How To Create a Nourishing and Empowering Morning Ritual

I’ve previously discussed the importance of creating a bedtime routine. This is crucial, because it helps your brain shift into sleep mode at the right time – which in turn helps you get enough restorative sleep each night.

It’s also important to put intention into creating a morning routine. The first things that you do after waking up set the stage for your entire day. How you spend your morning can put you into a calm, energized, and happy mood, or send you into a spiral of stress and anxiety. Either way, it’s very likely to impact the rest of your day.

Every person is different, so there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all perfect morning routine. But by taking some time to explore what your mornings are currently like, as well as how you’d prefer for them to feel, you can develop your own ideal morning routine that will put you into a positive mindset

So how can you create a morning routine that gets you into the right mindset for having the best possible day?

What’s your current morning routine like?

Many of my clients tell me that they don’t have a morning routine. But in truth, pretty much everyone has a morning routine. Most people have simply fallen into their morning habits without ever really thinking of this as a “routine.”

Whether you realize it or not, you almost certainly have a morning routine right now. And before you can go about developing your positive morning routine, the first step is to figure out what that current morning routine actually is.

Grab your journal and a pen. Journal about what happens during the first 30 to 60 minutes of your day. As usual, simply write whatever comes, without planning, editing, or judging what comes.

• What do you do when you first wake up? 

• What do you do after that? 

• Continue describing each of your usual morning activities up to the point where you leave the house for work (or start work remotely, or otherwise start up your usual daily activities).

Try to be completely honest with yourself. If you wake up and immediately grab your phone to check email or social media, it’s important to know this. Try not to write down the morning routine that you wish you had, but the activities that you actually spend time on in the morning.

Is your current morning routine serving you?

Once you’ve determined what you currently do with your mornings, it’s time to consider which of these habits are not serving you. 

For example, if you check your phone right away, how does this make you feel? Although most of us have a compulsive habit of checking our phones frequently, the truth is that this often makes us feel anxious and stressed. That’s probably not the way that you want to start off your day. 

Some of your habits may have a negative impact on your day, while others may have a positive impact. Still others may not necessarily be harmful, but simply aren’t adding much to your morning – they’re basically just a waste of time. By figuring out how each step in your current morning routine is impacting you, you’ll have the information you need to develop a morning routine that will serve you better.

Take some time to journal about how each of your current morning habits is affecting you. Look at the list of activities you created in the last section. For each one, consider how you feel after you do it. Write freely about this until you feel like you’ve explored it thoroughly for that activity. Then move on to the next one. Continue with this process until you’ve gone through your entire morning routine.

Generating positive morning routine ideas

Now that you have a good understanding of what your current morning routine is and how it impacts you, it’s time to think about what a more positive morning routine could look like for you.

Consider what effect you’d like your morning routine to have. Pull out your journal again.

• How would you like to feel in the morning? (Examples: happy, calm, productive, peaceful, centered, focused, energized.)

• Next, make a list of activities that would help you to feel that way. For example:

  • To feel happy, you could choose one of your favorite activities and spend 10 or 15 minutes doing that in the morning. Maybe you’d like to read, paint, or listen to music.

  • To feel productive, you might want to go for small wins. For example, you could make your bed each morning, to give yourself a sense of accomplishment.

  • To feel peaceful, you could try a few minutes of meditation or breathwork each morning.

  • To feel energized, you could do a workout in the mornings, or go for a morning walk.

  • To feel centered, you could try 10 or 15 minutes of journaling each morning.

These are simply ideas to get you started – don’t let them limit you. Try to think of as many activities as possible that will help you feel the way you’d like to feel in the morning. If there’s more than one feeling that you’d like to promote, you can list activities for each one.

Don’t just come up with one potential activity – keep journaling until you feel like you’ve come up with every possible idea you can. The more possibilities you have, the more material you’ll have to work with when developing your morning routine. Remember to consider the activities you’re already doing – if there’s an aspect of your current morning routine that’s serving you well, you can definitely put it on your list.

Creating your positive morning routine

Now it’s time to put it all together and create your own morning routine.

You’ve discovered which of your current morning activities don’t feel like they’re truly serving you. You’ll want to remove those from your mornings if possible, and replace them with healthier and more positive activities. 

Overhauling your entire morning at once may not be the best approach. When people try to make too many changes all at the same time, they’re more likely to get overwhelmed, give up, and return to their old habits. Smaller changes are far more likely to be sustainable.

Look over the writing you did earlier. Choose one change that you’d like to make in your mornings. You could choose a healthy habit to add, or a harmful habit to remove. Commit to making this one change in your morning routine.

When you’re thinking about moving away from harmful habits, research has shown that simply deciding to stop doing something is unlikely to be successful. It’s far easier to replace one activity with a different one. So rather than simply deciding to remove the harmful habit, try to think of a replacement you can do instead. 

For example, if you’d like to stop grabbing your phone first thing in the morning, simply deciding not to grab your phone when you wake up is probably not the best approach. Instead, you could put a glass of water on your nightstand and drink that as soon as you wake up, spend a few minutes meditating or doing affirmations in bed when you first wake up, or even jump out of bed and do 10 squats to help energize yourself right away. By replacing grabbing your phone with doing something different when you first wake up, you’re much more likely to achieve lasting change. This allows you to remove a harmful habit and add a positive one at the same time.

Over time, you can slowly build your ideal morning routine. Once that first change in your morning routine becomes a habit, you can add in another nourishing activity, again allowing it to replace something you’d like to remove (if possible). Continue to adjust as necessary, until you find that you’re starting your day feeling the way that you want to. 

Remember to make your morning routine fun and enjoyable. It shouldn’t feel like a chore that you have to complete, but like a gift that you’re giving yourself every morning. The positive mood and mindset that your morning routine creates will spill over into the rest of your day, which can make a huge difference in every aspect of your life.