My Morning Routine and Why Morning Routines are Vital.

I know, it has been a while, and yes, I missed you.

Let’s rewind it a couple of years. Younger Jack would be sleeping in his dorm room at Maine Maritime Academy until the sounds of Flexicution would blast through his iPhone 5’s speakers telling him to get up. With only 15 minutes to spare before his 8 am class, younger Jack would scroll through his phone for approximately 5 minutes before dragging himself out of the warm sheets. Realizing that he might now be late, he would scramble to find clothes, brush his teeth, pack the materials he needed for the day classes, and sprint down the four flights of stairs and navigate the hilly coastal campus to get to class.

The morning is vital to the rest of your day. People tend to be the most creative in the morning, people tend to be the most focused in the morning, and the tone you set for your day can be greatly influenced by how you attack your mornings.

With this mind, let’s take younger Jack, and try and hypothesize how his days went. In the morning, he was worried, he was reactive, and as a result, he was also usually late. Throughout the rest of his day? He was worried, he was reactive instead of proactive, and he would drag behind and be burnt out after a short day of classes. His work in the gym slipped, his quality of school work suffered, and his social life never grew. Life played him, he didn’t play life.

Today, I want to talk about the importance of a morning routine to set you off to attack your day and help you stay more present and positive.

Though you may certainly choose to have your personal morning routine be complicated, a mere 5 minutes of starting your day off on the right foot can make all the difference between a productive and positive day, and a negative and reactive day. Your routine can range from getting your work out in first thing in the morning, to giving yourself a psychological win by making your bed.

I want to talk about my personal morning routine in hopes that it helps you, and perhaps you may steal some of my tactics to improve the productivity of your day. My routine takes no more than a half hour, and sometimes it only takes me 10 minutes.

It starts with me waking up 15 minutes before I would normally plan to wake up. For example, driving to class takes me approximately a half hour, and getting ready and eating before I go takes me another half hour. For the math whizzes out there, that’s means I would have to wake up an hour before class in order to get to class on time. Add in my 30-minute morning routine, it would take my new total to an hour and a half before class. That means if I have a class at 10, I wake up at 8:30, right? Wrong, I wake up 15 minutes before that at 8:15 am.

Why is this the case? So I have no feelings of being rushed in the morning. I never want to start my days in a reactive state. Reactiveness tends to carry over to my mood, and carries over into the action I must take to achieve my destiny. I want to be smooth and steady all day long. That means gaining extra time to ease my anxiety and start the day calm and ready to go.

I have one rule during my morning routine, and that is not check social media or answer any texts until I am finished. This is because I want to be fully attentive to myself to start each and every day. I also don’t engage socially because I don’t want to be reactive to the outside world. Remember I want to start the day PROACTIVELY, not REACTIVELY.

Once I wake up, I do the first step in my morning routine, and that is simply list 5 things that I am grateful for in the present. I never repeat the same things as the day prior, and try to think outside of the box to understand what I really do appreciate in my life. Not only does this put me in a creative state, but also grounds me by taking a moment to appreciate all the great entities in my life. This exercise is so crucial, because even through the worst of times, we are all lucky to be alive and have a chance to formulate a beautiful life.

After that simple exercise I meditate for 5 to 10 minutes. Meditations allows me to feel being present within a moment without thoughts controlling my day. I don’t let the stress of life affect me for those few minutes as a I focus on breathing and calming my state before attacking the day. This specifically helps within interpersonal interactions and regaining a state of presence whenever my mind tries to take over.

After meditation, I list 5 things that I am excited for in the future. This helps me review my personal goals every day, which allows let my creative mechanism (the subconscious mind) naturally guide me towards achieving my goals.

After that, I do 5 to 10 minutes of self care reading or listening everyday. I do this because I constantly want to become a better person, whether it be learning from my failures, or exposing myself to more ideal ways of living for me personally.

When I am done with my 10 to 30 minutes, I feel grateful, present, positive, proactive, and motivated every single morning. This attitude carries over to the first thing I do every day, which allows me to perform at an optimal level, which carries over to the next activity, and you start to see the positive loop that carries throughout my day.

Then I take my thrive capsules (#notsorrychris)

The point of having a morning is choosing to focus on myself first thing in the morning, I remind myself every day that the most important thing in my life is taken care of, myself. You are valuable, and you want to perform at the highest level each and every day. By focusing on yourself first each day, you give yourself permission to take care of the daily externalities that can dominate your thought process if you are not careful.