f you’re a girl at Brown University, chances are you have a lot on your plate. Between classes, clubs, internships, interviews, and social demands, it’s hard to maintain a high level of energy, motivation, and productivity – and often students find themselves sleep-deprived, burnt out, and stressed.
Luckily, creating a good morning routine can help! Starting your day off right is a great way to increase motivation and limit grogginess.
Here are my tips and tricks for a great morning routine:
1. Don’t Hit Snooze
It’s so tempting to just press that ignore button and tell yourself just ten more minutes. But snoozing your alarm is actually detrimental to your sleep cycle and health. Research shows that snoozing your alarm can disrupt the sleep cycle – specifically REM sleep, making sleep fragmented and low quality. As a result, it contributes to making you feel more lethargic and groggy throughout the day. Additionally, it has been known to make you more drowsy throughout the day, negatively impact blood pressure and heartbeat, and train your brain to not wake up at the proper time.
The best thing you can do for your sleep – and therefore your morning and overall productivity – is to go to bed and wake up consistently, and when your alarm goes off immediately get up and start your day.
2. Make your Bed
Making your bed is a must as the first step in your routine. It is something small that takes minimal time and effort but leaves you feeling accomplished, sets the tone for a productive and put-together day, and helps to declutter your space. There is a body of promising evidence that can associate this practice with improved focus, stress reduction, relaxation, and calm.
3. Eliminate the Screen from Your Morning
When you first wake up, your brain is in its most malleable state, transitioning from delta waves to beta waves. If the first thing you do is check your phone and start scrolling, it speeds the process of wave transition in the mind, skipping the Theta brainwaves and jumping straight into Beta brainwaves. This sped up process tends to increase negative thought patterns like anxiety, worry, and hyperactivity. Try to remain off your phone for the first hour of waking up to help your brain go through it’s authentic natural wakeup process.
4. Write Intentions for Your Day
Writing out your daily intentions in your morning routine is a great way to set the tone of your day! It helps cultivate a mindset for your day and creates specific targets and goals for how you want to feel. Additionally, setting these within the first 30 minutes of waking up can be incredibly impactful on your overall levels of motivation and productivity during the day, due to the impressionable state your brain is in outlined in the previous section.
5. Start the Day With Some Movement
Starting the day with some movement has a host of positive benefits, including boosting your focus, improving energy levels, and releasing endorphins that boost your mood. Moving helps erase some of the stiffness in your body you can commonly feel after a night of sleep and helps get the blood flowing to help wake up and rejuvenate you. Even something as simple as doing some morning stretches while you wait for your coffee to brew can be enough to attain these benefits and start your day off right.
6. Eat a Nutritious Breakfast
You are what you eat! Fueling yourself with a nutritious breakfast is so important for your overall energy and productivity levels during the day. Breakfast replenishes your supply of glucose and other important vitamins and minerals in the body, which boosts energy levels and alertness. It is so important to set out some time to eat during the morning, as otherwise you are functioning at a fuel deficit that contributes to increased grogginess, lack of focus, and lethargy.