Morning Routine Pt. 1

I have been trying for so long now to get myself to wake up early so that I can ease into my day without feeling rushed and overwhelmed. However, this has proven to be TOUGH! Your girl is not a morning person by any means. Early bird gets the worm? Well, every morning I prefer sleep over said worm.  I work from home and start around 9 AM. Most of the time, I take full advantage of getting that extra sleep in the morning, roll out of bed, quickly take my dog out, and then log into work. It doesn’t help that I live in a one-bedroom apartment and my desk is literally right next to my bed. I also blame my dog. He wakes up, jumps on my bed, snuggles up next to me and lets me sleep until whenever my heart desires. On more occasions than I would like to admit (when I’m feeling extra motivated), the night before I will create this detailed list of everything I want to accomplish before work the next day:

7:00-7:05 – Wake up

7:05-7:20 AM – Take Theo on walk

7:20-7:40 AM – Skincare Routine/drink greens

7:40-7:50 AM – Stretch

7:50-8:00 AM – Journal

8:00-8:30 AM – Read

8:30-9:00 AM – Make breakfast and coffee

Holy anxiety! Trying to go from consistently waking up at 8:45 AM to waking up at 7:00 AM the next morning and trying to accomplish ALL of these things is already setting myself up for failure. The minute I don’t wake up right at 7:00 AM, the rest of the schedule is ruined, I’ll feel guilty about it and then end up snoozing my alarm and waking up at 8:45 AM anyway. I don’t know about you, but waking up immediately feeling guilty that I didn’t follow through is not a good way to start the day.

It’s been frustrating because I have so much discipline in so many other areas of my life. I track my macros, I train at the gym 4-5x a week, I get a set number of steps in each day, I delay my caffeine intake every day but for some reason I don’t have the discipline to get up early. But—and hear me out--all of these things have built over a number of years; I didn’t just decide to start doing all of these things at once. That is the key point that I’ve been missing and one of the reasons I haven’t been able to accomplish my goal. I think it’s good to have a general idea of what you want to accomplish but there needs to be smaller stepping stones before you reach that “end” goal. In my case, maybe i’ll wake up at 8:30 AM for a week and do my skincare routine. Once I can accomplish that without difficulty, then I can move on to maybe waking up at 8:15 AM to do my skincare routine and then take Theo on a walk etc.

I am also no stranger to asking for help when I know I need to leave it up to the professionals! I hired a morning routine coach (shoutout Claire Edwards IG: @heyitsclaireedwards) to help me stay accountable, and she is going to help me create a morning routine specific to what I want and need. At this point, I am not sure what that looks like but I’m sure it will be ever evolving for whatever phase of life I am in. Everyone’s morning routine will look different and just because some people would rather workout or journal in the morning, that doesn’t mean you have to. I’ll keep you all updated with my thoughts through this process in hopes that it can help someone 😊 Let’s get that worm!