Morning routines

How do you start each morning alert and ready to seize the day.  I’ve read a few lists from some notable contributors and have synthesized over time what works for me.  This has and continues to evolve with changing circumstances.  But, for me, it’s an interesting experiment where you can test an idea for a few weeks and see if you get any real benefit.

How you feel in the morning is usually a direct product of your night’s sleep.  This in turn is impacted by your food and drink consumption, daily activity levels and residual stress amongst other factors.  I am not going focus on these directly, other than where they are specifically addressed in a morning routine.

Let’s start with sleep.  Andrew Huberman is a PhD neuroscientist and tenured professor at Stanford.  He has an awesome podcast covering different health topics.  He is famous for giving advice on sleep hygiene and he considers the single most important action is to expose yourself to morning light shortly after getting up.  The benefit of early morning, low angle sunlight is it that resets your circadian rhythm.  This helps you to wake up feeling less drowsy and programs your body to feel tired in the evening to improve your overall sleep.  Artificial light is not a replacement for sunlight and looking at sunlight through the comfort of a window will limit the benefits.  I have tried this on and off for a couple of years and found the most benefit combining it with an early morning walk.  I try to walk for an hour which ensures I get the necessary sunlight but also benefits my mental and physical health.

Hydration is featured in many recommended routines.  Before we consume anything, we should ideally consume a large glass of water.  This really hit home when I increased my own daily intake of water.  Prior to doing this, I had been experiencing an odd phenomenon whereby every morning I woke up with very stiff ankle joints.  Walking downstairs was challenging, but it would pass as I started moving around and I just thought it was part of the ageing process.  After increasing the volume of water I drank, the morning tightness completely vanished within three days.  I have concluded that my inability to move freely in the morning was probably due to my body being in a state of dehydration.  The hours that we sleep are the longest period we naturally go without hydrating unless we wake up through the night.   It would therefore make sense to hydrate first thing in the morning before giving our bodies anything more challenging to do.

What about coffee and breakfast?  I would leave these to personal preference.  I usually feel the best when I am intermittent fasting, and I don’t eat until lunch.  I have done this for so many years it is rare that I feel hungry in the morning.  On the days I wake up and I do feel hungry, provided I didn’t drink too much the night before, I take it as a sign that my metabolism is raised, and my body is telling me to fuel up.  I have no idea if there is any science to this, but listening to your body and hearing its signals feels intuitively like a good approach to living.  If I am hungry, I will usually eat eggs or some other protein.  I avoid breakfast cereals because I hate the taste and they are largely nutrition-free.  They are also very dry products and will probably dehydrate you again reversing the benefits of your morning intake of water.  I love toast, but I try to avoid it, as despite how good a couple of slices of buttered sourdough taste, my body often feels sluggish about half an hour after consuming.  I still eat toast from time-to-time, but not every day and preferably not during the week if I want to feel sharp.  Many cultures eat fresh fruit in the morning, I have tried this myself and generally felt amazing.  Fruit can also help to keep you hydrated.  I used to love coffee but made the decision 18 months ago to remove caffeine from my diet as I realized that I could get the same psychological benefits of a warm beverage from drinking herbal tea.  The week I stopped drinking coffee revealed the impact caffeine was having on my body.  I felt jittery and had headaches for four days as my body went through withdrawal.  That experience was the nudge I needed to stop drinking coffee (and caffeinated tea) for good. Coffee is as much ritual as it is enjoyment, and that ritual can help put us in the right mindset to start our day.  Caffeine does take a long time to wear-off, so to improve the quality of your sleep the advice is to avoid drinking coffee after 10am.

The next big category is exercise and movement.  Some activity in the morning is good, but what you do and how intensively you do it should depend partly on what you eat.  As mentioned above, I am usually intermittent fasting and my morning routines are all done in a fasted state.  I tend to focus on low-impact exercise like walking, short gym sessions, jogging or Pilates.  If I want to do a heavy weights session or a high-intensity interval training I try to fuel up an hour or so in advance.  The main reason is that this type of intensive exercise depletes your glycogen stores and can leave you with low blood sugar, making you feel nauseous, dizzy and faint.  I’ve made this mistake a few times and there aren’t many more humbling experiences than sitting on the floor of the gym with your head between your knees because you pushed it too hard on too little fuel.  That gym experience is only beaten by the time I dropped my pre-Mp3 music player whilst running on a treadmill and in the sleepy process of trying to pick it up was thrown off the back of it.

Jim Kwik is a memory expert and author of Limitless.  His 10-stage morning routine includes advice on consumption and exercise and adds the following: remember your dreams, make your bed, take a cold shower, practice deep breathing exercises, journal and read or learn something.  Tim Ferris, the author and podcaster, has a list of 5 activities, which includes daily meditation.  I have tried all of these as experiments and have given my thoughts below.

I tried to remember my dreams over a two-week period, and I failed spectacularly.  The main problem was remembering to have a notepad within easy reach to capture my dreams.  But even with a notepad to hand, the time it took to fumble with my glasses and switch-on my reading light was just long enough to upset my sleeping wife and for my dreams to slip away.  For the sake of my marriage I ended the experiment and the wisdom will be forever lost to me.

Making your bed is a suggestion that I find to be a very effective but can also be switched out for similar tasks if like me you share a bed with a partner who usually gets up later and doesn’t like the bed being made whilst they are still in it.  My routine before I go to bed is to run the dishwasher and my morning routine is to empty it and put everything away.  The reason these mundane chores can be effective is because you are completing a task early in your day and creating a positive mental feedback loop in the process.  They are also easy to make into habits and can then be stacked with other activities that you want to make into a regular habit.

Cold showers are meant to be beneficial in the morning, but I don’t care.  I did try it for a very short time in Miami.  I can attest it does wake you up and does make you feel virtuous in a puritanical sort of way.  But I never enjoyed the experience, and I happily went back to my lovely warm morning shower.   The chances of me readopting this approach in New York (particularly in winter) are zero.

I have grouped together breathing exercises and meditation practices.  I have tried both and I think they have their place if they work for you.  Box breathing where you breathe in for 5 counts, hold your breath for 5 counts, breathe out for 5 counts and pause for 5 counts is a relatively well-known approach.  I cannot definitively say that breathing in a deliberate slow pattern is beneficial for everyone’s health, but it does no harm and if you find that it reduces stress that would be a big win.  My only issue with this practice is that I often forget to do it.  When I do remember I usually throw it in to my morning routine as soon as I open my eyes.  I have played around with meditation and meditation apps.  I feel good when I take a proper mental pause and calm my mind at the beginning of the day.  With limited time in the morning, I prefer to walk rather than meditate.  Both activities offer me the same benefit of being able to switch my mind off.

I have never got into journaling and personally see less use for it in the morning.  If anyone has made this work for them then I would love to know in the comments.  There is meant to be a strong correlation between expressing gratitude and general happiness.  I have tried to journal gratitude a couple of times and I found it quite an uplifting exercise.  The reason it doesn’t make my list is that I found it easier to do at the end of the day when you can reflect over the past day’s experiences rather than at the beginning of the day.

Finally, we have reading and learning.  During the pandemic I enrolled in an online training platform that served up courses divided into daily 15-minute sessions.  Since moving to New York, I like to read, particularly on my commute to work.  I am also a Wordle fan and use it to gently stretch my brain in the morning.  I find all of these things are highly effective and I feel there is more benefit when the subject you are reading or learning about is different to your career.

My ideal morning routine right now is to wake up at a similar time each day.  I have no need for an alarm clock as the time I wake up is determined by my cat who demands food by 6am.  I get up feed the cat and drink a glass of water.  I complete the daily Wordle puzzle and then go out for an hour’s walk to get early morning low-angle sunshine in my eyes.  When I return, I empty the dishwasher and then make my wife a coffee and myself some herbal tea that I will take with me to work.  I have a hot shower and get dressed for work.  Whilst on the subway I read my kindle.  I am not always consistent, but if I get most of these things done most days then I feel I am starting each day well.

Aside from the list of positive actions, I try to avoid checking my emails and social media first thing in the morning.  The whole point of the morning routine is to put myself in the best state to tackle the day, so I delay looking at anything that needs to be tackled until I am in the right state.  I also feel it would be a mistake to give up an extra hour’s sleep in the morning simply to check emails or doom scroll social media.  That said, this is an aspiration and when I break this rule, I try not to be too hard on myself.

As always, I welcome any comments or suggestions for what gets you ready in the morning.  I appreciate that I don’t have kids and that I have much more choice about how I allocate my time, but even if you have other commitments in the morning my hope is that you are able to take time focused purely on yourself.

Next week I want to review LinkedIn.  I am a more frequent user since starting this blog, but I have some thoughts on its useability, pricing and value.