Conquer the Morning, Slay the Day

There are a few specific things we can do to help set ourselves up for success each day. These aren't "cure all" hacks that are guaranteed to dramatically change your day, every day. They will, however, help you get going in the right direction and to give you some small wins to start the day with.

First thing first, DON'T immediately check your phone when you wake up. Don't start going through social media while lying in bed. Don't start checking emails. Don't look at your calendar. Just turn off your alarm and PUT. THE. PHONE. DOWN. Immediately throwing yourself on the digital hamster wheel before you are ready to actually give it your full attention accomplishes nothing and will just likely make you anxious, elevate your heart rate and start dumping cortisol, the stress hormone, into your system before your feet even hit the ground. If that is how you start your day, that is likely how you will feel all day. Anxious. Overwhelmed. Stressed.

What you should do instead, after turning off your alarm, is hydrate. Walk into the kitchen and drink at least 12oz of water. Overnight our bodies enter a start of dehydration. Think about it. You haven't had any water for 6-8+ hours. Take that a step further, most of us are not as diligent as we should be about drinking water during the day to begin with, so we probably went to bed a little dehydrated to begin with.

Pro tip - if you want to enhance your morning glass of water, add a pinch of Himalayan Sea Salt and some lemon juice. The salt will help your body absorb and retain that first glass of water in the morning, which is especially important if you are like me, and just chug the water down to move on with my morning. The salt also stimulates the salivary glands in the mouth, which will aid digestion of the food you eat later in the morning. The lemon in the water helps dissolve uric acid in the joints and can help decrease inflammation.

The next morning ritual tip may make some of you roll your eyes. I get it. I did too for the longest time. After you have your water (or lemon-salt-water), you should take a few minutes (at least) to meditate. I get that mediation has this woo-wooey-connotation to it. I could write and exhaustive separate blog about how to approach meditation and the research that backs this practice. Maybe I will in the future, but for now, trust me, sitting quietly before your day starts and taking some intentional breaths works. Recently, I purchased a Whoop biometric wrist band that tracks sleep, stress, and recovery using your heart rate variability and resting heart rate as baselines. After three months of regular mediative practice to start my day, every metric that the Whoop tracks improved. I recover more completely, my stress levels are markedly reduced, my sleep quality has improved and I am objectively a more patient human being. Days I missed my mediations in the morning resulted in a decrease in all of those metrics. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but it was the only major variable I changed. I could see a relatively immediate response, positive or negative, based on whether or not I mediated first thing in the morning.

That's it. Don't jump immediately into the digital world, hydrate, and meditate. The entire process takes me 25 minutes in the morning. 5 minutes or less to drink some water and 20 minutes of meditation. If you are just starting a meditative practice, this process will be even shorter. I would recommend starting with 5 minutes of mediation and increasing it around 5 minutes each week until you get to 20 minutes.

Conquer the morning, and the rest of the day is yours for the taking.