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good morning routine can set you up for massive success the whole day.

A positive routine in the morning gives you structure, build life-changing habits, and creates momentum for the rest of your day.

But your morning routine will only work if you have a concrete goal for that chunk of time before you start other reactive work.

According to research, when you create and follow a morning routine, your stress, and anxiety levels will start to plummet and your life satisfaction levels will begin to soar.

In the words of Hal Elrod, author of The Miracle Morning, “How you wake up each day and your morning routine (or lack thereof) dramatically affects your levels of success in every single area of your life.”

By simply changing your morning routine, you can transform any area of your life, faster than you ever thought possible.

A healthy morning routine instills a sense of purpose, peace and productive ritual to your day. But it’s difficult to even get started. It’s hard to start your day exactly how you want it.

I wake at 6:30 a.m, drink water, reflect, exercise, shower, read, eat breakfast, make and take coffee, check email, and then work on my most important things (MITs) before midday. I strive to make the most of my peak times.

At the moment my morning routine is still subject to tweaking. I am experimenting with different routines.

I want to transition to a 5:30 a.m. wake-up time. I am used to staying up late. But I am gradually changing that to wake up early. I love the idea of having a solid morning routine to ease me into a clear-minded, active, and productive day.

If your morning routine just isn’t working yet, make gradual, consistent and beneficial change starting tomorrow morning.

Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, says maintaining a good morning routine is no different than having a positive outlook. “Over my 50 years in business I have learned that if I rise early I can achieve so much more in a day, and therefore in life. No matter where I am in the world, I try to routinely wake up at around 5am. By rising early, I’m able to do some exercise and spend time with my family, which puts me in a great mind frame before getting down to business.”

The time between waking up and facing the rest of the world is crucial to your mindset, as it helps organize the rest of your day.

Create an evening routine

Your evening ritual determines the success of your morning routine.

In his book, The Compound Effect, Darren Hardy argues that a person’s morning and evening routines are the “bookends” of a prosperous life.

Without a disciplined evening routine, you will have a problem maintaining a successful morning routine.

Everything you do just before you go to bed has a lot to do with the time you will be able to wake up without struggle.

The time before you go to bed is an ideal time to prepare yourself for the morning.

Find a relaxing activity just before bed. Reading helps. Puzzles can also calm you. Whatever the activity, try to avoid a TV or phone screen too close to bedtime.

They emit a blue light, which suppresses melatonin (a hormone made by small gland in the brain).

Melatonin helps control your sleep and wake cycles.

Normally, melatonin levels begin to rise in the mid- to late evening, remain high for most of the night, and then drop in the early morning hours.

Your body has its own internal clock that controls your natural cycle of sleeping and waking hours. Don’t suppress it. Help yourself to sleep better.

Declare your bedroom a “device-free zone” an hour or less before bed and leave all tablets, smartphones, and other computer-related devices elsewhere. It may take a lot of discpline and practice to make it work.

Don’t eat late. If you’re body is still digesting food when you’re trying to get to sleep, you’ll have a tougher time falling asleep and wake up feeling worse off than if you just stayed hungry.

Once you get your evening routine down and get used to going to bed at a certain time, you should be able to get up earlier as a result.

Keep things simple in the beginning

Don’t try to fit in too much in the morning when you are trying to change your morning routine. It won’t work that way.

Experiment with a few things and stick to the ones that work best for you. If it’s too rigid or too packed you will feel like it’s being rushed. You don’t want that.

Early mornings are your sacred time to start your day right — don’t fill it with just news, email, social media, apps or notifications.

Instead, put meaningful things in this sacred space, things that you probably won’t have time for.

And don’t wake up at the last minute: half an hour before you have to leave for work, or right before you hop on your laptop and start typing. It’s a stressful way to start your day.

You probably won’t be able to fit in or implement all your ideas at once, but try one or two out and see if your mornings improve.

A productive morning is created consciously. You have to work at it. It’s difficult to maintain consistency but to make it work, it takes insane discipline and commitment.

Don’t make drastic changes

Be realistic about how much you can fit into your morning.

It might sound easy to establish a simple routine, but it’s just as easy to fall out of them. I still struggle but I intend to make them a habit that will stick over time.

Keep your routine as your most important goal for at least one month, focusing on nothing else but those habits.

Start slowly, by waking just 15–30 minutes earlier than usual. Get used to this for a few days. Then cut back another 15 minutes. Do this gradually until you get to your goal time.

Trying to do too many things at once spreads your focus too thin, and makes success less likely.

Kristin Wong of Lifehacker offers other ideas to help you do more in the morning: “It may also help to track your morning routine for a week or so. Find the areas in which you’re spending the most time and then cut back on the areas you don’t care about so you can focus on the rituals that matter more to you.”

According to Zdravko Cvijetic, the gradual method works best: The most efficient method for changing the time you wake up is to do it gradually — 10–15 minutes earlier for 1–3 days until you feel used to it, and then lower it down.

If you get up at 8 a.m. generally, don’t suddenly change it to 6 a.m. Try 7:45 a.m. first. Maintain for a couple of days, and then go to 7:30.

This will take some time, but the effects on your energy will be minimal, plus it’s the most enjoyable and it has a lower chance of failure.

Have a great reason

It’s hard enough to leave the comfort of bed every morning, but it’s nearly impossible if you don’t have a good reason to do it every day.

A morning routine helps you overcome procrastination, be a more positive, healthier person, and set you up for success each day.

Set something to do early in the morning that’s important. This reason will motivate you to get up. The time before you go to work is golden, as it exists every single day, and it’s usually completely yours to schedule.

What do you want to do with this time? Read? Write? Exercise? Work on your passion project?

Using that time to pursue something meaningful to you will immensely improve not only your total well being, but sense of self worth.

Benjamin Franklin’s meticulous “scheme” consisted of waking up at 5 a.m. and asking himself, “What good shall I do this day? And at the end of the night, Franklin asked himself, “What good have I done today?”

What works best for you in the morning?

7 Morning Rituals to Empower Your Day And Change Your Life

01 | Gratitude.

Feeling grateful and appreciation for those little signs and moments of joy happening in your life is probably one of the most overlooked or underestimated rituals. It is a perfect morning ritual to start your day on a very positive key.

The real power of gratitude is that it makes you pick out and focus on what is working in your life – what is in tune with your being as a whole. It is selectively positive. It reinforces happiness and positivity by shedding light on those awesome things, small or big, that grace your everyday living.

Quite often, we just pick out the pain points, the problems, the bottle necks, whatever it is that is not working in our life and causing friction, anxiety and unhappiness. This is like constantly rewriting the script of your life with a negative or tragic overtone. Your subconscious mind follows faithfully that script you write whether it is a negative or positive one.

So feeling grateful is undoubtedly an immensely empowering ritual. Start your day by being thankful for those positive things that happened the previous day or throughout the week. It could be something really petty and small. It doesn’t matter. You might be grateful for an unexpected visit from an old friend, a beautiful encounter with a kind stranger, a new opportunity or whatever it is that shines your way. Do it every morning and see what happens during the day.

02 | Writing Down Your Most Important Tasks.

This is a very practical ritual. Start your day by identifying and writing down from one to three of the most important tasks you need to complete during that day. These tasks are ones which support important long term goals that are aligned to your purpose, passion or general direction in life.

For example, if writing a book or building an online community are important long term goals which are aligned to your personal growth, then an important task for the day might be finishing off a particular page or two of the book or coming up with fresh content ideas for the online community.

What is important with this ritual is that you identify these tasks and complete them as early in the day as possible. Of course, you will have other tasks apart from the ones you will write down but, these are tasks which can be tackled later or batched up and carried out in one go.

Writing down your most important tasks in the morning helps you focus your day and life according to what is essential. It helps you prioritize and manage your time better. As a result, you simplify your life by applying your focus and energy on what really counts for your overall life progress.

03 | Affirm Your Goals in Writing or Drawing.

This is similar to the previous idea but different in its application and purpose. Writing down your most important tasks of the day is a way to have a concrete structure of action to follow. Affirming your goals, on the other hand, is a very powerful way of crystallizing your vision and goals in life into your everyday mental space.

Writing down or doodling your goals on a piece of paper helps you externalize those goals by giving them form. In return, they are reflected back in your subconscious mind and thus, reinforcing them and integrating them more wholly.

An example of this would be writing down “I am achieving greater success in my career” or “I am becoming healthier and stronger through my exercise.” Notice the present tense being used as a way to tell yourself you are in the process already. Remember the life script we subconsciously follow? You are basically modifying the script to be applied now in the present.

Drawing or doodling can be equally, or even more, effective  (if you are more of a visual person) as it summarizes a graphical representation of your goals. For example, if your goal is to build a new house or live in another country, you can draw the house or draw things that symbolize the country you want to live in.

04 | Practice Qi Gong Exercises.

According to Chinese philosophy, Qi (pronounced ‘Chee’) means the life force or energy inherent in all things;^[1] and Qi Gong is the practice to cultivate and circulate that energy in your body. This may sound esoteric or complicated but actually, Qi Gong is really a set of simple exercises aimed at increasing your health and vitality.

There are numerous forms and practices available for free through the online media. As a morning ritual, I recommend following these simple exercises by Qi Gong master Lee Holden:

05 | Drink Hot Water with Lemon.

Simply add a slice of lemon in a glass of hot water and drink one every morning. This is a very simple ritual I follow faithfully every morning.

Apart from being a good source of vitamin C and a great way of flushing out toxins in the morning, it balances and maintains the PH levels in the body, reduces pain and inflammation in joints and knees and helps nourishing brain and nerve cells. Here are some more benefits of drinking hot water with lemon.

06 | Rise Earlier.

The practical advantages of waking up early are obvious.

For example, you gain more time for doing exercise such as walking, cycling or Qi Gong as suggested above. You gain more time to be with yourself to reflect, meditate or, more importantly, carry out the other morning rituals.

So rising early can be seen as a foundation for all the other morning rituals. Many, like myself, find that they are more productive in the early hours of the day.

Also, various studies have shown that there are many other benefits from waking up an hour or two earlier in the morning. Sleeping early and waking up early helps the body attune with the earth’s circadian rhythms thus, promoting more restorative sleep. Other curious results from such studies show, for instance, that early risers tend to be more optimistic and can anticipate and solve problems more efficiently than the norm.^[2]

07 | Listen to Uplifting Music.

Uplifting music can have a direct impact on our mood, especially in the morning. It charges us emotionally and tunes us into a more positive outlook of the day ahead.

Most people wake up to music or listen to music as they commute to work. Very often, however, they tune in to a radio or randomly pick a playlist from their device. Being more selective and conscious of the music you listen to in the morning can have a great impact on your day and life in general.

It’s funny how we try to choose music according to our mood. For example if you are feeling down or disappointed by something, you are more prone to listen to music that reflects that mood – for instance blues, sad songs or downtempo music. This has the effect of reinforcing that mood. What you need to do is the exact opposite and retune your mood by listening to music that beats to a different tune than that mood.

Try to listen to more uplifting music in the morning even if, or especially if, your mood does not dictate so: 30 Inspirational Songs that Keep You Motivated for Life.(opens in a new tab)

by DOLCE LIBERTA. More than a Bikini!

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Feature article: 50 tips for improving your emotional intelligence