Meaningful mornings
Find what is meaningful to you, and let go of the rest.
It’s the beginning of January, and I have been reading self-improvement articles by the shovelful since October. I’ve been reading all about how it’s awesome for your productivity to get up at dawn, how I won’t amount to anything great in life if I don’t make my bed to a military standard every morning, and how there are exactly 23 things I have to do before 8am in order not to be a total loser for the rest of my existence.
I haven’t been doing the following routine for very long, but I felt like the internet was lacking in articles that gave the perspective of someone who is in the process of changing their routine, rather then someone already in the habit of getting up early. So here’s how I feel about my transition to earlier, more meaningful mornings.
I tried time and time again to commit to getting up early over the past few month, only to fail and go back to my previous habit. I felt so overwhelmed by all these boxes to check before my brain was just remotely awake, that I felt like a failure before even starting. The sheer amount of different tasks other people seemed to think were essential to start my day right only paralyzed me, and I struggled to pick a routine, and stick to it long enough to see if it would work out for me. This feeling of failure left me dissatisfied and disappointed in myself, so I kept on reading more and more and more articles about what I should be doing in the morning, as opposed to actually doing it. It was a subconscious way of living the perfect morning precariously through someone else’s. Once I realized what I was doing was potentially dangerous — I didn’t want to find myself, in a few months or years, having never started because I got lost in other people’s lives — something clicked.
A morning routine is not meant to be an endless list of boxes to check before an arbitrary hour. The point of a morning routine is to help us be more deliberate with our most precious resource: our time. It’s about spending the first couple hours of our day doing something that is meaningful to us, that brings us joy, or satisfaction, that adds value to our lives.
I was wanting to get up early without knowing why I wanted to get up early. I kept failing at it because I didn’t know what I was getting up for, and because I had no clear reason in my head, I continued hitting the snooze button. It was time for me to ask the difficult question: why do I want to get up early? What is it that I want to do so bad that it’ll make me leave my bed the second my alarm goes off? For me, the answer is this: I want to free up my evenings.
I usually keep all my activities for the evening; working 9 to 5, I thought it was the only time I had to either go to the gym, or work on a side project. It also means that if a friend invites me to dinner, I would have to sacrifice either my work out, my side project, or my social life, which is very irritating. But by the time 5pm rolls around, I’m already exhausted and my brain is in a fog from staring at a screen all day. After work is not a productive time-slot for me, and all I want to do when I get home is relax, make a nice dinner, and sit with a glass of wine. That is why I want to get up early; to allow myself to have down-time in the evening. With that in mind, it’s a lot easier to set my alarm and stick to it. Also, I let go of the pressure to do exactly the same thing every morning. It just isn’t realistic for me currently to get up early enough to meditate, have breakfast, work out, and work on a side project, all in time to be at work for 9am. So I plan to break it up; some mornings I’ll get up and head straight to the yoga studio, and some I’ll get up, meditate, and work on my brain, whether it’s through writing, sketching or simply reading.
The point of this article is not to get anyone on the same routine as me, and the reason for that is simple. What is meaningful to me is completely different than what is meaningful to others. The point of this article is to help us ask ourselves the important questions: what do I want to do, and most importantly why do I want to do it?
