Jim Kwik explains why making your bed each morning builds momentum for the whole day. The habit creates small wins, reduces stress through a tidy space, and bookends your day with accomplishment. He calls it a keystone habit that trains your brain to sustain other habits.
Welcome to today's Kwik Brain Challenge. I am your brain coach and host of the Kwik Brain Podcast, Jim Kwik. And today your challenge is making your bed for a better brain. And you're either thinking this, you're thinking, Jim, I already make my bed, why do I need to watch or listen to this episode? I'll tell you in a moment. Or you're thinking number 2, Jim, I don't want to make my bed. I've never made my bed. It's such a waste of time. I'm just gonna make it messy again, or my partner is gonna end up making the bed. Let me tell you a few reasons why you want to make your bed and why it's It's good for your brain. It's gonna help you to have better focus and improve memory and overall better life. It's like making your bed. You like make up your mind, right? Because it's good bed hygiene. It's also good mental hygiene. The number one reason, number one is this: how you do anything is how you do everything. How you do anything is how you do everything. Your life is really a reflection of the cumulative habits that you have, right? First you create your habits and then your habits create you back. You create your habits of meditation and journaling and working out and eating good food, and all of a sudden that creates your life back. Now, the most important habit— I think that one of the most important habits to get good at is the habit of creating new habits, because most people, they want to create a new result in their life, but insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. And most of us are doing the same thing. We're using the same words, the same thoughts, the same habits, the same behaviors, the same feelings, and we're expecting life to change, but it doesn't happen that way. So little things mean a lot. So how you do anything is how you do everything. So make your bed. What does it take? 1, 2 minutes? Make it with excellence, because how you do that is how you're gonna do everything else in your day, because success breeds success. They call it the science of momentum. You have one big win, you know, which is a win. You create— you accomplish something the first thing in the morning, and then you can build on that. The second reason why you wanna make your bed is because we talk about the 10 keys for activating your Kwik Brain. Eating good brain foods, killing automatic negative thoughts, different workouts to build your brain power, supplementation. We talk about positive peer group and sleep and really maximizing or optimizing your reduction for stress, all that. But also we talk about a clean environment, right? We're talking about having a tidy environment. You're seeing this a lot online, having everything clean because your external world is a reflection of your internal world. And when you clean your environment, Don't you feel less stress? Don't you have clarity of thought? So start the first thing in the morning by making your bed. When you get out of bed, you make it and you have a clean environment and you train yourself to have control over your environment because you influence your environment and your environment also influences you right back. And the third reason why you want to make your bed first thing in the morning is because once it's done and it's— you do it with excellence, and how you do it anything is how you do everything. You're establishing a clean environment. I mean, don't you— when you look at a bed that's freshly made, like you're at a hotel room and you look at that hotel bed and it's immaculate, doesn't it feel good, right? But you get to come back to that. So the third reason is if you come full circle, when you finish your day and somebody asks you how your day was because you created this momentum of success, you're like, I crushed it. And you get to go to bed, you come back to Success, right? You made success in the morning, you had your day, you come back to success. So both bookends of your day, first thing in the morning and last thing at night, you start with success. So for more information about this, what I would recommend you listen to is number one, listen to my morning routine episode. Number two, listen to the episodes we did on habits with James Clear and Dr. BJ Fogg, how to create new habits and how to break old disempowering habits. And finally, I would listen to the episode with Julia Roy about productivity and how you have different places and devices for different activities, especially the bedroom. So here's what you're going to do. You're going to make your bed first thing in the morning. You're going to do that even if it's difficult. You're not going to ask somebody else to do it. You're going to do it and take a picture of it and then post it. Tag me @JimKwik, hashtag Kwik Challenge. Kwik Challenge. And I'll repost some of my favorite, but what you're gonna do is really celebrate the fact that you're doing this, that you can make little habits and it changes your brain and changes your life. Because what other habits can you take on after this? You're getting really good at creating new, brand new habits, and you'll have a well-made bed and a well-made mind. I'll see you in the next challenge.
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