The Importance Of A Morning Routine

I call these the three M's of a morning routine. The first M is mindfulness, the second M is movement, and the third M is mindset. So I say, look, I'm a huge fan of morning routines because they give you a period of calm in the morning that's just going to make you a bit more resilient to cope with those stresses that will come up in your day. It's not if they're going to come up, they will come up. But I think the three M's provides a very valuable structure to help you think about what are you going to put into your morning routine. and it works if you have an hour in the morning, it works beautifully well. If you only have 5 minutes, like some of my patients, it can still work really well. So the first term mindfulness can be it can be meditation, it can be breathing, you know, it can be a practice of mindfulness. Whatever you want can go under that umbrella of mindfulness. I personally, currently I'm doing the Calm Meditation app. So first thing when I get up in the morning, I'm plugging into the Calm Meditation app. I put my phone on airplane mode so I can't see any of the incoming noise that might be on there, and I do 10 or 15 minutes meditation. Some days, Mark, I hit the zone and I feel really, really calm. Other days, I just go through my to-do list. But what I've learned to do is not beat myself up about it on those days where I'm going through my to-do list. I'm accepting that, hey, you know what? My mind's a little bit busy today. That's okay. Whereas even 18 months ago, I would get slightly frustrated, oh, I can't switch my mind off. I can't clear my mind. So I think that's a great practice for people to do. Then I move on to movement. Again, movement can be anything depending on what you like. I do a lot of hip stretches, maybe some yoga moves, maybe some workouts on a step, maybe some press ups, whatever I feel like for five or 10 minutes. That is all I do. And then I'll move on to mindset. So mindset can be anything to put you in a positive frame of mind. So it could be reading a book that you find very uplifting for a few minutes with a cup of tea in the morning. It could be doing affirmations. And actually, you know, like many people listening, I've got young kids, right? So my daughter, who's currently six, has a sixth sense when daddy is up, right? So I try and get up before them and get my morning routine done, but she can sense when I'm downstairs doing it. And often she'll creep down in. Often it's in my second end, in my movement, which is fine because she just does the movement with me. But if she's there with me for the third end, which is mindset, I'll do affirmations with her. So we'll sit there together, I'll hold her hand, she'll hold my hands, and we will say for about two minutes, I'm happy, I'm calm, I'm stress-free. I'm happy, I'm calm, I'm stress-free. And we'll just repeat that for two minutes. And at the end of those two minutes, she's got the most beautiful smile on her face. I feel totally relaxed and calm. And that calm continues throughout the day. that's the beauty of it. It's not just in the moment, I'm more resilient to the stressors in my life. Now, for people who are thinking, I don't have time for that, because I've got a lot of patients who are single moms who might be working two jobs. I managed to persuade them to give it a go even for five minutes. And one of my patients simply does this. She does her morning routine with those 3Ms in just five minutes. She gets up and for one minute, she will do deep breathing. She does a breath that I taught her called the 3-4-5 breath, when you breathe in for three, hold for four and breathe out for five. Okay, she does that for one minute. Then she does two minutes of some yoga moves that she learned on YouTube, right? So this is super accessible. She didn't have to go to a class, even though I recommend yoga classes. She learned some moves on YouTube, which she likes. And then for the final two minutes, she's got about three or four books that make her feel good. And she literally, for two minutes, she reads three or four pages from that book. And she has reported back that actually that has really, really helped her. In fact, she thinks it's helped her eczema get better, which is remarkable because there are many things that can cause eczema. Eczema we know ultimately is a slight dysfunction of the immune system, stress impacts the immune system. So for her, doing that morning routine, she feels is helping her with her skin.