You will drink your coffee if you are used to it, even though studies say you shouldn’t until 9 a.m. You will skip your morning workout if you’ve never done one. You will never have a contrast shower if you don’t like extreme sensations. You won’t meditate if you think it’s useless. Knowing you, we decided to skip promoting all those morning activities you will never take in favor of some more realizable healthy morning habits you may at least try.
1. Hitting snooze on the alarm clock
Last night, before going to bed, you planned the next day and set an alarm clock in accordance with the plan. Get up at the alarm, and do what you have planned.
What to do instead
If you doubt how to start your day off right, postpone your alarm clock for 5, 10, or 30 minutes the night before. Set the alarm at exactly the time when you plan to wake up. By hitting snooze, you devalue your own decisions and promises. Step by step, you stop believing in your “I can” and “I will do.” Why did you set the alarm an hour earlier? Maybe you wanted to start a new habit and do a morning workout? Maybe you wanted to start a working day early in order to be free later in the evening? So, act as you’ve planned. One of the key morning routines of successful people, it will create a tremendous boost in energy, motivation, and faith in yourself. And it can turn into a discipline and a new good habit.
2. Choosing fast sugars for breakfast
Refined, overly sweet foods for breakfast lead to insulin spikes in the morning, which will make you hungry and sleepy in less than 2 hours, increase your risk of diabetes, won’t give you necessary micronutrients, and won’t do any good for your health.
What to do instead
The perfect breakfast is personal. Some people prefer not to have breakfast at all, and this is normal. Some people have coffee for breakfast. If you wonder how to start your morning with proper meals, choose low carbs, fats, and proteins—like whole grain bread with cheese and yogurt, eggs with oatmeal, fruits with curd, or toast with salmon.
3. Arguing with your family
Many of us have a bad mood in the morning. The reason for this may be in the low level of sugar in the blood, poor sleep, the anticipation of a difficult day, and even a habit to grumble. But relatives and friends are not to blame. Stop quarreling because somebody left a towel in the wrong place, or because a person you love served you a cold coffee.
What to do instead
In the ideal world, you should meditate. Just kidding: here we will give only realizable pieces of advice on good morning habits. Try to find what caused your irritation. This is probably not the best thing for a working day, but if your family and friends are constantly suffering because of your morning irritability, it is time to get over it. If the cause of irritation is still not connected to you, but in your beloved ones, create new morning habits and rituals. For example, “do not talk to papa until he has had his breakfast.” Or “don’t ask mom anything until she has had her coffee.”
4. Making aggressive changes to your schedule
We all have some peaks of productivity, which are correlated with our circadian rhythms. Being a night owl is okay, as well as being a morning bird. But trying to shift to a morning person, if you are obviously not one, will only make you less happy and less productive during the day.
However, with our modern hectic life, it is quite possible that your sleeping preferences are the result of the wrong sleeping routine.
What to do instead
First of all, stop falling asleep with the phone in your hands. This is the best morning routine for success. Seriously, who are you? The president of a country? Our ancestors before going to bed thought about plans for tomorrow or analyzed the day that had passed—some of them were daydreaming, and some of them read a book. Try the old ways! In the magazines of the 50s or the 60s, they even advised to give up a book before bedtime to have a better sleep. Let’s improve habits gradually. Put the phone/tablet/laptop aside. This will allow you to fall asleep earlier and will make your waking less painful. And, maybe, you’ll find out that your “night productivity” is not your natural choice and you might find out your productivity peak is 6 to 9 a.m.
5. Starting your working day with the wrong task
Planning is the key to productivity. You know that there are 4 categories of tasks. Urgent and important, urgent and unimportant, non-urgent, but important, and non-urgent and unimportant. They must be carried out exactly in the sequence described above. If you take the last category first, you will obviously miss the time to do anything from the first, most important category. And if you hope you can work on several tasks at the same time—sorry, you can’t, because multitasking doesn’t work.
What to do instead
It’s a pity when an unimportant and non-urgent task is the most interesting one, but you have to postpone it. Thinking of how to start your day, eat a frog, taking up an urgent and important task. Or delegate it to professionals. As a reward, you will have the rest of the day for yourself and for more appealing stuff.
6. Having a meeting in the middle of the day
This will totally ruin the first half of your day. Before the meeting, you are waiting for it and cannot engage yourself in other tasks. You cannot do anything during the second part of the day as well, because you are analyzing the results of the meeting, or you’re too tired, or there is not enough time for another assignment.
What to do instead
Make important appointments in the morning. If this is not possible, have this meeting in the evening. The middle of the day is the worst choice.
7. Starting your day with hateful thoughts
First of all, it is necessary to analyze the reasons for your “morning depression.” Separate discontent with something you can’t influence, like gloomy cold days, from general melancholy that covers all aspects of your life with a gray veil.
Analyze your mood. If it’s just the blues, drink a course of vitamin D and try to be in fresh air more often. Perhaps you haven’t been on vacation for half a year or more? Bad moods can be addictive. You can get used to them and start to feel comfortable in them. Fight back with things that bring you joy. And if you can’t do it yourself anymore, find some professional help. A therapy session is one of the common morning habits of successful people.
There are things you can’t change. But you will definitely boost the quality of your life and your productivity by omitting these common mistakes. We’ve been there ourselves, and it wasn’t that hard to get out of them. So for you, it is also possible.