Health and Well-Being

Here’s How to Start the Day with a Spark and Live a Joyful Life in Five Easy Steps.

Practical tips to increase energy, boost mood and remain calm

Our habits determine our success, health, and happiness.

Staying calm and composed with a cheerful disposition is a desire for many people. This valuable lifestyle capability has nothing to do with wealth and fame.

It is mainly about a unique mindset empowered by a few fundamentals of our biological and psychological needs. It is a privilege to have a good night’s sleep and awaken fresh.

Our habits determine our success, health, and happiness. Many successful people have morning and evening routines that balance their lives. However, each person is unique.

Therefore, one’s routine might not work for another one. Therefore, we need to customize them based on our lifestyle preferences, goals, and requirements.

A routine is a coded habit of our behavior and gets strengthened in the brain’s neural pathways as practiced regularly.

In this post, I offer five practical tips that can be done in fewer than 30 minutes in the morning. They can be customized based on our needs.

These practices might increase our energy, boost our mood, and make us joyful all day. We can be more creative and productive with joy and a good mood.

When these actions are practiced for a few months, they turn into healthy habits and rewire our brains for a lifetime.

Here are the five practical tips to start the day with a spark and enjoy a joyful life. These tips are principle-oriented points rather than a strict recipe, as our needs, goals, and lifestyles differ.

1 — Having Three Minutes of Mixed Hot/Cold Shower

Every morning I aim to activate essential hormones and neurotransmitters and balance them using the proven techniques I list below.

To this end, mixed showers with cold and hot waters can be ideal for activating good feel hormones and relaxing our muscles.

I use this practice first thing in the morning to open my eyes. Investing three minutes of my time creates significant chemical and electrical reactions in the body.

I have been practicing cold showers for more than two decades successfully. I also heard many testimonials of this helpful practice. Since starting cold showers, I haven’t experienced a single cold or flu episode.

I specifically like cold and hot showers interchangeably because heat and cold create different reactions, causing various hormones to activate and balance.

Also, from my experience, mixed showers in the morning and at night before going to sleep reset our circadian rhythm. They help me sleep restfully and wake up joyfully. Remember that A Cold Shower a Day Might Keep the Doctor Away in My Experience.

2 — Moving the Body for Ten Minutes

Movement is essential for our physical and mental health. The body and brain require movement to function properly.

Even though some people do it for fitness purposes, morning movement's goal is not to build muscle or lose weight but to move the blood flow so that the heart and the brain get enough oxygen to function properly.

Some people like running and jogging in the morning to create good feel hormones. Intense exercises work for some people.

However, some people prefer gentle activities like yoga, pilates, stretching, slow walking, swimming, asymmetric balance workouts like planks, or calisthenics like pulling up or pushing up, activating muscle fibers.

Exercise depends on many factors, including our body type and medical history. There is no single formula that might work for each person. However, the principle can apply to all of us.

We can package our movements based on our needs, goals, and lifestyle choices. The purpose is to give the body what it needs to create joy for us.

3 — Recording Gratitude for Five Minutes

Gratitude is a wonderful feeling. Its effects on the brain are noticeable. Therefore mental health professionals use gratitude journals as a therapeutic tool.

When we feel gratitude, the body and the brain work in a better balance, when we are grateful, we seldom feel anger, jealousy, guilt, or anxiety.

We can customize this practice. Some might write them in words, short phrases, or bullet points.

I prefer describing each great point linked with my intention and plans for the day. A friend of mine writes a poem each day about her blessings. Some use them like a mantra.

Gratitude practice grounds us and shows our purpose in life. In addition, expressive writing has a calming effect on the brain.

Being aware of our privileges and reminding us about blessings can prime our brains to generate positive thoughts and reduce anxiety.

4 — Ten Minutes of Meditation

There are many ways to meditate. Some meditation methods and mindfulness practices work better for different people.

From my experience, meditation is to focus on a single thing, such as breathing and keeping our attention to reduce the effects of flooding thoughts.

We don’t have to be religious or follow a spiritual path to benefit from meditation. Meditation teaches us we are more than our body and mind.

Observing my breaths work for me as the breath is always there to focus on staying in our consciousness. Understanding the importance of breathing in our lives is critical.

We cannot survive with a lack of breathing for a few minutes. So this simple fact might help us feel grounded, and it is a daily gratitude point for me. In addition, mindfulness practices might improve our relationships by increasing our empathy, compassion, and self-love.

The meditative position sends signals to the brain to slow down and reduce anxiety-generating thoughts. For example, thinking about the past might trigger guilt, shame, and regret.

Likewise, thinking about the future can induce anxiety. We don’t need these emotions in the morning when starting the day.

Regular meditation can regulate our emotions and contribute to emotional intelligence, mastery, and maturity, even in a few minutes per day.

5 — Mood-Boosting Nutrients [Optional]

I left this one to the end as I don’t eat in the mornings anymore.

My aim for not consuming food in the morning is to keep my digestive system in a rested mode, prevent unnecessary blood glucose causing insulin spikes, and increase my growth hormone by fasting.

I enjoy a glass of cold water even though some people prefer warm water for various reasons. We know that fasting can change brain chemistry positively.

However, some people need nutrients from breakfast. Some people enjoy a cup of coffee or tea. Food and drink, especially essential amino acids and healthy fats, can create a mood-boosting effect for some people.

However, over-consumption of food might cause various issues, such as making us sluggish as the body has to allocate substantial energy to digest food.

There is not a single formula for nutrition. There are many options. For example, instead of eating breakfast, I used to drink a cup of coffee with butter which worked for me for a while.

Caffeine with healthy fat gave me alertness and enhanced my cognitive capability keeping me in ketosis without causing much blood sugar and insulin spike, keeping a good hormonal balance.

However, caffeine became addictive, and its effects were reduced after a while. I had to stop it a few days once a month to re-experience its impact.

Unfortunately, those coffee-fasting days were unbearable for me, causing stress due to withdrawal symptoms.

In addition, coffee and tea caused me digestive issues, increasing my tension. Coffee did not work for me, but it works for millions of people. Customizing our diet can be invaluable.

Conclusions and Takeaways

Starting the day with activities aligned with the needs of our body and mind can bring us many health benefits.

Turning these points into habits with practice can make them manageable as the brain creates connections and wires the activities as habits.

Chemical and electrical processes manifest as hormonal and neurotransmitter signals. These signals affect our thoughts, emotions, moods, and behavior. Observing our thoughts can help us regulate our emotions.

Managed thoughts and regulated emotions can affect our mood, mindset, and behavior. Consequently, they affect our health and happiness. Living mindfully and working in a flow state can be the best investment for a healthy and joyful life.

Thank you for reading my perspectives. Taking personal responsibility for our health and well-being is essential. I wish you a healthy and happy life.

I documented my experience in making our brains healthier. I hope it provides valuable perspectives on preventative maintenance.

If you are a new reader and find this article valuable, you might check my holistic health and well-being stories reflecting on my reviews, observations, and decades of sensible experiments.

Sample Health Improvement Articles for New Readers

I write about various hormones and neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, GABA, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, adrenaline, glutamate, and histamine.

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