Best Morning Routine for a Healthy and Happy Life

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The best morning routine is the one that gets you to your first real task awake, calm and clear about what you are doing. It does not have to be long, and it does not have to look like anyone else’s. But the good ones share a shape, and once you know it you can build your own in a week.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: there is no such thing as the best morning routine. There is only the best morning routine for you. What follows is a set of pieces that work; the order and the mix are yours.

Start the Night Before

A good morning is mostly decided the evening before. Three things make the biggest difference:

• A fixed bedtime. The same time every night, give or take half an hour, does more for how you feel at 7 am than anything you do at 7 am.
• The phone out of the bedroom. Charge it in another room and buy an alarm clock. You cannot start the day scrolling if the phone is not there.
• Tomorrow’s first task, decided. Write down the one thing you will do first, before email, before anything. The morning then has a point.

We go into the evening side in detail in How to Design a Night Routine That Improves Your Next Day Focus.

Waking Up Well

What is the first thing you do after you wake up? It should not be checking your phone. Picking up a screen the moment you open your eyes hands the first, clearest part of your attention to whoever posted last night, and it primes your brain for a day of switching. Leave the phone alone for the first half hour at least. The news will keep.

Instead, reach for a big glass of water. After six to eight hours asleep you are mildly dehydrated, and it shows up as grogginess. A glass of water, lemon in it if you like, is the quickest fix there is.

Then get some daylight. Open the curtains, step outside for two minutes, or eat breakfast by a window. Morning light is the signal your body clock uses to set the day, and it makes the fixed bedtime easier to keep as well.

Move

You do not need a workout. Ten minutes counts. A walk round the block, a few stretches, a short yoga sequence, or a proper session at the gym if that is your thing and your schedule allows it. The point is to be awake in your body before you ask your brain to concentrate.

The payoff is bigger than it looks: people who exercise in the morning rate their concentration and mood higher for the rest of the working day. The evidence is in How Exercise Impacts Your Overall Productivity.

Cold Showers (Optional)

Some people swear by finishing the shower cold, and there is a little evidence behind it. In a Dutch trial of about 3,000 people, those who ended their showers with 30 to 90 seconds of cold water for a month reported 29% fewer sick days from work than those who didn’t, though they felt ill on just as many days; the length of the cold blast made no difference. Most of them said it made them feel more alert, and most carried on after the trial ended.

The first few days are a shock, and that is the point. If you have a heart condition, check with your doctor first. Otherwise, try it for a week, and remember that the hot tap is only an arm’s length away.

Breathe, Then Plan

Five minutes is enough. Sit somewhere quiet, close your eyes and follow your breath; slow, controlled breathing settles the body and the mind. Then look at the first task you wrote down last night and picture yourself doing it. That is the whole plan. Three tasks for the day at most, the hard one first.

Breakfast

Eat something, and keep it simple. Oats, fruit, eggs, yogurt, a smoothie: whatever you will actually make on a Tuesday. Smaller portions early in the day sit better than a big plate, and if you trained hard, eat a bit more. The breakfast that works is the one that gets you to lunch without a crash and without thinking about it.

Protect the First Hour

Everything above is in service of one thing: a good first hour of work. That hour is when your attention is freshest, and it is also when email, chat and the feeds are at their most tempting, because everyone else is waking up too.

So protect it. Open the task, not the inbox. If willpower is not enough, and for most of us it isn’t, FocusMe can hold the line for you: a Weekly Schedule blocks social media, news and email until 10 am every weekday, on your computer and your phone, and the routine ends in an hour of real work instead of an hour of catching up on everyone else’s.

If You Have Kids

If small people wake you up early, build them into the routine rather than fighting it. A glass of water and a walk to the end of the road works for a four-year-old too, and children who see a calm morning learn to have one. It also makes it a great deal easier to keep your own.

Making It Stick

Write the routine down and stick it where you will see it on waking. Seeing it every morning is what turns a plan into a habit.

Then give it time. A University College London study that tracked people building a new daily habit found it took 66 days on average before the behavior felt automatic, with a range from 18 days to 254. Simple habits like the glass of water settle fast; harder ones take longer. Missing the odd day made no difference to whether the habit formed, so a bad morning is not a reason to give up.

Finally, remember that the best morning routine is the one that works for the life you have this month. Life changes. If you can hold a routine loosely enough to adjust it and firmly enough to keep it, good days await.

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