15 Fun Morning Routine Ideas for People Who Hate Mornings
Breathe in strength, breathe out bullsh*t.
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As a natural night owl, I was at war with mornings for most of my life. I have serious trouble waking up early. With the constant feeling of sleeping for too long and wasting my day, I was never good at a morning routine.
When I started to read loads of self-help books and follow self-proclaimed gurus online this turned into a full-blown self-worth crisis.
If you believe the mainstream advice of successful people there’s no way you’ll ever become something if you don’t wake up early and kick off your day with a life-changing and science-backed morning routine. You need to win the day, after all.
If you believe the transformational power-headlines, a morning routine will make you unstoppable, more successful, change your life, make you thrive, a high achiever, and help you build a billion-dollar business, among others.
I went on to race against the sun more often than I can count. I tried the alleged panacea of early waking and a powerful morning routine to set me up for success. Guess what, I lost every time after a few ambitious mornings.
The pressure, demand, and high expectations were enough to keep me awake all night. The next day, I was as groggy, unproductive, and as routineless as ever.
To solve this internal conflict, I researched chronobiology, sleep cycles, and crippling insomnia. My scientific results show I’m done with this BS.
Don’t get me wrong. To wake up at 5 am to have two hours for a full-blown wet dream of a morning routine including meditation, journaling, exercise, and a cold shower can be beneficial for some.
However, it’s by far not the ultimate solution for everyone and to claim otherwise is useless at best and harmful at worst. Only around 40% of the population are morning people. The rest are either nocturnal or fall somewhere in between. There are plenty of other people like you and me.
That said, you can still have fun after you wake up, even if it’s at 10+ am. In fact, I hereby permit you to do so without a bad conscience. You didn’t waste your day. You’re just starting.
After a lot of trial and error, here are the morning routines that brought me joy.
They’re not borrowed from Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. I don’t expect them to make me rich, productive, and powerful. In the end, these are pleasurable ways to start a day that often seems too hard to handle.
1. Listen to an Eccentric or Bizarre Podcast
I love to listen to an eccentric podcast out of my usual information bubble while I get ready in the morning.
What do I mean by that? Unique, fun knowledge about the world’s quirkiest niche topics.
To give you an example, my current favorite is Ologies with Alie Ward. Every week, she invites a highly specialized “ologist” (scientist) to talk about his field. This is how I learned about hagfishology, condorology, and acarology (the funky world of ticks), among others.
Other quirky podcasts are Stuff You Should Know, You’re Wrong About, or The Story Collider.
Here’s a link to my favorite podcast episodes about the most randomly wonderful topics. They get me out of my head, focus on disciplines and sciences out of my figurative box, and feed my hunger for knowledge.
2. Dance Ecstatically
I’m a big fan of ecstatic dance. It’s a dance in which you abandon yourself to the rhythm and move freely as the music takes you.
While usually done with a group nothing can keep you from your private ecstatic dance session in the morning. All you need is your body and a suitable playlist (I like this one).
I usually do 10–15 minutes of ecstatic dancing in front of a mirror which helps me connect to my body and emotions.
3. Take a Hot Bath (Instead of a Cold Shower)
This one was inspired by Her Majesty Princess Margaret. She took an hour-long hot bath every morning (after two hours in bed listening to the radio, reading the newspaper, and chain-smoking, mind you):
I’m not there yet but can attest to the bathing part as the ultimate chill-the-f*ck out experience to start your day.
If you don’t have a bathtub, take a hot shower and cover your body in coconut oil afterward for extra luxury.
4. Stretch (Instead of Yoga)
Morning yoga became such a trend it almost feels compulsory. You don’t have to do a sun salutation and tangle yourself up in complicated poses, however. A simple stretch is just as legit and I prefer it due to the lower entry barrier.
I did this one for years again and again. You can do it in your pajamas so no need to invest in fancy yoga attire.
5. Don’t Have a Morning Routine
That’s right. There’s life beyond (morning) routines.
A routine is something you do regularly. A morning routine is often (mis-)understood as a cast-in-stone hyper optimized chain of activities that’ll magically transform you into a creative productivity powerhouse for the rest of the day.
“It only works if you stick to it”, mind you.
I don’t believe in the single, right morning routine you have to figure out and then keep up. The fun of mornings lies in freedom and variety. You can do something different every day, or just don’t have a morning routine at all because, as discussed, you hate mornings.
There’s a fulfilled life waiting for you beyond morning routines. Don’t stress over it if you don’t need it or don’t have time for it.
6. Sit Down to Work Straight Away
Disclaimer: This one isn’t the epitome of fun, but it can still feel damn good. It’s also the antichrist of morning routines and it almost feels like a guilty pleasure.
After you read a few traditional articles about the optimal morning you might think you have to do more on a morning than wake up, brush your teeth, and sit your ass down to work.
It can almost feel as if your work is useless unless you perform a sacred 2-hour ritual upfront.
Here’s my secret: My best, most productive, most creative work happens in those mornings when I do little else but sit down to do the work.
Every activity I perform, and every line I journal takes up my limited mental space. Don’t get me wrong — a long, elaborate, glorious morning can feel good. Nevertheless, in the end, it makes me less productive.
While I don’t think productivity is the ultimate goal of the day (far from it!), sometimes we just have to get sh*t done. In those cases, I advocate starting straight away. In the end, no morning ritual will do the work for you.
7. Have a Date With Creativity
We too often feel like our creativity doesn’t deserve our time, especially if it doesn’t make any money. Writing, poetry, pottery, painting — they must wait until we did some proper hustling. Right?
Hell, no!
Your creativity deserves your quality time and undivided attention. You’re allowed to start your day with something you’re passionate about.
See it this way: If to slow down and spend time with what you like and value is automatically bad for your future, productivity, scheme of life, or diligence means there’s something wrong with the way we define these terms.
8. Don’t Talk to Anyone
On lots of days, I leave my phone switched off until lunch and use the insidious Self-Control-app on my laptop.
This prevents anyone from reaching me while I’m shielded from most of the addictive parts of the internet. While this doesn’t sound like too much fun either, I admit I love to not have to talk to anyone until lunch.
Also, we all need more clear mental space. This happens in those hours of the day in which other people’s chatter doesn’t flood our brains. We don’t doomscroll, and aren’t exposed to the opinions of others.
In other words — we need more time to think for ourselves. As Eva Keiffenheim, MSc said well, to not do so is a surefire way to live the life of others.
If you don’t think for yourself, you’ll end up living the life of others.
9. Talk to Someone — Call or Text a Friend Who also Hates Mornings
As often as I need crystal clear mental space in the mornings, I also thrive for connection.
This is especially true in mornings on which I feel terrible. Sometimes, I lie in bed and see no point in getting up. It happened particularly often since March 2020.
I find it too pointless to go to the loo, let alone perform a glorious morning routine.
On those mornings, it often helps to reach out and let a friend know how sh*tty I feel. This way, we can either vent together, motivate each other, or feel at least less alone.
10. Listen to Your Guilty Pleasures (Instead of Binaural Beats)
I made a playlist with guilty pleasures. It comes with Enrique Iglesias, Nelly, Sean Paul, and the soundtrack of Mulan.
It’s also my ultimate mood-booster. You don’t have to listen to binaural beats to further your self-improvement ad infinitum. You can listen to your guilty favorites, have fun, and start the day in a lighthearted way.
11. Meditate
At this point, you didn’t think I’d add this one, did you?
It feels pretentious to not add it, though. I meditated almost every day for years and even designed my two-day solo meditation retreat at home.
I still meditate often in the mornings. Of the traditional morning routine arsenal of a tireless self-improvement warrior, meditation is the most researched and is proven to help us deal with difficult emotions.
According to the Greater Good Science Center of the UC Berkeley, meditation sharpens your attention, can increase your resiliency to stress and your capacity for compassion can positively impact your relationships, and can even improve your physical health, among others.
I also personally experienced the powerful and positive effects of meditation — it helps me deal with my anxiety and impostor syndrome and teaches me to not take my negative thoughts and emotions too seriously. I attribute a great deal of my decision-making capacity and the ability to move forward even when I’m doubtful to the steady practice of meditation.
If you believe the self-improvement movement only one thing, let it be the power of meditation.
12. Don’t Meditate — Listen to this Anti-Meditation Instead
If meditation is something you tried and abandoned, again and again, that’s okay — you can still be a worthy, self-aware human being.
Instead, you can listen to F*ck that — An Honest Meditation. Here’s an excerpt:
Gradually, let the horse shit of the external world fade from your awareness. […] Take in a deep breath… now breath out. Just feel the f*cking nonsense float away. […] Breathe in strength, breathe out bullsh*t.
These will be your best-spent 2:30 minutes on a dreadful morning.
13. … Or Indulge In Your Anti-Gratitude Journal
I’m the last one to oppose a healthy amount of gratitude. Research, however, shows too much, and especially forced gratitude is counterproductive.
As Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director of the Greater Good Institute of the University of Berkeley put it,
“For most of the so-called happiness practices there’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.”
Instead of frantically grabbing on to gratitude and the beauty of every day, I love the idea of the anti-gratitude journal.
You’re free to keep a fancy notebook you dedicate to your negative, self-destructive thoughts. This way, you not only get them out of your head but can also acknowledge the pain of the present moment.
I call this a mourning routine.
We’re so focused on happiness we often forget pain isn’t optional — only suffering is. We can’t evade painful emotions. The best way to deal with them is to give them the space they deserve.
An anti-gratitude journal doesn’t make you ungrateful. It makes you realistic and resilient.
14. Read a Piece of Stoic Philosophy
The wise paragraphs above about suffering? I didn’t invent them. In fact, there’s a whole ancient philosophy focussed on the inherent discomfort of life. It's called Stoicism.
The ancient philosophy of Stoicism is, as Bryan Ye put it, a tool for handling pain.
The main idea of Stoicism is you cannot choose your circumstances and what happens. Life is too arbitrary for that. All you choose is your thoughts about the situations you find yourself in.
According to Stoicism, the key to a good life is to look at our situation, suffering, and mortality with profound honesty.
When I start my day with a Stoic thought it reminds me of our inherent superpower: acceptance.
Here are 3 applicable collections of Stoic thoughts you can read and integrate into your life:
- Meditations, the journal of the ancient Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius is the doorway to how we access Stoicism today.
- Ryan Holiday’s book The Daily Stoic comes with a daily piece of Stoic philosophy to ponder and integrate into your day.
- Darius Foroux publishes a weekly Stoic letter on this platform.
15. Answer a Deep-Sh*t Question
I parted with traditional morning-journalling of positive affirmations.
Every day, I’m feeling better and better.
I’m good enough.
I love my body.
I’ve been given endless talents which I begin to utilize today.
A river of compassion washes away my anger and replaces it with love.
Ugh, I don’t know about you but just reading these makes me feel worse — especially on mornings I don’t radiate positive vibes at all.
Turns out, I’m not an exception but the rule: As I learned from Oliver Burkeman’s refreshing book The Antidote: Happiness For People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking there’s a study regarding the effectiveness of these affirmations.
I assumed even though they’re cheesy they’re sure harmless and the problem is with me, as in I’m too cynical to reap the benefits.
Joanne Wood, the psychologist who conducted the study, however, drew on the so-called self-comparison theory. As Burke writes,
Much as we like to hear positive messages about ourselves, […], we crave even more strongly the sense of being a coherent, consistent self in the first place. Messages that conflict with that existing sense of self, therefore, are unsettling, and so we often reject them — even if they happen to be positive, and even if the source of the message is ourselves.
Read: If we want to reason ourselves into happiness and abundance even if what we feel is unhappiness and scarcity we’ll end up unhappier. When we don’t believe what we say it causes us distress due to inconsistency.
Nevertheless, journaling isn’t a bad thing — far from it. It helps me unlock thoughts and emotions I couldn’t have accessed otherwise.
Therefore, on some mornings, I like to answer what I call a deep-sh*t question. I get them from two resources: Gregory Stock’s The Book of Questions and Suleika Jaouad’s weekly Isolation journals email.
This is not your regular journalling question of where you want to be in five years and what three amazing things you can achieve today.
Both Gregory’s and Suleika’s questions are edgy, unconventional, and often uncomfortable. They give access to my raw and tender self and reconnect with my difficult thoughts and emotions.
Here are a few examples from The Book of Questions (BoQ) and the Isolation Journals (IJ):
- If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about one thing about yourself, life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know, and why? (BoQ)
- Would you want to spend a week as someone of the opposite sex? someone very old? very beautiful? very ugly? or severely handicapped? If so, which one would most intrigue you? (BoQ)
- Write about a beloved drink. About how you make it, a memory associated with it, or the way it connects you to others or yourself. (IJ)
- Write a confession — something you did or said that you still carry with guilt and shame. Then write your own absolution, honoring the aftermath of your actions, calling in grace. (IJ)
That’s it — you now have my anti-morning routine list full of ideas for people who hate mornings.
I hope your sense of humor is grand enough to not treat this as another burdensome to-do list. In fact, if you only remember one item from this list, let it be #5 (Don’t have a morning routine!).
It’s your morning and your life. You can be wildly successful (whatever that means) even if you waste most of your mornings. Choose your role models wisely. Don’t forget to look at the turbulent libertines who never got their sh*t together.
If you look at early bird Oprah (6 am), look also at late-riser Tim Ferriss (9–10 am).
If you look at writer Haruki Murakami (4 am) look also at James Joyce (10 am).
Finally, here’s an insightful Tweet I want to leave you with. I wish you lots of fun mornings you can hate a little less.
If you need more inspiration, join my Self-Letter. It’s a weekly email where I help you learn more about yourself, embrace your creativity, and make money while you live in alignment with your personal values.
