Since summer last year, I decided that I should wake up early. I read all the blogs about people who woke up early, and it just made sense to try it. All blogs stated that waking up early, meditating, affirmations, they would all help you. They made it sound as if my life would magically change when I would start doing these things. Well, I didn’t buy it, so I want to try it to see for myself.
So I read Miracle Morning by Had Elrod, which is an amazing book! Let’s start out by first outlining the book, after that, we’ll go into my morning routine.
The Miracle Morning
The book starts by stating that you are deserving of creating a life full of health, wealth and happiness. In order to do that, you should stop settling for less than you deserve. You need to take action each day to creating this success for yourself, and the best way to do this is to create time for you each day.
How you wake up every day determines the rest of your day. If you have focused and productive mornings, you will set yourself up for focused and productive days, which will create success in your life.
The book suggests to do 6 life S.A.V.E.R.S in the morning, by getting up an hour early:
- Silence – 5 minutes – meditating, breath work, staring at our spouse
- Affirmations – 5 minutes – mantra’s, money affirmations, say positive things to yourself
- Visualization – 5 minutes – vision boards, visualize your day, visualize your goals
- Exercise – 20 minutes – move your body
- Reading – 20 minutes – your favorite blog for example
- Scribe – 5 minutes – write in your journal, write on your blog
This means that there is a total of 60 minutes in the morning routine if you’d like. For the night owls among us, there is also the 6-minute version where you do everything on the list for one minute.
My Morning Routine
Especially in the beginning – my morning routine was no miracle morning, at all.. I’m a night owl and didn’t ever sleep before midnight. So the first step I took was starting with 10 minutes, and I’ve taken it from there. Now my morning routine is around 40 minutes!
Nowadays, I’m getting up at 6:15 am Monday through Friday, that’s the earliest possible time that I can handle setting my alarm clock. On the weekends I’m still sleeping until 8 am mostly, still working on my routine at the weekends. As I’m not a natural morning person, I love to ‘sleep in’ a few hours on the weekend.
I’ll walk you through my current morning routine one by one!
Silence – 5 minutes
I start every morning by waking up, sitting up straight and started my meditation. In the beginning, I didn’t know what I was doing, at all. I would just close my eyes and try to think about nothing.
The first weeks, I started with meditating 1 minute. I would set my timer to one minute, sit up straight and close my eyes. It was awful. I couldn’t focus, my mind would go into all different directions and I didn’t understand: how could anyone do this? The one minute turned into two and at this point in time, I’m meditating 5 whole minutes each and every morning. Wow.
It took me about 3 months before I finally got there, I discovered that it’s pretty difficult to think about nothing.
Mediation really brought me clarity. It’s not woo-woo, it has taught me to slow down and live in the moment. It taught me to not be so fired up all the time, to react more calmly to stressful situations and it enabled me to create more space in my mind. Space that I didn’t have before. Above all, space that led me to create this amazing little space on the internet.
Visualizing – 5 minutes
I skipped visualizing all together in the beginning. Since a few weeks I’m trying it, I still didn’t really get the hang of it.
It’s too abstract for me, I can’t get myself to see a certain situation in my mind as I am thinking about it. I can think thoughts surrounding certain situations, but actually seeing it in my mind is too much.
Most days I’m just thinking about what things I will do for the day, how my day will look like and what I’ll do in the morning. Other days I try to focus on what I want to do when I retire early, focusing more on my goal of financial independence and specifically on my why.
Maybe I’ll get better in it along the road – just as was the case with mediation.
If you have any tips for me to up my visualizing game, sent help pls!
Affirmations – 5 minutes
Immediately I added affirmations in the mix, because I loved the fact that I could tell myself every morning how amazing I am going to make my life. I read about all the amazing things affirmations could do to people, so I decided to try for myself. I’ve even written an entire post about money affirmation that will help attract wealth and abundance!
Affirmations have truly influenced my life for the better.
I write down five affirmations per month and I spend 5 minutes every morning reading my affirmations out loud. I just repeated them until the five minutes are over, it’s not so complicated.
The best thing is, that you don’t even need to believe your affirmations yet!! You can just read them out loud every day. The magic is that once you do that, you start automatically believing them after an X amount of time.
For me, after a few weeks, I noticed that I started to believe in them. I AM an excellent money manager, I DESERVE wealth and abundance in my life, I have ENOUGH money. It’s amazing what affirmations can do for you!
One of my favorite affirmations is: I am financially free, I work because I choose to. I actually feel this affirmation now, where it excites and motivates me to be financially free. It also gives me an inner calm; I’ll get there one day.
Exercise
I work out twice per week in the evenings, once with my roommate and once by myself. I’m having an office job, so I’m also walking with my coworkers during lunch for about 15 minutes. Also, when I’m at home and I feel like moving, I’ll walk another 20-30 minutes.
However, the one thing I cannot do is working out when I just woke up. I just can’t. It’s already requiring enough of my mental energy to get up, let also do push-ups and squats in the morning. Sorry but I’ll skip this one.
One day, when my morning routine has evolved more, I’ll do it. Not today my friends!
Reading
I love reading, I read all day every day. Other peoples’ blogs, social media, articles online, books, you name it.
In the morning it’s not so much reading for me, I try to focus on the meditating, affirmations and visualizing. I feel like I read enough during the day, where I don’t have to explicitly take the time in the morning to read.
Scribe – 30 minutes
FINALLY, we get to my favorite part; writing! Most mornings I write about an hour, on anything I want. Sometimes I start working on new blog ideas, sometimes I just write down my thoughts and sometimes I read other articles.
Writing can be such a flow to me, I am happy that I decided to focus on it now with this project.
Before I started my blog, I didn’t really write much. I wrote down what I was thankful for when going to sleep, but that was about it. Since I’m blogging, I’m writing much more – obviously!
Every morning after I finish my meditation, affirmations and visualizing, I’m starting to write. I love writing, the process of putting down your thoughts on paper – amazing. It’s like therapy but better.
I’ve already hit two major marks with the blog: I’ve blogged for over 6 months and I published over 100 blog posts. Life is good!
The Benefits
After implementing this, my life has not drastically changed and I’m not a millionaire yet.
But it has improved my life in a few ways:
- My sleep quality improved – no more laying in bed for one hour with my eyes wide open, waiting for the alarm clock to ring
- Throughout the day I am more present – because I already had the time to work on my own projects
- I am calmer and can delay responses in stressful situations – because I have organized my thoughts
- I can enjoy the peace and calm before the hectic day starts
- There is time to work on my side projects
HOW to Wake Up Early
Now we know why it’s amazing to get up early and what are alll the benefits. The only thing to tackle now is, HOW do I get up so freaking early?
My most important tips are:
- Have a game plan – decide what you will do once you get up. This way, that little voice is not able to sabotage you once your alarm clock goes off.
- Don’t think – when your alarm goes off, get out of bed immediately. Believe me, one minute extra in your bed will not want you to get up at all! Just turn on the coffee machine or the kettle if you don’t drink coffee.
- Go to bed, but seriously go to bed – get a minimum of 7-8 hours of sleep. The benefits of getting up early are fading quickly once you don’t get enough sleep to function throughout the day.
Keep in mind: it’s doesn’t matter what you do when you wake up in the beginning! It’s about building the habit first and foremost. Do some yoga, read a book, or write. Alternatively, you could scroll on social media, just get started. Not all heroes wear capes!
What is your current morning routine? Are you planning to get up early?
This post originally appeared on Radical FIRE and is republished with permission.