This is not an article about what you shouldn’t do, it’s more of me trying to understand why we tend to have lousy mornings. My mornings in Cairo have been quite stressful rather than refreshing. To add to that, I haven’t been doing anything about it and have been giving in to the feeling of carelessness. So, I decided to read up on what are the habits that negatively affect my morning routine (which was non-existent until now). Here are some of the bad morning habits some of us do.
Ditching the Alarm
Who knew snoozing the alarm could contribute to you having a bad day? When I thought about it, snoozing the alarm means waking up late and having to rush things, and probably ending up being missing my first few tasks. For a punctual person like myself, this is a nightmare. Forbes mentioned this in an article, “the biggest problem with hitting the snooze button is you haven’t even gotten out of bed and you’ve already lost. Failing to just suck it up, rip the covers off and start your morning puts you in the wrong mindset for the remainder of the day.” We might as well just buy this..
Bedtime Notifications
One of the things I used to do was check my phone before sleeping, which made me have a restless sleep. Recently, I discovered that the first thing I do when I wake up is check my phone, for no reason whatsoever. I think it’s because I used to worry if I had missed out on a work-related task (since my field, film-making, doesn’t really believe in fixed working hours).
Business Insider discussed checking notifications when we wake up and quoted Tristan Harris, Google’s former Design Ethicist, who told Medium, “when we wake up in the morning and turn our phone over to see a list of notifications… it frames the experience of ‘waking up in the morning’ around a menu of ‘all the things I’ve missed since yesterday.’” It strikes me that we’re so addicted to knowing what’s happened that we don’t quite care about what can happen in our own lives sometimes. Also, most of the information we absorb from scrolling on our social media accounts are useless, waste space in our minds and time from our morning. Sigh.
Sugar Cravings
I used to live abroad for a while, and there, a flat mate told me that one should eat their sugars in the morning. I did that for a while, but there are several opinions about that. What got me thinking about is, if I eat a lot of unhealthy sugars in the morning, wouldn’t I run out of energy pretty soon? I reached a conclusion, eating healthy sugars like fruits. You need to research what food is good for you. So, for example, instead of eating a Nutella pancake, I started eating a fruit smoothie or a couple of fresh fruits.
The Caffe-Effect
I’m no expert, since I’m not a coffee drinker myself, but most people around me are, so I looked it up. It turns out drinking coffee first thing in the morning isn’t the best time. This video explains why in details.
My yoga instructor used to say, “always listen to your body.” So, there are no rules for what your morning routine should be, but make sure you’re treating your body fairly.
