Starting a Morning Routine

Start small.

There is something to be said for the things we do daily, the steps that we often take without much thought.

These things are our routines.

What is a routine?

Well, it’s a set of regular activities or behaviours that you may perform in a specific order and often daily or at least have a structure on time.

Say you do a specific activity every Sunday such as watching or going to a football game with that that activity you have a set routine that gets you ready for it. Things like putting on a jersey, making a favourite dish, finding the correct channel, setting the couch pillows at just the perfect angle as to safely hold your nacho dish.

This is a routine you follow and have built as you have continued to watch a game every Sunday. You have things that work and don’t in this sequence of actions that you take.

How do you create a morning routine?

Well for me, it’s been something I’ve had to figure out over time for myself.

Many of the books might tell you to write out your perfect day etc… But how do we even know what that day would be when we are starting out on this journey?

I’ve tried things like shower then reading and meditation, it stuck for a while but eventually slipped away with life.

Currently my morning routine includes:

• Exercise first thing after I put my contacts in
• Meditation in a dark-ish room (I’ve been building up from 5 minutes of time, aiming for 10–15 eventually)
• Shower
• Morning pages (these are from the artists way by Julia Cameron)

So, how can you start? As I mentioned, small.

Start with whatever the first you do in the morning is, if you’re interested in writing, doing something like morning pages first is a great idea. Julia suggests that you should make this a first thing activity, going as far as to say you can brew your morning coffee beforehand but don’t take an hour to make the perfect cup.

Morning pages for myself have been one of those things that I learned to start small with, right now I’m celebrating 49 days straight of writing and I’ve been more off and on since the end of July, 2023.

I went through some big life things during that time like being evacuated from my home due to a wildfire which left me with zero mental ability to write when the habit was still so new.

I even went as far as to cut back from 3 to 2 pages of writing for a time which allowed me to keep the habit growing until I felt powerful enough to write the full amount each morning which I am now back to doing.

I’ve learned that life being life will throw curveballs and finding what helps you keep moving while dealing with them can do a whole lot of good.

Small steps, over and over

Routines can be made up of so many different things depending on you and your life.

Things like:

• Meditation
• Brushing your teeth
• Making yourself breakfast
• Morning page
• Writing
• Exercise
• Making a fresh coffee over having the reheated remnants of yesterdays pot

There are a million things that could be apart of your morning routine. Not all of them will actually be good options for you even if they first sound like it.

For some of us exercise is better done later, I used to think this was the case for myself.

If you want to set up a routine just try something, try it over and over and see what happens. If it doesn’t work for you that is okay!

Rinse and repeat. Repeat over and over if it is working, rinse if it isn’t.

And just keep going. You’ll go through different stages and chapters in life that will need different things from you, just keep going.