’s nice to take a moment and reflect back on it. Writing a journal helps me remember special cool moments, notice positive and negative recurring patterns and draw conclusions.

To me, it basically feels like living every day twice.

The other great element of writing 750 words is emotional relief.

On some days, when I wake up with thoughts running through my head or strong emotions coursing through me, I just start writing about it and see where it takes me.

Instead of letting my issues languish, I express them.

Getting subconscious processes into the conscious is important and allows me to self reflect and honestly about my station in life. It can be pretty confronting to see my own thoughts written; my inner negative voice can be harsh. But it’s worth it.

Specifically, this freewriting helped me make good decisions without emotionally mulling over them subconsciously excessively.

I realized through writing that I didn’t really want to keep seeing a girl I started dating. I was on the fence about her, but once I saw all my thoughts and emotions written it became obvious that I wasn’t inspired to see her again.

Writing also brought to light some issues about my business partnership. I let my partner know about my feelings, and we resolved something about the business that was in the back of my mind for months.

5 minute journal

On top of writing 750 words, I also fill in The 5-minute journal, a cute physical book my friend Dave Kadavy recommended.

Unlike 750 words, the journal asks you a few questions daily, which prime you to think about the positives in life, like “what are you grateful for?” and “what would make today great?”

The first question helped me start the day on the right foot, and the second primed me to look forward to the day.

It takes very little time to complete and is cute and fun, so I keep doing it. I know people swear by it, but I can’t point out to any specific changes it caused in me.

Stretches

Lastly, I do 5 minutes of hamstring stretches.

Why hamstrings? Well, tight hamstrings manifest as lower back pain and stiffness. I certainly had that – I couldn’t touch my toes on a regular day before starting my morning routine, and would occasionally get lower back pain.

I’m also working towards performing an L-sit, and that requires the ability to bend at 90 degrees at the hip.

I started by doing 3 Sun salutations A, followed by straight leg bend stretches (kind of like this) for 15 breaths on each leg. Recently, as I’ve gotten more flexible, I’ve added Standing separate leg stretching pose for another 15 breaths.

The results of this have just been epic. Regular stretching is just something I always forgot to allocate the time to, but after 45 days of hamstring stretches, I can touch my toes, or the floor at any random point of the day (I just checked!).

I can achieve about a 90-degree hip-to-straight-leg-bend now (awesome). I haven’t had annoying lower back pain since starting, which would happen occasionally.

More than anything, daily stretches have shown me the power of little actions over time.

Sticking To My Routine

In the first days of May getting myself to do the ritual from start to finish was a drag. I had to force myself into it. But I was expecting that, and after a few short days of persistence, completing the routine didn’t require much willpower.

It wasn’t all easy either, as I wasn’t in my natural environment the entire time. In the second week of May I was travelling for 10 days.

But doing the routine was a priority so I did what I had to in order to adjust. I woke up earlier on days with flights and tours to make sure I finish the routine in time. I found the room in my hotel rooms to do my stretches.

I kept the morning routine for the entire 31 days of May… And have been continuing it into June.

There were lots of days when I didn’t feel like doing it initially – waking up hungover after a night on the town. But after enough repetitions it was just obvious that this is the way my day starts now. It became effortless.

Some days, I woke up in the middle of night or early in the morning – without getting enough hours of sleep. As this ritual is supposed to launch me into my day, I didn’t start it. Instead, I usually took a warm shower, brushed my teeth again and read a book until I fell asleep.

Before starting this morning routine challenge, I was worried about forgetting some important things I’d have on my mind as I woke up – an e-mail I had to answer or a task I had to do. But I decided that %99 of things can wait until after I finish my routine – and nothing bad happened.

The Bad Things

I can’t point to many negatives of doing a morning routine per se.

The hardest part of my routine is to write 750 words daily. It can take a while longer because of me being morning drowsy. I still find it is massively worth it for me.

Another thing isn’t actually a negative. I’ve been pretty relaxed in terms of work for the last year or so, having my business make passive income and being pretty financially comfortable. But as I finish my morning routine every morning, I feel like being shot out of a cannon. I want to get busy with something – but there is no project I’m taking at the moment. I’ve already mitigated this and will be starting work on an exciting business opportunity soon. In that way, I believe my morning routine promotes productivity and getting stuff done as soon as I wake up – or in other words me becoming a morning person. Awesome.

Lastly, I feel like my sleep quality changes wildly between days. To really start working on getting well rested, I’m going to start working on a solid night routine.

But that’s for another post 🙂

Conclusions

I started this morning routine challenge to start working towards life long small habits, which create great results.

I always shied away from a routine, feeling that having to do something every day meant I was less free to make choices.

But I found that I actually enjoy the idea of routines a lot more than I thought. I enjoy doing good things for myself without having to exert willpower for it.

I found that following a solid, easy to follow, repeatable exercise routine made me feel similarly happy.

So far, the morning routine challenge has been a great success for me and I’m going to keep doing exactly the same things every day as I wake up – and perhaps even adding other little elements.

Hope this helped, would love to hear your comments!
Almog

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Miroslav - June 28, 2016

Love your work brother, was great reading what other people do and what has lead to your success. My morning routine at the moment is about 2 hours or so, (haha its the only structured part of my day) I feel I will give the writing a shot for the next 10 days or so and see how that influences my mood.

Thanks for the tips! 🙂

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