The choice is always yours, and whatever you choose to start your day with will likely shape the day at least until lunch. So your morning routines are far more important than you think, and with just a few small changes, you will notice a huge difference in both your energy and your momentum.
Here are 4 Golden Rules of Life you really need to stop doing, if you want a good start to the day
- Snooze
As we have written before, it is unequivocally proven that all people get tired of snoozing. When you snooze, you start a new sleep cycle (read more about sleep cycles here) and the whole awakening process is destroyed.
If you want to get off to a good start to the day, my first and most important advice is to simply grow up and quit snooza. When the bell rings, you get up, it’s just that.
- Check out Social Media
It is very tempting to pick up the phone and check through Facebook or Instagram when you wake up. It feels like a soft start and you get a little “reward” in the middle of all the awfulness that is waking up and going up.
But you just do yourself a disservice when you start the day by checking social media, or the news for that matter. For every thing you do that is not to move on to the goal (to wake up, get in order and go out the door) you just push up the inevitable and subconsciously create a mental picture that what you should do is what is pain.
If you instead kick start the day as it is intended, with breakfast, exercise, reflection and a sensible plan, then your morning will go like a rail and something as basic as getting out of bed will no longer feel like a punishment.
- Stress yourself on how to get to work
You can see the morning commute in two ways. Either you hate it and feel stressed about “wasting time” in the car, bus, subway, tram or how to get to work. Or you can look at it all as an opportunity for free time when you can focus on things that might otherwise be difficult to make time for. The morning commute is a great opportunity to listen to an audio book, catch up on the series you’re trying to follow, plan the week’s schedule or simply play on the phone to release some endorphins and get in a better mood.
We all need to get to work in some way, and most people have about 30-60 minutes to look forward to every morning and every afternoon. Here, as mentioned, you have two options:
A: Reduce the time you commute by moving or changing jobs.
B: Start estimating these two oases of leisure and make some sense of them.
- Ignore your goals
I can buy that this sounds a bit strange, but the truth is that the absolute majority of us either have no goals in life, or we have goals but ignore them. Therefore, this is a very important point in your morning routine.
Having goals is good, or yes, it is simply absolutely critical if you want to develop and reach new levels of life, whether it be work, relationships, training or a hobby. Without goals you have nothing to aim for, and without anything to aim for, you will just wander around in the dark and hope for the best.
We have written about it several times before, but it is tolerated to be repeated. One of the clearest common denominators of very successful people is that they have clear goals with everything they do. Thanks to the goals, they can always ask themselves the question: “If I do this, does it bring me closer to my goal?”. If the answer is no then they know they are wrong out there and can easily shift their focus to what actually takes them closer to their goals.
