One Morning Habit to Rule Them All

It’s lightning fast, requires minimal effort, and has saved me from cycles of torment and remorse.

When did we get so fucking neurotic about mornings?

Meditation.

Affirmations.

Workout before breakfast.

Workout after breakfast.

Workout after a protein shake but before breakfast followed by free-writing for 20 minutes while hanging one-handed from a pull-up bar.

In reality, there is only one thing you need to do to “win the morning.”

Nothing.

That’s it. Nothing.

Meditation is not nothing. Meditation is an exacting and rigorous practice requiring discipline and intent.

Screen-gazing is not nothing. That device you’re holding is as addictive as heroin. Allow it into your mental driver seat before you’re fully awake and it might be days before you take back the wheel.

Only nothing is nothing.

Sit on a couch, sit on the floor.

Sit on the toilet.

For the love of god do not go anywhere near your cell phone. No messages, no email before you’ve done at least 5 minutes of nothing.

Why?

The central problem of awakening was stated beautifully by Gabriel García Márquez in “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”

What García Márquez says of marriage can also be said of one’s self. It disappears every night before bed and must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.

Sleep is the ultimate flow-state. Unimpeded by sensual reality, our subconscious journeys wherever it will. Waking up, we desire to come back into ourselves. But who are we?

Morning rituals are an attempt to answer this question. A kind of hypnotic induction to bring us back to whoever we think we want to be.

But again, who are we?

The problem is, I might not know today who I want to be tomorrow.

Some days I work furiously until my fiancée gets home from work. A slide deck, a short story, a financial model gets pounded into shape and shipped, and I relish the thrill of creation. It’s good to start those kinds of days with pushups.

Some days I walk aimlessly around the city, read a book, idle pleasantly beside the river.

Going to sleep the night before, I usually have some idea of what I want to do tomorrow. Sometimes I set a powerful intention.

But I never truly know until I wake up.

Humanity never evolved to do the same thing each day. For most of evolutionary history, our habits changed with the seasons. Even within seasons, some days we would hunt, some days rest, gather, make clothes, play games, tell stories.

A complete self encompasses different moods, different attitudes, different impulses on different days. Anything else is a reduction of who we are.

That’s why I choose five minutes of nothing before anything else.

It allows me to feel into who I want to be that day, without the influence of hypnotic induction.

I look out the window, stare at the wall, listen to birds, and listen to my soul.

Then, if I feel like it, I meditate. Do push-ups. Free-write. Get straight to whatever it was I was planning to do that day. Or crawl back to bed and sleep until lunch time.

Nothing is not a replacement for all rituals.

It is the prerequisite for choosing the right ones.