The Power of the Eye-Rolling Morning Routine

How to maximise the results of a saturated life-hack.

Do you wake up feeling pumped for the day every day? If that’s a yes, feel free to rewrite the entire article and send me the secrets because I know no one who magically wakes up feeling more than great, every-single-morning.

When we wake up with a cloud over our heads, it is unsettling at best. Sometimes, it is a feeling of dwell that comes to us — we had a bad day yesterday, or we’ve recently gone through a rough patch and it’s lingering. Sometimes, we’re feeling dread or fear for something that’s yet to come, or we’re simply unhappy with our current situation.

Sometimes, we don’t even know why we’re not in the best mood and we proceed to look for things to make us feel worse. A delayed journey into work. A bill will be mailed through our door and send us into a spiral of complaints about how we don’t have money. Anything will make us feel worse and we’ll take it more than personally.

But, you know what? Sometimes, we feel fuckin’ awesome and we smash through our days with our eyes closed, negativity undiscovered, and unphased by mild annoyances.

We let things slide because they’re not that big, and we see with more colour, more intensity, more passion, more energy, and more…just more.

I want to feel this way every single day when I get up in the mornings. Don’t you?

Well, in the cheesiest way possible — I am telling you that you can make yourself feel happy every day, and even more importantly — you deserve to wake up on top of the bloody world all the time.

But there’s no secret or lifehack. It’s just hard work.

Enter the Annoying Morning Routine (And How It Really Works)

Yes, I know, you may be groaning since you’ve probably read about the sodding morning routine countless times and yet, you still don’t feel like it’s a magical life hack, but rather a money-making con.

That’s because it’s not special. It’s not miraculous. You aren’t going to wake up and give yourself a particular routine that will make you feel happy forever because that’s not how it works.

The whole point of a morning routine is to set you up for a great start to the day, so the rest of your day is more likely to go well too. But you cannot depend on exterior things to help make you feel good in the longterm. You cannot place the responsibility to your happiness on a routine. That’s just silly.

So, why is the morning routine useful? The thing is, you need to figure out what will help keep a good mood going. It means that you need to work on yourself internally first, and then work on your routine to keep that momentum going.

That takes time. And when’s the best time to take time to work on yourself? First thing in the morning. Why? Because no one is likely to interrupt you first thing in the morning, and scientifically speaking, your brain and body have the most energy then, too. It’s as simple as that.

You can’t rely on a set of activities to help you feel good because even if it does make you feel good on the surface — it won’t be a permanent and sustainable source of happiness. That’s why you see so many people around you giving up a new habit — because they’re not getting that feeling they hoped they would — but that, is their fault.

You have to get right in your head first and then you can use other things to help maintain that attitude.

You do those things because you feel good, not to feel good.

Here is where it gets hard.

You Have To Genuinely Want To Change

It seems like an obvious thing to say, but it’s not.

Before you even get up, your brain has thought hundreds and hundreds of thoughts. You’re already feeling some kind of way, and the goal is to feel nothing but good.

But when you take the time to listen and converse with that cloud, you must know that you are doing so voluntarily. You must realise it is the engagement with it that changes the way you look at every aspect of your life.

But don’t think it’s just you — everyone does it because we’re human. Psychologists call this negativity bias. It means that as humans,

“Negative events have a greater impact on our brains than positive ones.” — Verywellmind.com

We are accustomed to dwelling about the past and dread the future. So the “trick” is to change your thinking and change your feelings.

Now, I said that your mood must be good before you depend on these morning hacks to feel good — but that’s only a half-truth. There are things you can do to be in a better mood, and it starts with the desire to want to feel good, truly.

It means that when that cloud is above your head — you don’t need to think about why it’s there, but rather, how to lift it.

Treat happiness as an exercise, just like any other habit. Treat all your emotions as exercise routines. Imagine that when you feel sad, you’re exercising the sadness routine. When you feel happy, you’re practising the skill of being happy. Think about how you choose to cultivate each feeling by simply feeling it for more than a second.

You can choose not to exercise some of them, and you can choose to work on more of others. For example, if you start feeling a little bout of anxiety, your brain is telling you it’s time to exercise it not because you need to, but because that’s what you’re used to doing.

You can choose not to.

You are not your feelings. I hate the language we use because it makes us identify with our feelings as our own, rather than simply being witness to them as separate entities. Your name is not sadness. You can choose to be in any emotional state you want, and you can choose happiness every single time.

But you have to want it. You have to want to decide every time sadness treats you with her presence that you don’t want her company. You don’t have to be hostile to her. Simply acknowledging the feeling is enough to validate it, without needing to cultivate it with more negativity.

You can get out of a negative state by changing your thinking. You simply need to know what makes you feel good.

Change your thought pattern by changing your habit. Instead of conversing with the negative cloud above your head, try changing the subject in your mind. Treat it like a second person in your head. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous it sounds — it really works. Because you are not those negative thoughts, and you can control your thinking. You can steer them towards more positive thoughts.

That’s where the morning routine comes in.

Do You First

What better way to start the day than by waking up and doing something for yourself first? Don’t get up to go to work — get up to do something you want.

When you focus on your needs and wants and take time to implement them — first thing in the morning, you’ll have nurtured some good old-fashioned self-love that’ll boost your good mood and help lift those initial negative feelings. It’ll make giving your time away to your job and your boss’ goals a lot easier.

I write first thing in the morning because nobody is around to distract me. I’m a stay-at-home mother to a tornado toddler, and I feel more productive since I started getting up at 5 AM than I did when I worked a full time job for my local government.

I feel motivated and fulfilled, because I work on myself first. I take care of the rest of the day much more efficiently when I know I’ve ticked off a few thinkgs off my “me” list.

Morning People Are More Positive

If you’re normally a late sleeper, you’re more likely to spend time thinking about work or problems before you go to bed. That’s bound to make you wake up feeling that cloud.

You wake up feeling negative because you thought about problems in your past, present, and future. Research shows that people who go to bed earlier and wake up earlier tend to have more of a problem-solving hat on, which also changes your perspective on said problems to begin with.

According to an article in Entrepreneur Europe, Christopher Randler, a biology professor at the University of Education in Heidelberg, Germany, said,

Morning people anticipate problems and try to minimize them. They’re proactive. Many studies have linked this trait, proactivity, with better job performance, greater career success, and higher wages.”

Going to bed earlier takes away the magnifying glass on your problems. That makes getting up early and doing something for yourself a lot easier.

Exercising Gratitude First Thing

Waking up and listing a few things that you’re thankful for will make you feel good the more you practice. It might feel like another saturated and over-heard life-hack, but it works when you give it a try. And you don’t have to feel it at first — faking it till you make it works because you’re literally forming a new habit at this point.

The key is breaking an old pattern of thought by forming a new one in your mind. When you give it a try, you’ll naturally start to feel the gratitude all those self-help gurus rave on about over time. Practising profound gratitude is as necessary and as scientific as water.

Final Thoughts

If you want to feel good, you have to practice feeling good. That involves some changes within you, and that takes time.

When you realise that you are not your negative feelings, it becomes easier to engage more with positivity. You can help yourself by practicing gratitude in the morning to help break the old pattern of thinking.

I get up early and spend an hour on myself because I want to feel good. When I do what I want, I am a much better person to everyone else. A much better mother. A much better wife. I feel happier about my circumstances, and look forward to working on and achieving my goals.

When you take the time to do something that matters to you, you’ll be much better prepared to work on everything else, including the less enjoyable tasks. Your negativity lens will shrink and you won’t identify problems as obstacles, but rather steps towards your goals.

Embrace the beauty in the slot of time hardly anyone else takes advantage of. You deserve it.

Sylvia Emokpae, thinker and philosopher, is passionate about self-love and motherhood. See more work like this.

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