Building a productive morning routine that helps you start the day off on the right foot is one of the best healthy habits you can form. As you explore what kind of morning routine is right for you, you’ll see heaps of advice about waking up at 5 am and essentially squeezing in a second day’s worth of activities before you start your day. If you’re fortunate enough to have the energy and ability to do something like that – by all means! However, for most of us, this is unattainable. This guide is meant to give you a few simple ways to improve your morning routine with the intention of helping you go into your day feeling better, rather than turning you into a productivity machine. To help you build a realistic and satisfying morning routine, we’ll discuss these five tips:
- Wake up at the same time every day
- Prepare for the day the night before
- Sit up and drink water as soon as you wake up
- Use a sunrise alarm clock
- Move your body
With just these five tips, you can build a morning routine that makes you feel great and is easy to get through even on days when you’re not feeling your best. Ready? Let’s get started.
5 tips for the best morning routine
1. Wake up at the same time every day
Studies have shown that waking up early is not inherently better for you, especially if you’re not getting enough sleep. To improve your productivity during the day, you don’t need to wake up earlier. Rather, you need to get good quality sleep. One of the best ways to ensure you’re getting good sleep is through a consistent sleep routine.
This means that whether you like to wake up at 5:30 am or at 9:30 am, as long as you are relatively consistent and getting enough sleep, you’re more likely to wake up feeling rested and maintain good energy levels throughout the day.
2. Prepare for the day the night before
Your mornings will go much easier if you have an outfit planned, all your things for the next day in a bag ready to go, and a lunch planned, if not already packed. This can get tedious, and I definitely neglect to prepare everything some nights when I just don’t have any energy left in me, but when you know exactly what to get done in the morning, everything will run more smoothly and efficiently.
In addition to not having to rush in the morning, laying out what you need for activities can help increase the chance that you’ll actually do them. Want to do yoga every morning? Roll out your yoga mat the night before. Want to read a chapter before heading to work? Put your book out on your coffee table.
3. Sit up and drink water as soon as you wake up
If anyone has ever given you the advice to just jump out of bed as soon as your alarm goes off, you know how useless it is if you are not a morning person. While this advice is not always attainable, it is true that taking action immediately will help you get out of bed easier instead of snoozing.
Instead of telling yourself that you’re going to jump out of bed first thing (and not doing it), try just sitting up. Then, drink some water. Combined, these will likely wake you up enough to at least keep you from hitting snooze.
4. Use a sunrise alarm clock
Especially if you get up before the sun or sleep with the blinds and curtains drawn, it can be really hard to get out of bed. To help with this, I like to use this sunrise alarm clock from Hatch. You can set it to any duration of time from 5-30 minutes and it will start slowly lighting up your room before your alarm time. When your alarm actually goes off, your room will be lit up as if it’s sunrise. It also has very gentle alarm sounds (like bird song!), and nighttime routine features that can help you follow a more consistent sleep routine.
If the Hatch Restore is out of your budget, you could also try this budget-friendly option.
5. Move your body
Nobody wants to exercise, or even get out of bed, first thing in the morning. I’m definitely not suggesting waking up at 4:30 and hitting the gym before a long day at work unless that’s your thing, but some sort of movement first thing in the morning will make such a difference.
For example, as soon as I wake up, I do about 10 minutes of a gentle yoga sun salutation. If you don’t actively do yoga, you can always look up a simple sun salutation, or if yoga’s not your thing, you can just do some simple stretching. Any sort of simple loosening up of your body and movement will wake you up. You’ll feel a warmth flow through your body as you start moving, and you will feel noticeably more awake. I promise!
