My track record with getting up in the morning has been pretty atrocious in the past few months, to say the least, and I was using work as an excuse for my laziness - "I had work last night", "I didn't get in till midnight", "I was on my feet all night". I would get up at 10-10:30am when I had work at midday, and lounge around slowly getting ready, again sacrificing washing my hair because I didn't want to get up an hour earlier, using my trusty old dry shampoo instead. Despite this, I'm a big believer that the way you spend your first hour awake sets the tone for the rest of the day, and the rest of my days when I did this didn't exactly go the way I wanted them to - this just led to a stream of other bad habits and a hell of a lot of procrastination.

So recently, I decided to write down what I want my ideal morning routine to look like and when I have utilised it I felt so much more refreshed and motivated to deal with my day. It's definitely a work in progress with regards to making it a proper habit just yet, but it all starts with one small step each day.

WAKE UP AT A DECENT TIME

Due to the fact that I do shift-work, and the fact that I sometimes finish a shift at 2am, I decided to give a time slot to this one depending on my work the previous day. I'd ideally like to get up anytime between 7am-9am in order to get started on my days activities. In the past few months I've been getting up most days around 10:30am and have felt sluggish during the day from oversleeping, so I'm gonna slowly work my way up to a 7am get up. 

MEDITATION

I have known about the app Headspace for a long time, but the subscription fee was always something that put me off because I wasn't sure if meditation was really my thing. I managed to get a deal with my Spotify Premium account, however, and I haven't looked back. It just calms me, grounds me, and lets me clear my mind to focus on the things that I need to get done that day. Headspace has a massive variety of different guided meditations to go through from stress to kindness to creativity - there's always gonna be something for everyone, no matter what you're going through. I want to try and do this in the morning as well as in the evening for a couple of minutes to unwind.

READ A CHAPTER OF PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

I've been known in the past to go full on personal development reading, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to better yourself, but when it comes to reading, reading, reading, and not applying any of that to your life, that's where issues start to arise. I've decided on a happy medium of reading a chapter a day to continue my learning curve but to also allow room for reflection and action. 

JOURNALING

I love journaling in the morning; like meditation, it's a release. I feel that I can get all of my thoughts and feelings out onto one or two pages about anything and everything so I can move on from it and continue my day - it's massively therapeutic for me and definitely gets a lot of things off my chest. I like to do a constant stream of writing that I just let flow from my mind so I can get my raw feelings out of my head and onto paper. It was especially helpful with my my brain dump earlier on in the month as it helped me realise some of my downfalls and weaknesses so I was able to rise up from them and build a better life for myself.

SHOWER/BREAKFAST/GET READY

This is the obvious stuff, but I want to get this out of the way before I even think about checking my phone, which leads me to...

DON'T CHECK PHONE UNTIL ALL OF THE ABOVE IS DONE

Now, this is the biggie, and probably the most difficult of all of the habits to keep (embarrassingly). I realised that I was/am massively addicted to my phone; constantly checking, scrolling, checking and scrolling the same feeds waiting for something interesting to happen because you know, FOMO, duh! I'm just so used to waking up and checking all of my feeds, that that itself became a habit, albeit a bad habit, that I've picked up and am trying to stop. But, if I can at least keep this part of my day free of any phones or social media then it's a small win on the road to curbing the habit completely. 

So that's what I'd ideally like my mornings to look like. Do you have a morning routine?