HH388: Intentional Morning Routines

Welcome back to another episode of health hacks, and I am starting a whole new series this month, and it's a year in review, because since January of 2024 I have continued doing health hacks three times a week, so that's 12 to 15 episodes every month, and that's a lot of content, a lot of tips, a lot of learning for you. And so I wanted to bring it all together this month and just go back and share the highlights and share you the episode. Share with you the episodes that you can check out in more detail if you would like to. So today I want to talk about intentional morning routines and starting your day off the right way. So many of us start our day off with an alarm going off on our phone, and the moment we pick up our phone, we start looking at email or messages, and we're all of a sudden, just automatically thrown into reactive mode, responsive mode, and we haven't created a space for us to set up a way to start our day with intention, to protect our mood, to protect our energy, to protect our productivity, to protect our mental clarity and our productivity and our emotional stability. So what is it that you can do to start your morning off with a morning routine? It doesn't have to take a lot of time. However, when you start to create habits of just taking a few minutes to be quiet with some mindfulness or some gratitude, taking a few minutes to move your body and stretch with some yoga, taking a few minutes to enjoy a nutrient packed breakfast and also to hydrate. And you need to hydrate first, because you're dehydrated after an entire night of being asleep. So that's one of the first things that you want to be doing. Maybe your packed breakfast comes after your 10 minutes of mindfulness. Maybe it comes after your 20 to 30 minutes of stretching or movement. Perhaps it comes after making sure that you have thought about your day and put a plan into place for your day. Maybe you have a list of the things that you want to get done, and then you can sit down for your breakfast. Then after that, is when you can open your email and start looking at what else is going to come into your day. So you can add to the list you've already got, your list of the things that are in, the non negotiables that must get done, anything new that's coming in can be added to that list. However, it doesn't necessarily have to get done on that day. It needs to get prioritized. What we want to be doing is protecting our morning time from technology and not getting into that reactionary responsive mode right away, we want to avoid starting our day with scrolling or looking at the news. Choose to be much more mindful about how you start your day, because when you do that, you are literally protecting your energy, protecting your stress levels, protecting your mood. As soon as you go into responsive mode, your stress level just skyrockets and your energy gets tanked. And you don't want that for yourself each and every day, if you would like some more episodes on protecting your energy, you're going to want to dive into episodes 355 358 and 361 where I talk about energy boosting techniques and come back for my next episode, where I'm going to be talking about building resilience with mindfulness.