This Is How I Wake Up Now

The tiny things I do before I leave my cozy bed

Many times I awaken and I feel that feeling in my chest: the familiar rush of hormones and the sting of anxiety.

I used to leap out of bed in a panic and start running around mindlessly trying to catch up with the rhythm inside me.

I’d corral the family, and start barking orders to get people in motion.

Busyness has been programmed into me. I used to think busyness made me more productive: busy moving, busy thinking, and busy being. It’s what I’ve always known. I saw my mom do it for so many years and I think I mirrored her.

After so many years of being on auto-pilot, I’m undoing a lot of patterns.

I started with my mornings.

How I now get out of bed

When I wake up and feel that sense of tremendous urgency, I stop.

Nothing is wrong.

I watch the feeling.

I don’t ask where it came from because it’s become part of me. My brain has been hardwired this way for so long, so it’s used to going to that place. It takes time to rewire, but it can be done. It’s all about changing how I react to that anxious feeling and studying it with curiosity.

Deep breathe

I take deep breaths: Inhale three, hold three, exhale three, pause three. And repeat.

This is a grounding breath and I use it at all times of the day, especially before getting out of bed.

Say thank you

We all know by now that gratitude is so important. Unfortunately, it’s been highly commercialized, but if that gets more people to be thankful for the simple things in life, I’m okay with it.

My former business coach used to tell me

It’s hard to be in a place of fear when you’re grateful.

So if you wake up anxious or just ‘off’, take those deep breaths and say thank you for another day of life, your cozy bed, your body, or whatever comes to mind.

Affirm something that is grounding

When you wake up, your body is coming back to this physical plane. If you’re not a lucid dreamer (I’m not yet), you may have been doing some serious work during your sleep. You might feel out of sorts when you wake up.

When I wake up anxious or very sleepy, affirming helps bring me into the present moment.

I’ll admit that I used to think affirmations were ‘cheesy’. Many of them don’t resonate with me. I know that words have power and that what we put into the world, we become.

I was limited in my thinking — I just needed to find the affirmations that work for me. After all, if they don’t resonate with you, they won’t have any impact. They’ll just be empty words.

Affirmations don’t have to be puffed up power stances like:

I’m a rich money magnet

Instead, you could say

I’m in alignment with the energy of abundance

These are the ones I tend to say morning and evening:

Pray, or just talk to the big great Spirit

I haven’t always prayed. Religion turned me off, and I forgot the purpose of prayer.

It took getting to my 40s and marrying a spiritist to bring me back to my spirituality. Prayer has nothing to do with religion, and the act of prayer connects me to something bigger and greater. It grounds me, makes me feel safe, and reminds me that everything has a purpose and meaning.

If you’re like me and don’t have a religion, and the traditional prayers don’t jive with you, you can have your own conversation with your higher power, or you can say prayers that are more neutral in language.

Awaken the body

I vigorously rub my hands together creating friction and heat and gently place them over my eyes. This is something I learned when I was a yoga teacher and it’s one of the things I’ve kept up with.

I stretch a little bit, sometimes do some scissors kicks, or whatever helps get the energy going.

Can’t move?

There are days when I’m seriously pressing the snooze button.

Winter is hard. Sometimes I have to negotiate with myself to get out of the cozy blankets when I know it’s -20 outside, and it’s pitch black because the sun doesn’t rise for another thirty minutes.

The other scenario is that my son has crawled into bed with me and is offering me no incentive to rise, smothering me with hugs and saying just a little while longer. This is when it gets really tough.

So I apply the Five Second Rule from Mel Robbins’ book and count backward:

Five, four, three, two, one.

I’m up.

I move from the bed, put my feet on the floor and feel the ground.

The day has begun.

How this has made a difference in my morning

I am able to watch anxiety as it dissolves to a more reasonable level or maybe entirely disappears.

I save time spilling things, tripping, delegating, getting lost in the order of operations between making lunches and breakfast in the morning.

I’ve stopped trying to make my mornings like everyone else’s or to follow any prescriptive process. It really depends on how I feel.

A lot of people talk about what they do once they rise. But what you do, think, and feel before you actually stand up matters just as much.

Before you face the world, be with yourself for a few moments in your bed, and get up in a way that makes your day more harmonious, even if you’ve had a bad sleep, and even if the day ahead of you seems heavy.

Tell yourself you’re safe. Remind yourself you are a gift and that life is precious. Breathe in all that good air, even if it’s not in a forest. Say thank you for something little. We are abundant beings.

I wish you more beautiful mornings. May they turn into beautiful days.