Is Your Morning Routine Exhausting or Empowering? The Choice is Yours
You get to decide if every new day will be exhausting or empowering.
During the workweek, when you wake up, do you begin your day feeling exhausted? Do you struggle to get out of bed, get going, and face all that lies before you today?
Or do you begin your day feeling empowered? Do you get out of bed, get going, and face all that lies before you today ready to experience potential and possibilities?
Odds are, neither is the case. Most likely when you wake up you have a routine. Years of habitual behaviors like hitting snooze on your alarm, getting up to pee before doing anything else, stumbling to the coffee maker, and everything else that goes into your typical workweek morning ritual.
Because it’s usually habitual, you don’t see it as exhausting or empowering. Rather, you see it as a neutral, regular, unremarkable experience. It probably doesn’t even cross your mind to give it much thought or look at what impact it has on the rest of your day.
Does it have an impact on your whole day? Of course it does. How we start our day, and the choices and decisions we make as we begin, will set the tone and direction for the rest of our day.
Ergo, if you begin already exhausted, it’s going to be a long slog of a day.
On the other hand, if you begin empowered, it’s going to be a day of potential and possibilities.
But to be fair – it’s never that simple.
Habits are habitual and subconscious
The things we do by rote and routine – our habits – are second nature to us. They’re automated activities that we just do. Most of them we don’t even give the least bit of active thought to.
Take how you brush your teeth. When was the last time you focused on how you brush your teeth? Do you move the brush up and down, in tiny circles, left and right, or some other way? Do you begin on the left, right, or center of your mouth? Top or bottom first?
You don’t even consider this activity to be habitual – but it is. And you do it probably exactly the same way every time you do it.
Why we form habits is to free the mind to work on more pressing and immediate matters. You don’t have to think about brushing your teeth – so as you do, you can consider your calendar, the emails in your inbox, an appointment later in the day, etc. One activity so automated and subconscious that you can give your thoughts and feelings to other matters.
Habits are often largely neutral. But we all have both good and bad habits. Smoking, eating fried food in every meal, chewing your fingernails, and the like are bad habits. Taking a walk every morning, reading books, eating balanced meals, and the like are good habits.
Both good and bad habits are equally automated products of our subconscious.
Habits can be changed. But to do so, we need to move them from our subconscious – where they’re rote and routine – and bring them to our conscious awareness. We need to become mindful of them. This requires us to identify the habit, recognize and acknowledge it, then determine how it makes us think and feel subconsciously.
Then we can act to change habits.
You can recognize if your day begins exhausting or empowering
Your morning routine has likely been in place for a long time. Why? Because it is what it is.
When you first begin something new – a new job, a new relationship, a new venture – it has no routine built into it yet. The process is unknown, and everything you do at the start is conscious. You’re mindful of what you must do, what you’d like to do, and what you shouldn’t do.
Once you get into the swing of things – you develop a routine. If I do ‘x’ the result is ‘y’. For example – if I show up to the office on time, the donuts are still fresh and I can pick any flavor I desire – or – if I give a compliment to my new relationship, their face lights up in that amazing smile – and the like. If I do ‘x’ the result is ‘y’.
The more you do ‘x’ to get the ‘y’ result, the more routine it becomes. After enough time passes, it becomes habitual. And you probably don’t even know that’s what happened because it’s wired into your subconscious and thusly automated.
Habit doesn’t eliminate choice – it automates it. But we can always decide to change it.
How we start the day can impact everything we do. If you begin with it being exhausting or empowering will set a tone that affects the rest of your rote, routine, and habits. Unchecked, this can lead to a sense of longing, feelings that you’re missing something, or their opposites.
Habit change is a choice
Not so long ago, my morning routine was exhausting. I stumbled out of bed, mindlessly sat at my computer, and played a couple of Facebook games. No spark, nothing interesting, and my day would often leave me wanting and unsatisfied. I felt drained and uninspired.
I was dissatisfied with my life on multiple levels. Why did it feel like every day was just exhausting, right from the get-go? Because my morning habits were exhausting and unhelpful.
So, I made a choice. Since I’d unsuccessfully tried to read at night before bed, I thought – what if I read first thing in the morning?
The difference has been incredibly empowering.
Now, I arise without an alarm – usually with the sun, between 6am and 7am. I get up, feed the cats, and start the coffee. Then I sit down on the couch – and read for the next 30-60 minutes. I read 2 books at a time, 1 fiction and 1 nonfiction.
After I read, I go to my home office, and post – or write and post – the day’s blog. After that, I go for a walk – come home, shower, and get to work.
When I wake up, I look forward to reading what’s next for the characters in the fiction, and what I will learn from the nonfiction. I’ve chosen not to waste away my morning on mindless games – but on improving my mind.
Your morning routine can be exhausting or empowering – and that’s a choice you get to make. I’ve chosen mine to be empowering.
Room for change and improvement
Even with my current, empowering morning habit – there’s room for improvement.
For example – in addition to going for a walk, I need to get back to the gym. I also need to limit how much I read. With some of the fiction I read, I can easily get so caught up in the story I don’t put it down and it takes so much of my morning I fall behind on the rest of my day.
But to change any habit – you need to become consciously aware of it. That means you must work on more mindfulness.
While relatively easy – the challenge tends to be that it’s not a one-and-done act. Because mindfulness is a product of the moment, it shifts with the moment. That’s because only in the now, the present, can you genuinely be aware of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. What they were or will be doesn’t matter – because you can’t change the past or control the future.
The first step to changing your morning routine is to thoroughly examine it. You can do so now – but it’s more powerful to do so when you wake up. Don’t just fall into your habitual actions – take the extra time to be mindful of what they are and how they impact you.
Then, you can see if they are exhausting or empowering.
It might take a few mornings to work it out. But if you spend your day dissatisfied and wanting – start at the start and be mindful of your morning routine and if you’re setting up your day positively (empowering) or negatively (exhausting). And if you’re still not sure – choose anew what direction you desire to face at the beginning of your day.
Identifying if your morning routine is exhausting or empowering isn’t hard
It’s all about working with mindfulness of thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct actions.
When you take the time and make the effort to examine the habits in your morning routine, you can identify whether you’ve begun by exhausting or empowering yourself. Knowing how your habits and routines at the start of your day impact you, you can make new choices and decisions to alter them to better suit you and direct your life how you most desire it to be.
This empowers you – and in turn, your empowerment can empower others around you. That can expand to change the bigger picture matters, too.
Choosing for ourselves employs positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for our lives.
Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts matters in a way to open more dialogue. In that form, we can explore and share where we are between the extremes and how that impacts us here and now.
Lastly, the better aware we are of ourselves in the now, the more we can do to choose and decide how our life experiences will be. When that empowers us, it can also open those around us to their own empowerment. And that is, to me, a worthwhile endeavor to explore and share.
Thank you for coming along on this ride with me.
This is the four hundred and fifty-fifth entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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