When Your Morning Routine Becomes a Burden — And how to Create One That Actually Serves You
The advice of having a morning routine that helps you “win the day (week, your whole life)” is everywhere if you’re reading about self-improvement and -fulfillment and are looking for ways to become a better, more mindful, more grounded, more successful person. Which makes sense, since the largest part of your life is actually made up of the small things that you do on a daily basis.
However, after trying countless daily routines and getting frustrated by my perceived failure in not being able to follow the outlined path to success, I started to adopt a different perspective regarding morning routines — and it was a complete game-changer.
Most articles and advice that deal with morning routines regard the following elements to be vital for a good morning routine:
- The time you wake up (early!)
- Mental hygiene: Acts of meditation and mindfulness
- Physical movement: Exercise, yoga, daily workouts, etc.
They mostly conclude with this advice: Stay consistent. Keep at it, even if it sometimes sucks, as it’ll serve you in the long run.
It makes sense as there are countless case studies, podcasts, and books revolving around highly successful people who do exactly these things.
There is just one problem. What if you are one of those people who never seem to manage to wake up between 4 and 6am, who don’t honestly feel like conventional meditation changes their lives (or even makes them a little less restless) and who cannot for the life of them get themselves to go for a morning-run or finish a morning-workout session?
What if you are one of those people for whom morning routines feel more like a burden than a major life-improvement?
Rest assured, you are not alone. Not alone in the circle of ordinary mortals and not alone in the circle of highly successful people, either.
Viewing morning rituals and success from multiple angles
As for ordinary mortals, here is my case. I have phases of bad insomnia, am a natural night owl and my mind is most active when other people go to bed. I like to exercise but can barely move in the morning. My mind certainly needs rest but with meditation, I often achieved the exact opposite, even after doing it for longer-ish periods.
Is my life a ground-breaking success? No, but I’m happy, consider myself productive, and have found a way to accept myself along with what I can’t change. I also DO have a morning routine which I love, but more about this later.
As for highly successful people, it’s pretty much the same. It’s just that those whose key to the kingdom didn’t lie in anything that had to do with their morning routine tend to not write articles about their morning routines. Don’t get me wrong — I admire Tim Ferriss and his advice and love it if successful people share stuff that works for them. But when looking at success and how to emulate it, it’s worth looking also past the self-improvement and entrepreneurship-niche. Look also at the James Joyces, Thomas Wolfes and Gertrude Steins of this world.
The book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey is a real goldmine depicting how versatile mornings of successful people can be. For example, curry quotes the biographer Richard Ellmann when describing James Joyce’s morning:
He woke about 10 o’clock, an hour or more after Stanislaus had breakfast and left the house. Nora gave him coffee and rolls in bed, and he lay there, as Eileen [his sister] described him, “smothered in his own thoughts” until about 11 o’clock.
James Joyce is regarded as one of the most important authors of the 20th century and there are countless artists and creatives like him who don’t or didn’t start the morning in any way self-help books would suggest.
Here is another excerpt, this time describing the day of René Descartes who is one of the founders of modern philosophy:
Descartes was a late riser. The French philosopher liked to sleep until mid-morning, then linger in bed, thinking and writing, until 11:00 or so. “Here I sleep ten hours every night without being disturbed by any care,” Descartes wrote from the Netherlands, where he lived from 1629 until the last few months of his life. “And after my mind has wandered in sleep through woods, gardens, and enchanted palaces where I experience every pleasure imaginable, I awake to mingle the reveries of the night with those of the day.” These late-morning hours of meditation constituted his only concentrated intellectual effort for the day; Descartes believed that idleness was essential to good mental work, and he made sure not to overexert himself.
In short, success and great mornings come in a whole variety of facades and what we often overlook is that the purpose of a morning routine is to make your life better and more enjoyable, not harder. A “successful morning routine” that eats up your energy and requires significant changes to the person that you happen to be, completely defeats its purpose and reduces the whole thing to absurdity.
How to Create a Morning Routine that Serves You
So should you just give up and stay a routineless, unmindful and scattered person? By no means! As I mentioned earlier, I do follow a morning routine, but it took me years to form it in a way that it works for me. To save you some time, here is what I learned from my painful journey to optimizing my days:
Take stock of who you are
Craft a morning routine respecting and considering your personal strengths, weaknesses and — most of all — bodily functions. “Early bird” and ”night owl” are not just two witty expressions describing late risers and people who wake up before the sun does. These are important factors of what scientists call chronotypes, aka the natural timeline for our “primal” activities. Sleeping is one of these, but so are e.g. eating or having sex. You can not change your chronotype. Quite the opposite— forcing activities, habits and waking times onto yourself that interfere with it can lead to a sleep disorder and we all know how good that one is for productivity, success, and well-being. The Power of When-Quiz created by Dr. Michael Breus is a great starting resource to learn more about your chronotype and how to craft your routines around it.
Do what you love, and not what other people love or tell you to love
Strongly related to the previous point, always keep in mind that every successful and productive person is successful and productive in their very own, unique way. What works or worked for Tim Ferriss, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs or Margaret Thatcher is not bound to work for you too, in the same way. Someone who thinks best after a good round of physical exercise in the morning will attribute a large part of their success to it, but this won’t automatically make you a better thinker and strategist after a 10km morning run. Take other people’s morning routine recipes as ideas and inspiration. See their ingredients as a cooking recipe (to e.g. ratatouille — a dish where you have plenty of freedom regarding what and how much to add) rather than a baking recipe for a complicated cake (where the amount and presence of e.g. yeast actually makes or breaks the whole thing).
Reframe your perspective on routines
You’ll often hear that a routine only is a routine if it is something consistent that you strictly do every day, as this is how routines manifest. While the definition of routine definitely includes steadiness and regularity, it is really up to you how wide or narrow you define your morning routine. “Taking time for yourself every day after you wake up” does already count as a routine; why make it stricter than this if it doesn’t feel good? Take this as a starting point and narrow down from here, not the other way round. Simply, make it a routine to have a ritual, instead of defining five strict activities and feeling guilty if you cannot find it in yourself to accomplish them all.
Give yourself permission to choose
Taking this further, a lenient definition of your morning routine allows for plenty of creativity. Prepare a list of morning routine ideas and activities that you allow yourself to choose from. Mine includes workouts and runs, but also coffee, journaling, reading, writing a haiku, writing morning pages, planning out my day, language apps or listening to a Ted Talk. From your kit, you can pick one or two that you really do every day for longer periods, but the rest can really be up to your current mood of the day. To have this kind of choice choice takes the stress away from pushing your mornings into a straitjacket, will make you look forward to your mornings and provide your days with a structure.
Allow your morning routine to change
Even your set morning routine can and will change. You might fall in love with yoga and make it a more steady routine but find that you no longer enjoy it after some time. Maybe journaling or expressing gratitude was a steady part of your day at one point but it started to feel like a chore lately. Just because something works now doesn’t mean it’ll work for you in the future, and that’s okay.
A good counterexample for the positive benefits of having the same routine for years is the famous gratitude practice. Undoubtedly, shifting your perspective by noticing the tiny wonderful things in life and adopting a positive attitude is great. However, as Emiliana Simon-Thomas, instructor of the Science of Happiness-course at the University of California, Berkeley points out,
“[T]here’s always the possibility of diminishing return with forced or obligatory over-repetition, like: ‘Uh, let’s see, I am grateful for Post-it notes … for being lots of colors.’ Either it gets shallow or it makes us feel overextended. Think of it like exercise — if a person exerts themselves continuously in the same kind of motion, they risk getting hurt.”
Allow your routine to change. Life is about constant change and movement for better or worse and our habits should be there to aid these changes, not to hinder them.
It’s not only about the morning
Yes, mornings are important but not everything that’s labeled as a “good morning activity” will suit you that well after waking up. For example, I have found that I rather plan my next day or exercise in the evening. Maybe the best thing for you is to just wake up, brush your teeth and get to work instantly and it is rather the evening when you take this time for yourself. If this is what has always worked for you — go for it and do not create a morning habit just for the sake of it. Again, your habits should serve and suit you and what you do. If a lunch- evening or midnight routine is your thing you should absolutely relish it and allow yourself to skip the morning-routine thing entirely.
Get rid of the all-or-nothing mentality
No matter how strict or lenient your morning routine is, from time to time you’ll be bound to skip it entirely and “waste” your whole day without doing anything that feels good, successful or productive. That’s totally okay and an inherent part of being human. Don’t beat yourself up over your “bad” mornings and days. Be gentle to yourself and just jump back the next day, without feeling guilty.
I wrote this article to reframe and alleviate the amount of stress that often comes with creating a successful and fulfilled life. Over-optimisation is certainly a thing and it used to fill me up with stress, anxiety and bad sleep — kind of the opposite of what I wanted to achieve in the first place. I hope that reading this gave you a little relief and a good framework to design your mornings and days in a way you can actually look forward to them.
Here are the 4 main takeaways:
#1 Reframe your morning routine to be simply a good time you choose to spend with yourself.
#2 View your morning routine as a kit you can choose from rather than a strict set of activities.
#3 Allow for your morning routine to change over time.
#4 It is okay to skip days without feeling guilty.
Don’t forget: A morning routine is there to serve you and bring enjoyment to your days. Be gentle to yourself and allow it to be something you can actually look forward to.
Read on:
To give you even more inspiration for your morning-routine kit, here are two excellent Reddit threads where people list their wonderful morning routines. They range from the curious to the hilarious and are packed with great ideas. Some of my favorite ones include:
- a skincare routine
- a drawing practice
- going for a walk and listening to an audiobook
- saying good morning to a friend
- dancing all weird and crazy in your room
- relish a good breakfast
- lying in bed with your eyes closed, daydreaming
- watering your house plants
- watching cartoons
- getting some direct sunlight
Here are the links to the threads:
Disclaimer: the link to Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals is an affiliate link. It means that I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase at no additional cost for you. This didn’t shape my opinion in any way; I love this book, it really inspired me and I hope it’ll do the same for you.
