20 Of The Best Life Changing Morning Habits -

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Life Changing Habits

Now I know that 20 daily habits are A LOT, but even integrating one of these will change your life, I promise you they have helped me tremendously! Plus I like to have options and I believe most people do to. Below I have compiled a list of habits that I really hope will bring you start your day better as well as bring more long term happiness and health into your life! Check the list out and let me know what you think at the end in the comment section if you have time and want to talk some shop! Enjoy my friends.

Disconnect My Friends!

First things first, I suggest that you don’t even touch technology for the first 15-30 minutes that you are awake. By refraining from checking your email or social media handles, you won’t be stressed out about the emails you need to return or what is going on in everyone else’s perfect lives that pasted on social media! Give yourself a brief mental break from technology and integrate some of the suggestions below! I know this is super tough, maybe the toughest thing to incorporate on this list, but it is well worth it! Start with even 5 minutes without technology upon waking then go up from there!

Meditation

Now I know there is a ton of buzz that surrounds meditation, some good, some bad. The only thing I know is that I have integrated it into my morning routine and the results have been amazing. The great thing about meditation is that you don’t have to be part of any certain religion to do it, its open for believers and non-believers. It is simply a way of quieting the mind, which if you are religious, it can allow you to feel closer to God and help aid in your spiritual growth and if not, it allows you to find peace and quiet right where you sit. Our lives our chaotic, we live in world where we all, on some level or another, in the rat race. Meditation can help you be more centered and allow you to go about your daily tasks with more optimism and in a more efficient way. It has been shown to bring a myriad of positive changes and benefits to its practicers, some of which include:

Less Stress
More Compassion
Better Focus
Better Sex Drive
Faster Physical Recovery
Better Sleep
Sharper Intuition

One of the easiest ways to start meditating as a beginner is to simply practice mindfulness meditation. This is when you tune your senses into certain things, the most popular being your breath. Try and witnessing your breath and being aware of the inhalation and exhalation as well as other sensations in the body.

You can also simply light a candle and track the flame or use a mantra like “AUM”.

Start off with just a couple of minutes at a time. These beginner methods above focus on allowing your mind to focus on one thing, helping quiet your mind through focused effort. If your mind drifts, that’s OK, just bring it quickly back with the meditation method you are using.

You can also utilize guided meditations where they can walk you through the process. There are great because there are so many guided mediation options out there ranging from quieting the mind and becoming more compassionate, to meditating on making more money and abudence and pretty much everything in between!

Here’s a video that you can use to learn upon waking in the morning to get your brain to shut the heck up! Enjoy 🙂

If you happen to not like the idea of sitting still which is a big part of meditation, you can do yoga, which is a great form of meditation, allowing you to calm both the body and the mind and also leads us into our next habit, which is exercise!

Also, due to the fact that most of us shower in the morning, why not bring your meditation practice in with your birthday suit! Practice mindfulness mediation in the shower by really feeling the water flow over your skin and listen to the water splashing against the shower walls and on the ground.

This can also be a great time to recite some positive affirmations that will start your day in a positive way!

Make Your Bed

Do you want to feel productive right out of the gate, well you can do so, and it only takes between 30 seconds to 2 minutes depending on whether you are couch surfing our living in luxury on a California King! Making your bed lets you accomplish a task right upon wakening, this will get the ball rolling onto accomplishing many more tasks throughout the day. Start strong!

Write What Your Grateful For

A great quote about gratitude from Tony Robbins – “When you are grateful, fear disappears and abundance appears”. Eckhart Tolle considers it to be the most powerful force in the entire universe among love.

Starting out your day by writing a list of what your grateful for takes minutes, if that. It also puts into perspective the great things that you have in your life that you may be taking for granted. This will create a much more positive outlook on life for you when you hone in on what your grateful for, plus it just feels good to get in touch with the people and scenarios you are grateful for.

Also on a chemical level, gratitude is shown to release positive endorphins in the body, producing a stronger immune system!

Plan Your Day Out

All of us have been guilty of having a ton of aspirations for the day and getting some or even none of them done! Schedule your day to a tee, right down to the hour of what you want to get done. This will help you check more things off of your to-do list and allow you to squeeze the most juice out of your day. Leaving you feeling full of fulfillment instead of full of regret at the end of the day!

Avoid that scale my friends!

The scale weight can either make or break a persons day. Don’t step on that sucker in the morning. Chances are that you can be retaining water or your your glucose stores can be high, falsely leading to the idea that your diet or lifestyle isn’t working. As a matter of fact, I suggest you just toss the thing completely or donate it if you don’t want to feel the remorse! Go off of how your clothes are fitting you how you feel, not a number on a scale that could even potentially be off because the scale moved onto a spot where your home floor foundation is off!

Hydration

Drinking a glass of water upon wakening is an awesome way to start the day because it has been shown to rev up your metabolism, flush toxins out, eat less for breakfast and rehydrates your body. A health hack is to add lemon to your water. Why? Well doing so has been shown to give better cell protection and provide reduction in oxidtative stress, aid digestion and is also high in vitamin C providing you with a great and simple antioxidant drink to get your morning going.

Readers Digest totally crushed an article on the subject if you want to read more about it! Incredible Health Benefits of Lemon Water

Belly Breath For a Few Minutes

Belly breathing, otherwise known as diaphramic breathing allows you to pull more breath into your lungs.

How to do it? Well its super easy, all you have to do is lye down and place your hand on your belly and focus on pushing it up with your stomach. Focus on filling your belly with air. What this does is drawn upon your lower lungs to drawn in air. It will take the emphasis of breathing from the chest which takes more energy then breathing with your diaphragm.

We are actually created to breath this way and over time the stress in our lives forces us to take shorter faster breathes, resulting in chest breathing.

Do this daily and it will become a habit, just like chest breathing has. Doing this will help you become more calm, improve recovery, strengthen your lung capacity, aid in digestion and better immunity.

Instead of using your hand, you can also use a small book to give more weight on your stomach to place more awareness on drawing your breath to that area.

Once you get familiar with the technique, you can do so more and more from a seated or upright position.

Here is a short video on how to do it correctly!

Exercise

Cranking up the good endorphins right off the bat can create both a solid start of your day as well as allow you to reshape your body. It will also have a great impact on your self image as well as give your more sustainable energy throughout the day.

If you haven’t been starting out your day with exercise but are open to it, my best suggestion is to leave your workout clothes at the edge of the bed where you step off it from. This way you’ll step on your gear and feel a little guilt if you don’t put them on! Just kidding, but really its a great reminder to just put them on and go without thinking.

Also here is a little life hack. Since we spoke about meditation and positive audio, you can listen to a guided meditation or positive audio during your working, knocking out two life changing morning habits with one stone.

Also my friends, don’t feel the need to go to the gym for exercise, especially if you don’t have a strict current workout regimen. Simply walking or running around the block a couple times, with your dog if you have one or getting up and banging out a set of push ups and pull ups with some stretching. Just starting your day with some sort of exercise is a great way to get your body and mind in motion! Start slow and build from there!

Stretching can even be a great way to start out your morning! It will help you loosen up your muscular skeletal system which can become tight when we are asleep, allowing you to be more physically relaxed and agile going into your day.

Create Your Life WHY and Read It Upon Awakening

Having a big WHY aka a big vision for your life is one of the most important things that you will ever do in your life as it will have effects in every area of your life. Really hone in on why you wake up every morning and for whom and create a WHY around that.

If you aren’t where you want to be in life, create a WHY around where you want to be. Tape this baby in the location of where your eyes gaze to each morning and even put it in other locations like your bathroom and car. This will burn this into your brain, giving you vision and purpose for your life instead of just going through the motions.

Intermittent Fasting

Being that this and Ketogenic dieting are all the buzz, I have to hit on this topic. Being that we can reap many benefits from intermittent fasting. The first one being that it can help with weight loss/fat loss. But it also frees up time to not have to make breakfast and allow you to do other more productive activities to get your morning started, like EVERYTHING on this list!

Intermittent fasting has been clincially shown to provide so many health benefits, some of which include:

new neurons in the brain
protect from brain damage
burn fat for fuel instead of glucose
lessen your risk off suffering from neurological diseases associated with aging
Creation of new mitochondria

To learn even more about the benefits of intermittent fasting, check out this very well written and reserached article.

By incorporating intermittent fasting, you will not only reap the physical and metal benefits of doing so, you will also train your mind to not be so reliant on eating food right away, creating a stronger mindset towards food and keeping a better diet. This alone will transform your body over the long term.

Other Alternatives

For those of you thinking “Dude I can’t go without breakfast!”, well then a great way to start your morning is by pre-prepping your breakfast at night so you can save cooking time and just get right to eating it! This will also allow you to set your own portion control by preparing your meal before hand, giving you a good caloric start to your day!

Also you can make a healthy smoothie to start your day. It is faster than making breakfast and can provide you with great nutrition and antioxidants to get your mind and body alert to start your day strong!

Wake Up With Natural Light

Waking up to natural light can be like kicking back a natural cup of coffee, also it has been shown to help you sleep better. So wake up with sunlight because it feels great on your skin and reap the benefits at night by clocking in some better sleep cycles! Getting 10 to 15 minutes of morning sunlight exposure has been shown to also:

Prevent eye aging
Better bone health
Help you sleep better
Fight Depression

Plus you get a great dose of free Vitamin D right off the bat providing you with a natural energy boost from the cellular level! If you don’t think have time to take a quick walk and soak in some morning sun, then just move your bed towards a window that allows you to get some sunlight on your skin in the morning.

Positive Audio

Your brain is most sucepitible to the stimuli it receives right before you go to sleep and right when you wake up. They are referred to as alpha states, which you can learn more about here. But essentially when you first awake, your mind is very relaxed and information is absorbed at a more readily pace than that of a more active waking state that we are in most the day after waking up. Due to this fact, the first thoughts and thing you listen to are going to affect your day, for better or for worse.

Being that we can access positive material for free, it is great to stream a few minutes of audio into your life off of Youtube from motivational speakers or read couple pages out of a self development book.How you start your day has been clinically proven to affect how the rest of your day plays out. Starting it out positive will allow you to have a more positive outlook on whatever life throws at you that day. And when you respond more positive to life, this will keep stress levels lower and optimism higher.

Here is a great video by the world renowned motivation speaker Les Brown, a 15 minute Morning Motivation Clip

Now you can also take this a step further and listen to or read something positive right before you go to bed which as shown to let you both sleep better and wake up more positive!

Write Out Your Goals and Review Them

Going back to the fact that your brain is more seceptible to what it is seeing in the morning, this is a great time to look at your goals and commit them to memory when your memory is at its freshest! This is will allow you to look over what you want to accomplish for your daily, weekly, monthly and yearls goals and commit them to memory. Take a few minutes to review them and visualize yourself as already having them. This will access the subconscious mind to start attracting to you your goals and dreams.

Also this is a great time to visualize thing at work going good, especially situations that are emotionally charged, like working with people that drive you nuts or asking for a raise! Creating a positive scenario in your mind will allow you to go into emotionally charged situations in a more relaxed manner allow your true self to shine instead of negative emotions.

Writing out your goals will allow you to make your thoughts concrete. In the self help book “Think and Grow Rich” Napolean Hill goes into detail about goal setting, one powerful technique he suggest among envisioning your goals is to speak them out load, which is taking writing them down to the next level. You are speaking them into existence, forcing your thoughts to transmute into the material world, transmute into the goals you have set for yourself and make them become reality.

Don’t Think

One of my biggest idols, Arnold Swarzeneggar once said that when you wake up, don’t think. Just get up and go. The more you think, the more you are apt to hit the snooze button, or second guess the positive things that you should be doing to start your morning. Get into the habit of keeping your mind shut off for the first few minutes you wake up, just use your body to get you going! If you still feel like its David and Goliath when it comes to conquering the snooze button, you have to check out this article that shows you how to stop hitting the snooze button for good. Its literally the best article I have ever read about this subject and has helped me better conquer that SOB! If only we had an app that took away option to hit the snooze button! Hey, there’s an idea for the techy readers!

Pop Some B-12

Vitamin B-12 is an excellent supplement to take in the morning due to the fact that it can give you a boost in energy and vitality as well as provide a myriad of health benefits with long term consumption like better nervous system function, brain health and even ward of mild depression. If you aren’t into taking supplements, you can still get a great dose of daily B-12 through foods like eggs, skim milk, nuts, certain cereals like bran flakes and oatmeal, salmon and ricotta cheese.

For an awesome list of many other foods that B-12 can be found in, check out this page! 22 Best Foods With Vitamin B-12.

Journal Your Thoughts Upon Wakening

Clear your mind by writing all your thoughts out when your first get up. They could be negative or positive, just put them on paper and clear your mind. You can also take one negative subject that you have been stuck on and journal it out right away as a quick mental purge to start your day!

Michagan State University put together a study that showed how it can reduce anxiety, depression and help with problem solving.

Knock Out The Hardest Thing On Your To-Do List FIRST

Before you do anything at all, get that weight off your back by doing the thing you dread the most. Whatever it is to you, and it could change daily. Whatever it is, just wake up and check it off your list. Doing the hardest thing first will make everything else look a lot more easy to do, allowing you to become more productive and have a better outlook on everything else you have to do in your day.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by the biggest task, or any task on your list, chunk it down into more bite sized pieces that will allow you to see it as much more manageable and achievable.

Fill Up Your Cup

For those of you who want to start their day in a peaceful manner, go for a nice cup of tea while reading or listening to some positive material. For my friends who are looking for a jolt and grab a cup of joe and drink it on the way to the gym!

Wake Up Early

Getting up early flat out just makes you feel more productive, even if you don’t do anything extra. But early risers also reap the benefit of better sleep as they are usually the ones that go to bed early, establishing solid sleep routines that the body can adjust to. Getting a jump on the day can allow you to do things on your to do list before you would have done them before when you woke up at a later time, giving you a great outlook on the rest of your day. A great aticle on the subject has even talked about how it provide you with:

Better Mental Health
Increased Productivity
Keeping a Healthier Diet

Read More on it HERE! Benefits of Waking Up Early

Conclusion

So there you have it. 10 morning habits that will transform your life. Now again, not all of these need to be integrated to change your life for the better as well as they don’t necessarily have to be integrated in the morning, you can sprinkle them throughout the day.

The best advice I can offer, whether you utilize one or all ten of these habits is to create a morning routine of the ones you choose to use and stick to them every single day like clock work. This will create a more powerful mindset around your morning routine and after a while, you will just get up and do it without having to think about it.

I really hope you enjoyed this article and are looking forward to integrating one or more of these morning habits. Let me know what you think about the article as well as if you have any good habits that have helped you and can help our community! Also if you disagree with any of these, I would love to hear your perspective too!

Chris