If you tend to feel overwhelmed and exhausted as you move through your day, take a look at your mornings.
Research shows that the first 10 minutes of one’s morning set the tone for one’s entire day.
Here are 7 morning habits that can sabotage your day. How many do you do?
(1) Hitting Snooze
You think it’s giving you some much-needed extra sleep, but you don’t actually get quality sleep in those extra few minutes. Even worse, every time you hit snooze you’re making multiple micro-decisions
- the decision to hit snooze
- the decision about when you will wake up “for real”
- the mental calculations about the timeline of your morning
Bt the time you get out of bed, you’ve depleted most of your decision bandwidth for the day, without deciding on anything important.
(2) Getting Online
Checking email, news, or social media is an invitation to getting off track before you’re even on track. It distracts from your creative potential and executive function bandwidth. Even more important, checking news, email, and social media produces stress hormones in the brain, like adrenaline and cortisol, which causes. your nervous system to be in fight-or-flight mode from the start.
(3) Leaving Your Bed Unmade
Leaving your bed unmade might not seem like a big deal, but making your bed is one of the first visible tasks your can complete in a day. When you make the bed, you signal to yourself that you can get things done. Leaving it unmade sends the opposite signal: that you can’t even be bothered with one simple task.
(4) Rushing
There’s a difference between moving with intention and purpose and rushing. You know what it feels like. When you’ve hit snooze for almost an hour and then get up and realize you need to be out the door in 10 minutes, you’re rushing.
Rushing creates a surge of adrenaline and cortisol that puts your nervous system into sympathetic mode (fight-or-flight mode) before you’re out the door.
(5) Starting Your Work Immediately
Rolling out of bed and immediately sitting at your desk to do work might feel productive, but consider the needs of your body. The body is designed to move. After being still overnight, the worst thing for it is to make it sit upright at a desk.
It’s easy to get stuck in that sitting position for hours if you’re not conscious of it.
Give your body the movement it needs, and both your body and mind will perform better throughout the day.
(6) Staying Inside
Artificial light is no substitute for daylight. One of the best ways to regulate your circadian rhythms is to expose yourself to daylight as soon as possible after waking up. This starts the production of melatonin that will help you fall asleep more easily in the evening.
Just a few minutes of standing outside in fresh air is better than nothing.
If you really want to do work before you workout, try getting outside first — even if it’s just for some brief stretching or a quick walk around the block. It will give you movement and sunlight in one shot.
(7) Eating too Much
Overloading your body with too much food — especially carbs — will weigh you down as you head into your morning. Eat enough to fuel your workout, and plan your bigger meal after you’ve exercised.
Make Slow Changes
The best way to make a change is to implement it slow and steady. Pick one habit to change and make a small change. You may even find that one single change — when it’s the right change —will change many of these habits.
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