How I've put myself first, 2,878?times

Or, the importance of establishing a morning?routine

Are your mornings like something out of a nightmare? Do you often feel like you’re on the back foot, and running at a hundred miles an hour before you’ve even got the sleep out of your eyes? Would you like to have a chance to take a breath, to think and plan out your day so you can steer things in the direction you want them to go, rather than feeling like you’re swept away every day by everyone else’s priorities and demands? Then read on…

If you’ve ever met me in real life, or if you’ve already read my book The Bad Habit Kicker, then there’s a good chance you know about my morning routine, and how completely transformative it’s been for me.

Before I put a consistent morning routine in place in my own life, I desperately wanted to change things, to find the courage to be creative on a regular basis, but I was stuck, held back by my fear and anxieties every time I attempted to step out of my comfort zone. I needed something to help me to get over that initial hurdle, to allow me to take that first step, and although I didn’t expect it to at the time, a morning routine turned out to be exactly the thing I needed to help me do that.

I’ve always been a reader, and since I was in my early twenties, I’ve been someone who regularly reads self-help books. One self-help book leads on to another, one author’s bibliography or recommendations then leads on to discovering new podcasts or YouTube channels and newsletters, and while a lot of what I’ve read has been extremely interesting and thought-provoking, not all of it has been as truly life-changing as reading (and starting to actually do) The Miracle Morning.

Somehow, in April 2016, a month or so after my mum passed away, I found out about this book, which was written by an American author called Hal Elrod. He’s an extraordinary man, who’s looked death in the face at least twice, almost meeting his end after a horrific car crash in his 20s and then being diagnosed with an extremely rare and aggressive kind of leukemia in 2017, which he also beat. I don’t remember now how I found out about the book, but today?—?going on for 3,000 days later?—?I’m extremely glad I did.

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of Hal’s morning routine as well as looking at a couple of other ideas, let’s look at why it makes such a difference to my day, and to the lives of many other people.

To start with, establishing a morning routine?—?however that looks for you and no matter what you choose to do?—?starting your day off the way you want to, rather than allowing the world to sweep you along, sets the tone for the rest of your day.

Let’s look at how people tend to start their days off, so we can contrast.

If you’re only responsible for getting yourself up and out in the morning, then your morning might look like this:

You went to bed later than you’d intended the night before, and so when your alarm goes off to let you know that it’s time to get ready to face your day, you press snooze several times. By the time you finally drag yourself out of bed, you’re running later than you’d intended, obviously, because you didn’t get up when you decided you needed to when you set your alarm the night before. Now you’re racing against the clock to try to get up, get yourself washed and dressed and to hopefully have time to eat something before you have to head out of the door to get to work on time.

There’s a good chance that you’ve had to cut some corners. Maybe you’ve not had time to eat anything, and you’re going to have to grab something on your way to your office. Perhaps you really needed to wash your hair, or couldn’t find the time to iron the outfit you really wanted to wear. But you’ve compromised and you’ve done it.

You may well make it to work on time, but it’s unlikely that you’ll feel centred and ready to face the day and you’re probably going to feel like you’re on the back foot and trying to play catch up, at least for a while.

If you’ve got a family then maybe you’re woken by your hungry children, and then the focus of your frantic morning routine also includes getting them dressed, fed and ready for school.

In both of these instances, whether you get up late or on time, you’ve not had much, if any, time for yourself.

The unexamined life is not worth living?—?Socrates

If we’re not careful, it’s all too easy to just spend your days on autopilot, going through the motions and doing the things that you absolutely have to do, such as going to work, paying your bills, doing your shopping and doing chores and other tasks for your loved ones.

Before we know it, years have passed us by and we can still have unrealised dreams, embers of our passions still smouldering in our hearts. If we’re really unlucky, then we can go to our graves with those still there, and face the prospect of lying on our death bed with a mind full of regrets for the things we wanted to do but didn’t make the time for.

A morning routine, no matter how long it is, gives you time to reflect, to plan and to start your day out in a more controlled and positive manner.

But why do we have to do this in the morning? Why can’t we do these kinds of things at the end of the day, rather than having to get up earlier than we’d like to, I hear you cry?!

There are a couple of good reasons why the morning is a better time to put a positive routine in place than the evening. Although if the evening is the only time you can do these things, then that’s absolutely still better than not doing them at all.

First, we all have only a set amount of willpower to get us through the day. The moment we open our eyes and we start making decisions, whether it’s to go along with our usual habits or to push ourselves out of our comfort zones and to do something different, you’re eating away at that limited resource.

The later in the day it gets, particularly if you’ve had a number of challenges to face or temptations to resist, the chances get greater that when there’s a choice between slumping on the sofa and watching an episode of the latest big Netflix show or sitting down and thinking about your life and where you’re trying to get to, or doing something creative, then you’re going to choose the former option, almost every single time.

Secondly, the later in the day it gets, the greater the chance that something else is going to get in the way. A child might get sick, a friend might call on you for help, or you might get an unexpected task dropped on you at the last minute by someone at work. Or you might just be totally exhausted.

All of this is completely normal and not some kind of moral failing on your part. So take a moment to absolutely forgive yourself for being human, and let’s move on.

So, getting up and doing some positive, life-affirming things for yourself before the pressures and demands of the day have a chance to get in the way gives you the best possible chance of being successful, whatever success means to you.

You don’t necessarily need to get up at 4 or 5am, although you obviously can if you want to and if your lifestyle allows you to, but even getting up ten or fifteen minutes before you need to or before the rest of your family start to stir can be a hugely life-changing experience.

Just getting up and writing your thoughts, ideas and dreams down in a journal can make all the difference. What you do doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming, it just needs to be something positive and life-affirming for yourself.

In fact, I’d encourage you to start very small, as your chances of success are increased if there’s less resistance or possibility of you being overwhelmed by the change, as you allow it to settle in and become a habit, until it’s a part of your day just as much as brushing your hair or cleaning your teeth.

As you get used to the new routine, you’ll find other things that you’d like to incorporate and things that you want to remove.

So, that’s a little bit of the psychology and reasoning behind putting a morning routine in place, but what kinds of things can you do during the time you carve out?

I mean, the world’s your oyster, but there are a few authors and people in the self-help space who’ve written about this.

The Miracle Morning Of course, I had to start with a shout out to the routine that set me on this path in the first place.

Hal’s routine includes, journalling (scribing), meditating or prayer (silence), visualisation, affirmations, reading something positive/educational and exercise.

Although there’s an acronym (S.A.V.E.R.S.) that goes along with Hal’s routine, you’re free to do the steps in any order, whatever works best for you (for me, I exercise and then meditate, last of all).

What matters is not how long you spend doing it (Hal even has a 6-minute version you can try, and surely even the busiest people can fit that in), but that you do it at all. As I said above, it’s best to start small, to take baby steps and allow yourself to get into the habit before you try to do too much.

What I like about the Miracle Morning is that it’s very clear what you need to do, so it’s an ideal way to quickly get up and running with a morning routine with the time you have available.

I won’t say much more about it, I’ll let you read about it from the man himself here: https://miraclemorning.com. There’s also a podcast and a free documentary on his site you can listen to/watch to tell you more.

The 5am Miracle Jeff Sanders has both a podcast and a book, which you can find out more information about here: https://www.jeffsanders.com.

Jeff’s 7-step plan focuses more on the goal-setting side of things, and it’s a little more like a choose your own adventure game, in that it encourages you to think about your ideal morning routine, so if that sounds more appealing to you, then I’d give it a go. I also love listening to his podcast, usually in the car, and he always gives me food for thought.

Julia Cameron’s morning pages

If the above ideas feel too much for you, or too structured, then how about trying a morning journaling practice instead?

The author Julia Cameron wrote The Right to Write in 1998, and as a budding author, I read it. The idea of morning pages comes from this book, and it’s a practice I had in place (and loved!) before I read The Miracle Morning. I still do this, although sometimes I don’t do it in the morning and I call it ‘Daily Pages’ instead! And rest assured, they’re not just for writers, they can work for anyone.

The idea is simply to sit down in the morning and to write three pages by hand. You don’t censor yourself, you simply write about what’s going on in your life, what you’re thinking about, worrying about, planning to do, whatever you like. And don’t worry, this is not for publishing, or for anyone else’s eyes. You don’t even have to read it back yourself if you don’t want to, you can shred it later on or burn it if you like!

Julia explains the practice herself here: https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/

Why is it so helpful to do this? Because you’re getting all of those swirling worries and thoughts out of your head and pouring them onto the paper, and while that helps to declutter your mind and allows you some space to breathe, it also gives you the opportunity to work through some of them, to see if there are ways to get around the problems or to see if there are things you’re doing which you’d like to stop. That clarity can often be enough to have a sudden breakthrough later on in the day when you’re doing something completely different!

And I do recommend doing this by hand. There’s something different about writing by hand, rather than typing, especially if you can touch-type. It slows you down, and helps you to really think about things in more depth.

If you search online, you’ll find many articles explaining the science-backed benefits of a morning routine, such as this one from CNBC, as well as many, many ideas for what you might choose to do or focus on when you make the incredibly positive choice to carve out some time for yourself before the busyness of daily life starts to get in the way!

And as with all of lifestyle choices, the most important thing isn’t sticking rigidly to someone else’s set routine, especially if it doesn’t feel right to you, but being consistent and doing what feels valuable to you and what’ll fit reasonably within the circumstances of your own life.

I hope I’ve convinced you that this one small change can make an enormous difference to how you feel about your days, as well as potentially allowing you the headspace to start bringing more creative activities into your life.

Why not give it a go, starting tomorrow? Just set the alarm just fifteen minutes earlier and then see what a difference it makes to your day!