Master Your Mornings: The importance of a morning routine

We often say that, if someone’s in a bad mood, they’ve got out of the wrong side of bed.

Now, I don’t think that any of us really believe that the side of the bed you get out of makes any difference to how your day pans out, but there’s no arguing with the fact that all the other things you do when you get up in the morning can have a significant effect on your entire day. Maybe even your entire life.

In his book The Miracle Morning, Hal Elrod talked all about why the way we approach our mornings can be the key to the way we approach life in general.

He believes that we’re all worthy of wonderful lives and that we should never settle for anything less than the best. But, he also knows that achieving the best takes time and dedication.

According to him, successful, productive mornings lead to successful, productive days, and rushed, stressful mornings lead to rushed, stressful days.

If you’ve never thought about it before then this might seem like a bit of an exaggeration, but if you think about it, it makes an awful lot of sense.

Hal believes that there’s no challenge in life that can’t be overcome if you start your days well. Developing a solid morning routine can make all the difference to your life, and if you’re trying to live a healthier, more active lifestyle, then this could be the key.

The SAVERS morning routine

Hal came up with SAVERS as a way for us to all easily remember what we should be attempting to include in our morning routines to get our days off to the best possible start. Read on to find out what all those letters stand for.

• Silence

A moment of silence in the morning can be the perfect antidote to our busy, noisy lives, going a long way towards reducing stress levels.

You can incorporate silence into your morning routine by consciously setting aside ten, or even just five minutes for meditation, prayer or deep breathing.

• Affirmations

If you’ve never tried affirmations before then you might feel a little silly to begin with, but you’ll soon realise just how powerful they are.

Affirmations are positive statements that you repeat to yourself out loud, preferably in front of a mirror, that will help you to truly believe that you’ll overcome your fears and achieve your goals.

Saying positive things to yourself on a daily basis will help you to reprogram your mind and give you a more optimistic outlook. The more you say things as if they were true, the more you’ll come to believe that they are.

• Visualisations

Hand in hand with affirmations go visualisations. As well as repeating things to yourself, creating mental pictures of the things you would like to attain or achieve and picturing what you need to do to make that happen is another hugely powerful thing you can do in the mornings.

It’s a tried and tested method amongst athletes, but we can all benefit from it even if we’re not going to be competing in the Olympics any time soon. It helps us push aside memories of past failures and fill our minds with images of future successes.

When you’re ready to visualise, sit down and start breathing deeply, then picture yourself having achieved your goal. Work back from there, and imagine yourself taking all the necessary steps to get there.

Repeat this daily and you’ll soon start to take the steps you’ve been imagining and actually move towards your goals.

• Exercise

You don’t need to find time for a full hour-long workout in the mornings if you don’t want to, but just 10 minutes of exercise, whether yoga or a full-on HIIT workout, can do wonders for your health, energy levels and self-confidence.

It can also help you think and concentrate better throughout the day.

• Reading

Any kind of reading is fantastic for the mind, but reading a few pages of an inspirational book in the morning can get you in the right mindset to go out and take on the day ahead.

Put together a reading list of books written by people in your industry or who are experts in self-care or productivity and get inspired every single morning.

• Scribing

Once you’ve read a few pages, it’s time to get your own words down on paper. Journaling is a fantastic way of keeping track and making sense of what’s going on in your mind.

Write down your insights, ideas, breakthroughs, anything you’ve learned, anything you’ve achieved, and absolutely anything else that you feel like you want to write about. There’s no right or wrong.

Write as much or as little as you like. One popular morning writing practice is known as morning pages, which is when you write three pages every morning, but you might find you want to write more or less.

Finding the time

If you don’t have a morning routine in place at the moment, then trying to squeeze all of the SAVERS in might seem like a bit of a tall order. But it needn’t be.

At the risk of stating the obvious, one of the best ways to improve your mornings and find it easier to spring out of bed is to get to sleep earlier. If you often find yourself staying up late or struggling to get to sleep, then there are a few things you can do to help change that.

Set an alarm to remind you when it’s bedtime and decide on a time at which you’ll turn off all screens so you’re not exposing yourself to blue light. If necessary, put your phone in another room during the night and buy a real alarm clock to wake you up in the morning.

Make getting 7-8 hours of sleep a priority. If you’re planning on getting up earlier, then you should be going to bed earlier rather than cutting down on hours of rest.

Getting started

Don’t panic. I know all this can seem like a lot to begin with, but no one’s expecting you to be able to incorporate all of the SAVERS elements into your mornings from day 1.

This is will be a slow process, with you gradually getting to grips with your new approach to your mornings and adding new elements into your routine until you’ve perfected it.

Some people will prefer the all or nothing approach, but if you’d like to ease into it then you might want to start by focusing on just one of these elements and then gradually adding in others.

Here are a few general tips for ways to start transforming your mornings.

1.Wake up earlier

This one’s fairly obvious, but the most important thing in order to have a successful morning routine is having plenty of time at your disposal. After all, there’s no sense having a morning routine if you’re just going to rush it.

To start off with, try waking up half an hour earlier than you usually would. Over time, you might find you want to increase that to an hour, or you might find that half an hour extra is quite enough for you.

2. Wake up well

Do you find that your alarm tone puts you in a bad mood? Change it. Find something that doesn’t grate on you, or wake up to your favourite song.

Oh, and say goodbye to the snooze button. Five more minutes are never going to make you feel better, I promise.

There’s a fantastic app called Sleep Cycle that tracks your sleep and will wake you up at the moment that it judges that you’re sleeping the lightest, so that you wake up feeling refreshed, not like you’re wading through treacle.

3.Treat yourself

Before you start transforming your mornings, you might need to get hold of a few things to help you along the way and get you excited about this new challenge.

You’ll need inspirational reading material, so buy a few eBooks or paperbacks.

If you’re going to be writing, then why not treat yourself to a beautiful, well-made journal that you’ll treasure? If you’re spilling your innermost thoughts then you shouldn’t just be scribbling them down in any old notebook.

4. Nourish yourself

In order for all this to have any effect, you need to be well nourished and hydrated. Stock up on some energy-filled, healthy, delicious breakfast foods and make sure you start all your days with a large glass of water.

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Once you’ve discovered the power of a well-organised morning, you’ll never turn back.

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