Mornings matter. They set the tone for the rest of your day, so it’s important to be intentional with how you spend them. If you can control your mornings, you can control your life, and one of the easiest ways to do this is to develop habits. With habits, you don’t have to think — you can simply wake up and perform the actions that are important to you. This is your opportunity to put yourself first before the world demands your attention. So what’s a good morning routine?
The Best Morning Routine
Many people search the internet for the best morning routine, but truly, it doesn’t exist. There is no universal best morning routine, because everyone is different. What works great for someone else might not work for you. The important thing is to find a good fit for you and your situation. So how do you discover your best routine?
Creating A Morning Ritual
To create your perfect morning routine, you need to first define what’s most important to you. If your priority is creating a healthy morning routine, exercise, stretching, and eating a clean breakfast should come first. If you’re building a business, your biggest needle-moving task for the business should come first. What are the important things you want to do everyday? I recommend putting those items in your morning routine if possible. Let’s go over some more examples.
Morning Routine Examples
It’s always helpful to see good examples. Hopefully these will inspire you to create your own perfect morning routine.
Let’s begin with a healthy morning routine focused on physical activity and mindfulness:
Wake up -> Drink glass of water -> Meditate for 5 minutes -> Walk for 10 minutes on the treadmill -> Stretch for 5 minutes -> shower -> eat 4 scrambled eggs -> Brush teeth
Here’s a simple morning routine for those looking to study in the morning:
Wake up -> Drink glass of water -> Open computer -> begin 60-minute study block -> shower
Notice how each habit fits in a chain? This is called habit stacking, a very powerful way to perform multiple good habits, and do so easily. We wrote a full guide here if you want to learn more: The Complete Habit Stacking Guide.
What Will Sabotage Your Morning Routine
Many people create a morning routine, gain control over their mornings for a couple weeks, feel great, but as time goes on, especially at night, they slip into bad habits. These bad habits can bleed over to the next morning and sabotage the habits you took so long to build. Staying up late, scrolling, and a lack of planning are some of the biggest culprits. If you have bad habits you want to kick, check out our guide on How to Break Bad Habits (For Good).