Stop it; It isn't a healthy morning routine
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We're going to talk about your morning routine, there's a ton of stuff out there about morning routines; there's tons of books, there's tons of blogs, there's tons of podcast episodes but it seems that the majority of those are focused on what you should be adding to your morning routine, I want to take a different tact today and focus on what you should stop doing in your morning routine. So today I'm going to break down seven things you should stop doing in the morning if you're doing them right now.
Checking social media right when you wake up
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You need to stop doing this, for two important reasons; first and foremost, if you make check in social media the first action of your day, then the first action of your day is giving into a craving for novelty and that counteracts all the work you've been doing to build your focus muscle, by contrast, if you wait a little bit before you check those feeds, maybe do some other things like having breakfast, working out, or reading a book for a bit. You're telling you brain that, "yes you have to wait before you check all those novelty inducing social media feeds" and that's going to make you much more able to focus on your work later on in the day.
Reason number 2 why you should stop checking social media in the morning is because if you're anything like me, you tend to just grab the phone and start checking your feeds in bed and you intend to just check your feed for only five minutes but you end up looking at them for over thirty minutes to one hour sometimes and from personal experience I can tell you there's no healthy position to be looking at your phone in bed, you're either looking at it with your arm above your head or you're propped up on one elbow either way you're putting your body in a bad posture position and if you do this enough, you're going to end up causing nerve damage. Use your bed as a place for sleeping, check your social media when you're out of bed and do it a little bit after you wake up.
Hitting the snooze button on your alarm
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Aside from the fact that hitting the snooze button is basically denying yourself good quality sleep that you could have had because you're interrupting your sleep cycle and then attempting to get into a new one which is going to be inevitably interrupted early again. Hitting the snooze button is also a terrible idea because doing it is admitting defeat as your very first action of the day. If you hit the snooze button on your alarm, it means that you had certain intention to wake up at a specific time the night before and then you failed. So do yourself a favour and get out of bed the moment your alarm goes off. Now, this might sound a little bit weird but I've actually it pretty helpful to picture myself setting this intention and telling it to a specific person and the person who always comes to mind for me is Fela Durotoye, a renowned motivational speaker, life coach and consultant and to be honest, he's somebody that I would definitely not like to disappoint in real life.
Complaining
Seriously, a lot of people love to wake up in the morning and complain; they complain about how early it is, they complain about having to go to work, they complain about how tired they feel, and the problem with complaining is that the words that you choose to use, the way that you choose to express yourself, actually has a tangible effect on your state of mind and your level of motivation. So, instead of waking up in the morning and complaining, why not thing about what you have to be grateful for or you could be positive about, if you dwell on these things you're going g to be an overall happier person.
Cleaning up your living space or your work area
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Now this is definitely not a bad thing to do but I'm putting it on this list because I think it is much better to do it the night before. You have to operate on what I call the clear to neutral, this basically means setting your work area or you living area back to its neutral state after you're done using it and the reason that you want to do this, is that the next time you come to use it, which in the case of your living space would be the next day when you wake up, you want it to be in a state that is already usable. When your living space or work space is ready to be used immediately when you start the day, you don't have to waste any of your will power or your time getting it ready, it's just ready to go. So, when you're building your before bed routine, build in a little bit of time for cleaning up your space and clearing it back to neutral, your future self is going to be very appreciative.
Planning your day
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Planning your day in the morning can be very useful for some people, some people like to have that as part of their early morning routine but for other people it can actually be a lot better to plan their day the night before. Personally, I find that when I wake up to a concrete plan that I set up the night before, I'm much more clear on the direction I'm going to go in immediately. It's kinda similar to how Barack Obama used to make the decision on what outfit he was going to wear during the day because he didn't want to deal with that decision in the morning, he already had a ton of other decisions and that was just going to make him less focused.
Starting your day with negative news
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If you're the kind of person who likes to check reddit or the news app or the news app on your phone, this is something that you need to be weary about. As somebody who likes to browse reddit, I'm well aware that many of the headlines on reddit.com are filled with tons of negative news and yes you might want to keep up to date on world events but if you're waking up every single morning bombarding yourself with a ton of negative stories, that's going to put you in a negative state of mind and it's going to send down a rabbit hole and end up wasting a ton of your time. So, if you're going to wake up and check news, check your feeds, that's something you like to do, tailor those feeds to be full of positive or interesting information not negative news or if you want something even more effective just read a book in the morning, make that part of your morning routine, and then check your feeds later on during the day. Again, if you wake up in the morning, and you start your day with some long form content, that'll build that focus muscle.
Waking up at inconsistent times
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If you don't currently have a consistent time of waking up, if you're getting up really late in the weekends and early during the weekdays or you have totally different wake-up times during the week, you're negatively impacting the quality of your sleep. So as best as you can, try to establish a consistent wake up time for yourself. I know a bunch of you are going to ask, can I still sleep in on the weekends? Physiologically speaking, you'd be best off by having a consistent wake-up time that includes the weekends. Your body doesn't have like a special magical weekend mode, it doesn't switch over all of its physiological processes because you're not in school or work, but it doesn't mean that you're going to ruin your life by sleeping in, in the weekends. To be quite honest, I actually sleep in about an hour late on Saturdays and Sundays, than when I get up during the week. From a physiological perspective a consistent wake up time is better than an inconsistent one.