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7 Ways To Wake Up Feeling Energised On A Monday Morning

...and throughout the week
Leanne Spencer

Leanne Spencer

5 Min Read

Do you ever wake up on a Monday morning feeling groggy, tired, uninspired, or under-energized? Does this have a knock on effect on the rest of your week, where you never really catch up until the weekend when it all starts again? Well, the good news is you’re not alone. Many, many people wake up on a Monday morning feeling under-energized, and that’s something I’m going to try and help you with. The good news is there are many things that you can do about this. Here are my seven ways to feel more energised on a Monday morning.

  1. Eat dinner three to four hours before going to bed. This actually starts Sunday night, and would apply for any evening of your week, as well. The renowned nutritionist, Alessandro Ferretti, in the podcast that I recorded with him last year, said that studies have shown that the best length of time is between three and four hours between eating and getting to bed for optimal sleep, so it doesn’t interrupt your circadian rhythm.
  2. Make sure you’re getting enough sleep. It might sound obvious, but we’ve come to accept that the new normal might be getting six to seven hours sleep, and the majority of us need longer than that. This will depend on your genetic predisposition, and there is a very tiny minority of us that can do with maybe four or five hours sleep. A few famous politicians, like Margaret Thatcher, for example, was potentially one of those people. However, most of us need a good seven or eight hours or sometimes even more, so understand what amount of sleep really works for you. If you’re an eight-hour person, then you need to adjust your bedtime to take that into account.
  3. Start moving as soon as you wake up. In order to kickstart our circadian rhythms and get our bodies geared up for the day, we need to move. Optimal movement would be a gentle walk, maybe some yoga, and this need only be a few minutes; it could also be walking the dog or just bouncing or walking around the house, but get moving and get some energy flowing.
  4. Heartfulness. This involves saying something nice to your partner or your kids or your animals or looking in the mirror and saying something nice and warm and loving to yourself. Start the day with a positive tone. Change your physiology by doing something that comes from the heart, and you’ll be amazed at what a difference it can make to how you feel, even about the day ahead.
  5. Get natural light into the eyes as soon as possible. Curtains go up, blinds lifted. Get natural light, even if it’s not sunny, onto the eyes and onto your skin as early as you possibly can. Once you’re up, get in front of the sun or in front of natural light.
  6. Introducing more heartfulness into the week. What I mean by this is, quite often, we have a week that’s controlled by somebody else. It’s controlled by our employer, by our clients, by our team, and we can feel quite claustrophobic in that environment. Put something in your week that’s for you. It might just be five or ten minutes. Maybe it’s meditation. Maybe it’s reading. Maybe it’s walking the dog, reading a magazine. Whatever it might be, do something, an exercise class, get something in the diary that is for you, and that will help change your perspective on the week ahead and help you feel more energised about it.
  7. Governing your circadian rhythm and making sure you don’t have what’s called a sleep hangover on Monday, also called a social hangover. This refers to the fact that many of us get up to an alarm clock Monday through to Friday, but at the weekends, we sleep in, and the consequence on Sunday nights, we can’t sleep at our usual time because we’ve had a lie-in that morning. So have a consistent wake time throughout the week to avoid that sleep hangover on a Monday morning.

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Leanne Spencer is an entrepreneur, coach, TEDx Speaker, author of Remove the Guesswork, and founder of Bodyshot Performance Limited. Bodyshot is a health and fitness consultancy that helps busy professionals get more energy by removing the guesswork around their health, fitness and nutrition. Visit www.bodyshotperformance.com or email [email protected] to register your interest in our services and connect with us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Author(s)

  • Leanne Spencer

    Leanne is an award-winning entrepreneur and the founder of Bodyshot Performance Limited. She delivered a TEDx talk on 'Why fitness is more important than weight', is the author of bestselling books 'Remove the Guesswork' and 'Rise and Shine', and hosts a podcast called ’Remove the Guesswork‘. Leanne is the founder of Bodyshot Performance, an award-winning health and wellbeing company. Bodyshot Performance work with businesses of up to 500 people who want to create a culture of energy, vitality and performance through the business and position wellbeing as a competitive advantage. Bodyshot intersect the latest science and technology to provide unique solutions to the challenge of wellbeing in the workplace that have a direct impact on the bottom line. Our clients have won awards for wellbeing and recognise it directly improves employee engagement and retention and attracts talent into the business.  We also work with chronically stressed or burned out professionals to get you back in control of your health and able to do the things you want to do in life. My expertise is around health, fitness and wellbeing, specifically focusing on sleep, mental health, energy, body composition, digestion and fitness. I host a popular podcast on iTunes called ’Remove the Guesswork ‘, and in November 2016 I delivered a TEDx talk on 'Why fitness is more important than weight'. I’m the author of the bestselling books 'Remove the Guesswork' and 'Rise and Shine' and I regularly speak to corporates on health and wellbeing. My personal values are to live truthfully, considerately and to "suck all the marrow out of life" as Thoreau said. I support the charity Diversity Role Models which works to combat homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying. I recently completed the world’s toughest ski race to raise £10,125 for Alzheimer's Research as my father-in-law was profoundly ill with Alzheimers, and I am on a constant mission to find ways to live in a way that is sustainable and environmentally friendly. I love sport, fitness, reading, gardening, business, podcasting, and being with my cat and our scampish little rescue dog, Kami from Romania.