How to Start Your Day the Right Way

Boosting productivity, success and happiness — all before sunrise.

In college, my first roommate consistently got up early every morning to go for a jog, and it fascinated me. Though I technically understood why he got up early to jog, I never wanted to be like him in that aspect. For me, waking up for early classes was rough enough, it that was just something that I had to do. To elect to get up early just to go for a jog made little sense to me when we were mutually living in a world of high stress, busy schedules, and all of the awkwardness of being a first-year college student.

At that time, it was my opinion that my roommate was missing out on valuable sleeping time. We would both go to the gym in the afternoon and went to sleep around the same time at night, so I knew that rest was a much more scarce commodity than exercise for both of us. Besides, my roommate was already ripped, so I could never quite wrap my mind around why he felt like he needed to get up and run first thing every morning.

Fast forward through several years and many more roommates and the penny finally dropped. Running was never the point. Setting the foundation for his day was. Running just happened to be the action that he used to do that.

A Moment of Realisation

A full two years after graduating from undergrad, and six years since I lived with my jogging-enthusiast roommate, his seemingly crazy obsession makes far more sense to me.

Fresh out of college, I fell straight into working a job that I didn’t enjoy. It was incredibly stressful, the pay wasn’t great, and my shift timing — 11AM to 8PM — left me with little time to do much outside of work. Each morning, I’d stay in bed until my dog demanded to be let out to use the bathroom, then I’d get up, make coffee, fix breakfast, and watch TV until I had to get ready for work. Then I’d work all day, eat dinner, watch a little more TV, and go to bed.

Quite rapidly, this pattern started to wear me down. I felt like I had no personal time or time to thoroughly relax. I woke up feeling anxious about work, and because the end of my shift was so close to when I went to sleep, I often dreamt about being stressed about work. In short, my quality of life was dwindling rapidly. I was eating more, sleeping less, gaining weight, and losing my peace of mind.

In search of a remedy, I came across the book Mind Hacking by Sir John Hargrave. In it, he recommends working on daily concentration games to improve mindfulness, but also to write down your goals on a daily basis. At the time, I thought that my goal was to find a new career, so I decided to get out of bed thirty minutes earlier each day and go sit on my porch with my coffee, where I’d write about my stress and the goals that I thought would alleviate that stress.

By the end of the first week, my job suddenly wasn’t so stressful. I was able to stop thinking about work after my shift ended, and I started sleeping better. I hadn’t made any progress on my goal of finding a new career (spoiler alert: I never did– I still work the same job, just a slightly more convenient shift), but I was still feeling better. A little soul searching and I finally realized that it was simply the act of journaling and writing about how I wanted to feel that enabled me to start feeling that way.

Jogging and Journalling My Way to Happiness

For my roommate, it was jogging in the morning that let him clear his thoughts and put himself in a positive mental space for the day ahead. For me, it was journaling — writing down the things that I wanted to change in my life and the steps I would take to do so.

The specific action isn’t so important. What’s important is that you take advantage of your waking hours. They’re the key to setting yourself up for success throughout the rest of the day.

Find an activity that makes you feel good, whether it’s jogging, journalling, reading, meditating — there’s no right answer, and try to engage in it for 10–15 minutes each morning. You can build this up to thirty minutes or an hour, or even longer over time — but you don’t want to overdo it at first. If you try to make too drastic changes all at once, you could be setting yourself up for failure. Starting small and making micro-adjustments that you can integrate into your daily life pretty easily is the best approach to take at the beginning.

Starting your day this way puts you in a positive state of mind will set a solid foundation for the rest of your day by:

• Lowering your stress levels.
• Clearing your mind.
• Allowing you to set daily goals for yourself, which can influence how you spend your time throughout the day.
• Helping wake you up and feel energized.
• Establishing a morning routine, giving you a sense of structure and stability.

I initially decided to try it for a week, but quickly got addicted to feeling better about life. I have a hunch you’ll feel the same.