When it comes to living a productive and motivated life, your habits will be one of the main key factors that affect them. Particularly, your morning habits. This is because how you start your day determines and impacts the rest of your day.
Hence, if you start strong, you will go through your entire day strong, with motivation and productivity.
On the other hand, if you start your day with a slump, your entire day will be affected and you will never get much done.
This is why it is important to develop productive morning habits. You want to manufacture a successful life through incorporating the right morning habits each day.
“We are what we repeatedly do; excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle
What you do every day is more important than what you do once in a while.
Take meditation, for example, if you wake up in the morning and meditate for just one day, its impact on your life will be as good as nothing.
Yeah, maybe you’ll feel good for a day, but that’s all. However, if you meditate every day, it will be a totally different story.
That’s how habits can change your life.
You can’t expect to hit the gym and exercise for a day and then you will have 6-pack abs. No, that’s not going to happen.
Success doesn’t happen overnight, it happens over time. Thus, develop these 11 best morning habits and live a great life…
Why do you need to drink a lot of water each day once you wake up? The answer is pretty simple; you want to hydrate your body functions. After a long night’s sleep and without having any water, your body dehydrates.
And it is a good idea to drink a lot of water in the morning. So how much water do you need to drink?
Experts suggest us to drink at least 500ml or 16oz of water in the morning right after we wake up. If you think that this is too much, you can drink just one full glass of water first. And then after some time like 15 or 20 minutes, drink another full glass.
It is said that water will increase our metabolism rate, helps our body to flush out any toxin, and refresh our body and mind.
This has been one of my best morning habits for a long time. Each morning right after I brush my teeth, I will walk into the kitchen, fill a full glass of water, and drink it. It is the first thing that I do once I stepped out of my bedroom each morning.
I found that I feel more refresh and energetic after a few minutes of drinking the glass of water.
You should do it, and you should make it your morning habit. Try it from tomorrow onward and see how this easy habit can give you a productivity boost.
When it comes to developing morning habits, you cannot miss out on this one. It is one of the most common habits that most successful people share.
People who have accomplished outstanding success such as Richard Branson, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Xerox CEO Ursula Burns and many other great leaders wake up extremely early.
Why would they want to wake up so early? It is because they wanted to have more undisturbed and personal time. They wanted to start their day earlier and get ready before everyone else started.
This is why successful people are always one step ahead of us. They wake up extremely early.
Here is a list of 21 successful people who wake up early from Business Insider. You should check out the list.
There are few benefits when you wake up early:
You have more hours. Yes, when you wake up early, you get more time than normal people who are still sleeping. Talking about hard working and commitment, can you wake up earlier and start your work earlier and get more things done?
Distraction-free time. Usually, nobody will distract you early in the morning. You can consider it as your sacred time. This is why a lot of people use their early morning time for meditation, exercise, and prepare their day. As for me, I will review my goals and write down my targets each morning.
I strongly recommend you take my course: Goal Setting Formula. You will learn how to find out what you want to achieve, take charge of your life, and achieve real success through setting empowering goals.
Stay one step ahead of others. Imagine that your competitors are working while you are still sleeping, how do you feel? In order to stay one step ahead of others, you should wake up early to prepare your work, strategize your plan and you will always be ahead of others. This is especially true in business if you are not staying ahead of others, you are moving backward.
Your best time. Early morning could be the best time. It is distraction-free, the air is fresh, and your mind is clear. I love morning time because there’s no noise and it is quiet that I can do my stuff.
So what time should you wake up?
Personally, I wake up at 6am each morning. You can be extreme and wake up at 4am or 5am. If you want to make this your habit, you can choose to wake up an hour earlier first. And then adjust your time from there.
Read: How To Wake Up Early And Have The Motivation To Get Things Done
There are a ton of studies have been conducted on meditation and its effect on our human body and brain. If you want to read the comprehensive research, just read it here.
It is no doubt that meditation is good for both your health and your brain. What you do is to focus your thoughts on one thing when you meditate, you can call it ‘mindfulness.’
You can just sit down comfortably, close your eyes, and focus your thoughts on your breathing. There will be a lot of distractions from your mind. You will want to think about other things, and your thoughts will jump here and there.
What you need to do then is to focus on your breathing and nothing else. You can do this every day for a few minutes. You can start with 5 minutes and then increase from there.
Here are a few simple and quick reason meditation is one of the best morning habits.
Reduce your stress. You cannot be productive and motivated if you are stressed. And meditation is one of the best practices to manage your stress.
Learn more about yourself. Studies have shown that people who meditate tend to connect with themselves better. They understand themselves better, and this boosts their self-worth and self-confidence.
Train your mind to focus. This is a very important benefit you can get from meditation. It helps you to focus and discipline your mind. Your brain will connect better, and you can access information easier through meditation.
Check out this research from the New York Times about the power of concentration and meditation.
Do I need to say more about making planning as your habit in the morning? Most people go through their day without much planning.
If you don’t have a plan, you will go through your day in a reactive mode. You react to whatever comes to you.
And extraordinary people are not reactive; they are proactive. Therefore, they plan their day, and they know exactly what they need to accomplish during the day.
Reactive people are those that get into the office and wait for people to tell them what to do. On the other hand, proactive people know what they should do, and they are always in action.
When you plan your day, and you know what needs to get done, you are one step ahead of others because you are ready and prepared for what will come.
Instead of creating a to-do list, create a success-list. Your success-list should consist of only 3 to 5 tasks that are most important to you.
And more importantly, these are the tasks that will give you the most result when you act on them.
If you want to be productive, you must take action and work on things that will give you the most result, not just focus on getting things done, but you need to focus on getting the most result-yielding things done.
The difference between ordinary people and extraordinary people is that ordinary people focus on getting things done, extraordinary people focus on doing things that make them successful.
So commit to planning your day each morning before the day started. Make it your morning habit and you will be impressed by how effective you can be.
Morning time is the best time to review your goals and reflect on your accomplishment and your progress.
There’s no one there to disturb you and it is the best time because you are all alone.
Thus, use this time to review your goals and your dreams. You can review your progress and check on your accomplishment as well.
If your dreams and your goals are what you truly desire to achieve, whenever you think about them, you will feel inspired and motivated.
Thus, reviewing them each morning will get you motivated and inspired you to take action. However, if your goals and your dreams are not what you truly wanted, you will never feel the energy.
Brian Tracy, the best-selling author, suggests people write down their goals each morning. This is because when you write down what you want to accomplish in life, you will feel more committed, and you will know the direction you are going.
Hence, practice daily goal setting. If you have no idea how to do this, read my guide here.
There are too many things to distract us each day. And to stay focused, you must always remind yourself about your aim in life. Thus, reviewing your goals each morning will help you with this.
Take this course: Goal Setting Formula. You will learn how to find out what you want to achieve, take charge of your life, and achieve real success through setting empowering goals.
Successful people always visualize the success they want. Be it in the morning or at any moment of the day, they always envision about what they want.
They think about what they want most of the time. They see themselves achieving outstanding results and are producing remarkable outcomes. You have to do the same.
First, start by making it your morning habit to visualize the success you want in the morning.
I first learned about visualization and vision board from John Assaraf. Visualization is truly an amazing tool that is free for anyone to utilize. It will activate the Law of Attraction too.
As for vision board, you can create one to help you better visualize what you want.
Researchers have proven that visualization works. You can see the best result of visualization from the sports industry. Professional athletes incorporate visualization into part of their training as well.
When you visualize vividly, your brain cannot tell if it is true and stimulate your brain neurons to connect better. You can improve your skills by just visualizing yourself training the skills.
And since you are going to be thinking anyway, you might just think about the success you desire.
Do you know that one of the main differences between extraordinary people and ordinary people is that extraordinary people think about the success they want, while ordinary people think about problems and why they can’t?
Ordinary people will think about what to eat, where to go, and what movie to watch and what to do.
Extraordinary people think about their dreams and their goals, what can they do to improve their skills and sales, they think about the achievement of what they want most of the time.
This is why successful people are successful. They just cannot get their dreams and goals out of their head.
Read: 7 Different Ways How Successful People Think
Each morning when I stand in front of the mirror before I brush my teeth, I will tell myself that it is going to be a great day and great things are waiting for me. I will then smile and feel the positive energy flowing through me.
Declaration and affirmation work. You just need to commit to it and feel the energy when you do it.
Tell your mind up front that it is going to be a great day and your mind will expect great things to happen. You will then search for all the great things throughout the day.
This is also called positive expectation. Conversely, when you expect negative things to happen, your mind will often search for all the bad things around you.
Winston Churchill has a great quote:
“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
So train your mind to search for great things every morning through declarations and affirmations.
This is one success habit that most people underestimate and never make good use. Turn it into your best morning habit. Tell yourself all the great things with positive and encouraging words each morning.
Start your day great, and you will have a great day. Here are 2 articles you should read:
Most successful people spend their morning time exercising. Why is that so?
Exercise makes you happy. When you exercise and when you sweat, your body will release endorphins. And endorphins will make you feel happy. What would happen when you feel happy each morning? Do you think you can have a better day ahead? The answer is obvious.
Exercise makes you discipline. It is going to be your first win when you exercise in the morning. When you say you are going to workout for 20 minutes, and you did, you have your first accomplishment of the day, and this makes you more discipline to tackle other tasks of the day.
Exercise reduces your stress and takes away your pressure. When you exercise, your body will release the stress through muscle tension. You will feel less pressured and lighter after the session. It is a great way to start your day.
These are just some of the benefits you can get from exercising in the morning. If you want a full list, check out this article from Elite Daily.
The word ‘breakfast’ says it all. You have to break the fasting. Try to eat more healthily and eat well each morning.
Imagine going through your day with an empty stomach; you just can’t focus on your work. You will get distracted, and your energy will be lower.
It is said that your willpower will be affected by what you eat. Usually, in the morning after you wake up, your willpower will be at its fullest. And it will decrease as you go through your day making decisions and taking action.
After your lunch break, you will get your willpower recharged and your next half of your day will start.
This is why having a good breakfast is important.
After long hours of sleep, your body needs to consume food for energy. Imagine going through the whole day without eating anything, how do you feel? Do you think you can be productive?
You know the answer. However, many people are still skipping their breakfast because they do not see how important it is and they just don’t have enough time for breakfast.
This is why you need to wake up earlier, plan your day and to have great breakfast.
If you are still not convinced to make this your morning habit, read this article from Consumer Reports.
This is another common morning habit you can see from most successful people. They spend some of their morning time to read and to learn.
Reading is good because it trains your brain to be disciplined and to stay focused on the book. It is not easy to stay attentive and to look at all the words.
If you are reading this point right now, congratulations, you have a better attention span than most people.
Imagine spending just 30 minutes a day to read a book. And within a month, you will have read about 2 books. And after a year, you will have read 24 books.
What if this has been your habit for 5 years? How many books would you have read and how much would you have learned?
The effect will be tremendous, and this small habit will be a game-changer in your life.
This is why successful people spend the time to read and to improve every day.
Thus, make it your habit to read at least 30 minutes each day. You can read personal development books or any other books that are related to your goals.
If your goal is to be financially free, read finance books that teach how to do that.
Read: 10 Best Success Books to Create Real Results in Life
Finally, appreciate your day. Make it your best morning habit to appreciate and be thankful that you can wake up and open your eyes each morning.
Expressing gratitude is one of the key factors that make people feel “successful”.
Most people’s goal is to make a lot of money in their life. However, how much money do you need to be successful or to be enough finally?
When you are grateful with all you have, you will be wealthy. On the other hand, if you do not feel grateful and are not appreciating what you have, you will never have enough, and you will never feel successful.
Therefore, starting from this moment on, make it a habit to appreciate your day. And each morning after you wake up, expresses your gratitude that you are still able to breathe.
When you are grateful, you have everything with you. When you are not, nothing can fulfill your desire.
I’m not saying that you should not aim higher or accomplish more in your life; I’m telling you that you should be grateful for everything that you have right now.
Check out this article about gratitude from GreaterGood.com; it will change your thinking about being grateful.
There are many habits you can adopt to make you more productive and motivated. I believe that these 11 are simply the best morning habits that one can adopt to make their life more effective and more successful.
You can just pick one or two and start making them your habit right away. Remember, your habits can make you or break you.
Adopt great habits and you will have a great life. Adopt negative habits and your life will be ruined.
So which habit do you think is the most important to possess in the morning? Do share with me your opinion through the comment section below.
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Thanks for the tips! I recently started using some of them and I began to do more in a day. Previously, if I had a day off, then I just lay there and did nothing, watched some videos on the Internet and I was just too lazy to do anything. Recently, I decided to change this since I really am not doing anything useful and started planning. I also tried yoga in the morning, at first it was all uncomfortable for me, but over time I began to get pleasure from doing yoga and learning new things.
Hey there, glad that some of the tips here are useful to you. Yes, our morning routine is extremely important. How you start your day determines how you will go through your entire day. So, start strong, and your day will be powerful. You will accomplish more when you start your morning with the right pace. Cheers buddy.. :)