what is the purpose of a morning routine

Summary

do you have a morning routine. and by morning routine I don’t mean things you happen to do in the morning. I mean time set aside specifically to improve yourself. and is that even necessary. let’s talk.

1. influencer morning routines became a joke for good reason. the parody version is the green drink, the cold plunge, the sauna, the 90 minute workout, the 45 minutes of journaling and meditation. the joke is correct. that isn’t the point of a morning routine. but the joke also throws the baby out with the bath water. setting aside intentional time to work on yourself still matters.

2. for me the only thing a morning routine is for is mind work. meditation, journaling, affirmations, visualization. nothing magical about doing it in the morning. nothing magical about the steps. the whole point is intentional time on the mind because the mind runs everything else.

3. I didn’t have a morning routine until I became an entrepreneur over a decade ago. I had brutal anxiety about being able to support my family on an online business. the routine was the only way I could fight back. wake up early, meditate, journal, think through what I was scared of, regain control of my own brain. when I drop the routine, the anxiety comes right back.

4. the mind is powerful and the science backs it up. visualization studies in basketball, weightlifting, martial arts. people who only visualize do almost as well as people who physically practice. people who don’t do either regress. the placebo effect at scale. the hotel maids study where the half who were told their work counted as exercise got measurable health improvements in a month without changing what they did.

5. if you want a structure, Hal Elrod’s SAVERS works. silence, affirmation, visualization, exercise, reading, scribe. pick one. do five minutes. compound it over a decade. no magic in the steps. the magic is consistent mind work you wouldn’t otherwise do. try harder.

Transcript

the influencer morning routine is a distraction

but I had an overwhelming amount of anxiety of being able to support my family with an online business and I didn’t just get crippled by that anxiety. I knew that I had to fight back against that after a certain point The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human a better human business and To grow a business like this you have to continually improve yourself This podcast is a documentation of that thesis scaling businesses and also personal growth My goal is for you to shortcut this journey. So if you’re ready to try hard Subscribe, if you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy Question for you today.

Do you have a morning routine and When I say morning routine, I’m talking about Time you’ve set aside in the morning to improve yourself Not a repeated I do the same thing when I wake up what if that’s I wake up I use the bathroom I unload the dishwasher. I feed my kids breakfast that might be repeated actions But when I’m talking about a morning routine, I’m really talking about a specific time. You have set aside To improve yourself and is this even necessary?

So I’m gonna be talking about morning routines today because one thing I’ve noticed I would say over the last year maybe two years is Morning routines are kind of getting made fun of In the in the health world if you will and if you haven’t come across that kind of content I’ll explain it a little bit more but it’s more or less people are taking you know a jab at how ridiculous some morning routines have become and that’s You know, I’m useless if I start the day and I haven’t had You know my green drink and my cold plunge and my sauna and my hour-and-a-half workout in my 45 minutes of meditation and journaling and Just these ridiculous routines, right?

And that’s that’s not the reality That’s not what I’m talking about But you know people pick poke fun of these but also poke fun at these but also at the same time Are kind of discrediting the fact that they might be necessary and I want to talk about that a lot more because The Overwhelming influencer style of morning routine may not be necessary But I do think that having some set-aside time for self-improvement is really important And so what is the real purpose of a morning routine in my opinion?

Now if you work out in the morning or whatever, that’s great those are those are great times to have a morning routine, but for me my specific goal and What I do as a morning routine the reason behind it has everything to do with my mind It has everything to do with my mind, okay when you sit down to work on your mind Whether that’s meditation journaling affirmations Visualizations you’re actually doing something and we can get into the some of the scientific literature behind How powerful your mind actually is but to be honest, there’s not a lot of argument or me needing to prove that I Can ask anyone?

the real purpose is the mind

Do you think the mind is a powerful thing in the response nine times out of ten or 99 out of 100 will be? Yes, I think and I believe the mind is a powerful thing. I Don’t know if I’ve ever asked that question and someone say no It’s not because we all hear these stories about professional athletes and Incredible things that can be done just by flipping the attitude or mindset or how we approach things But then when you ask the next question like okay you believe the mind is a powerful thing When do you practice?

Developing your mind your mindset your attitude how your thoughts go through your brain When do you spend time on that and the answer is Almost never. Oh, well, I do that for an hour in the morning or 30 minutes in the morning or 10 minutes in the morning I Generally get a blank stare when I ask that question people don’t actually have time to set aside to do it and I get it’s it’s no different than fitness if I can ask people like hey, do you think working out exercising is important?

The answer will be yes, but do you actually do it as much as you should a lot of times the answer is no But I think that we do need to set aside the time to do this Knowing that the point is not some magical Process of step 1 step 2 step 3. I’m a better human That’s not what a morning routine is There’s no magic here for what I do or what someone else does the cold plunge or all this crap None of that stuff actually matters The only thing that matters in your morning routine is the improvement of your own mind in my opinion.

That’s what a morning routine is For me in my experience when I was and I didn’t really start a morning routine until I became an entrepreneur over 10 years ago and What I was using that time for was one.

I was short on time and So I had to pack things in the morning but I had an overwhelming amount of anxiety of being able to support my family with an online business and I didn’t just get crippled by that anxiety I knew that I had to fight back against that after a certain point and the only way for me to do that was to wake up early Meditate journal think through my thoughts start to control them a little bit more come up with solutions to things I was worried about and it was a time for me to Regain control of my mind instead of just sit there and let all these Anxiety producing thoughts run around in my head and control me and cripple me I had to fight back somehow and that’s what my morning routine was.

how a morning routine fought my entrepreneurial anxiety

So when I see people making fun of a morning routine, I Just want people to know there’s a lot more to it than yeah I had my green drink and I did my push-ups and that’s supposed to be some sort of magical formula a morning routine is set aside to Help you control your mind actually Interject yourself into your subconscious mind and be able to control the conversation in your brain a little bit more And that’s what I did.

I mean that was all my experience in doing a morning routine had nothing to do with me thinking that Doing or not doing things in the morning, you know was the secret to success for me It was just the mindset practice Becoming a better human through putting aside some time to control my mind and for me It was not this hour and a half long process. I have three kids. I’m an entrepreneur. My kids wake up early sometimes my morning routine was ten minutes sometimes five minutes sometimes it was an hour and I’ve gone on and off of the consistency of Having a morning routine to where I was super consistent for several years and then I came off of a morning routine Thinking you know what? Maybe I don’t need this.

Maybe it’s not as helpful anymore And I opted to wanting to get more sleep But what I found was whenever I’m not doing my morning routine, I am just a worse version of myself anxiety starts to find its way back and So I have to have a time set aside to be able to do this And again, there’s no magic to the morning side of this either I’m sure I could do this at the end of the day in the middle of day whenever I feel like it’s still the mindset practice that I think is most important and I again I don’t think there’s any magic to the morning side of it.

So I Get it done in the morning first thing because it’s important to me and it sets me up for the rest of the day and again, it has everything to do with the power of the mind and if you just look like I’ve covered so many studies in the garage gym athlete podcast about the power of visualization and Weightlifting and fitness and health people they in that these studies go, you know, normally one way Typically, they’ll have three groups.

The first group will do like actual the actual physical activity There’ll be another group that only visualizes them doing the physical activity and then the third group doesn’t do either one They don’t practice or they don’t visualize and what normally happens is the people who practice every single day They see the most resort most results the people who visual only visualize see about the same results as the people who actually Practice and then the third group who did not practice or visualize they don’t see they regress They don’t see any progress. So visualization proves out over and over again. We’ve seen this in basketball studies they did in basketball players where They were shooting free throws and they did that exact same format. We’ve seen it with lifting.

the science on the power of the mind

We’ve seen it with Taekwondo and martial arts like just across all different domains that style of study proves itself again and again Visualization is almost as powerful as the practice So we know the brain is powerful even just putting a smile on your face has been scientifically proven to Make you a happier person even if you’re faking the smile one study They did this they didn’t want to tell the participants what they were doing so they had them hold a pencil in between their nose in their upper lip to where they had to kind of force a smile to do that and then they had other people do it to where they’re holding it in between their lips in one group doing nothing and Ultimately the people who were kind of forced to do a smile and they didn’t know why Reported being happier

throughout the day and there’s just over and over again the placebo effect Look into any just research the placebo effect for 10 or 15 minutes and you’ll see these studies of people you know just completely changing like curing cancer and like all these just Crazy things with the placebo effect that the brain and the mind is so powerful and there was one study we looked at where They had these maids a group of overweight maids who got a ton of Just daily energy like daily energy expenditure right just throughout their job But they didn’t think that they were making progress 67% of them were like, you know what?

I’m just a maid I just do all this work all day But you know, it doesn’t count as physical exercise and then these Harvard psychologists sat them down and they were like hey What you’re they split the maids up half and half and in half maids they didn’t do anything just go about your life the other half they explained to them how Amazing just doing their job was for their body How good it was for their health and then I forgot that it was after a month They came back to reevaluate after just letting them know like hey everything you do every single day so good for you It’s good for your health.

It’s good for it’s it’s just as important as exercise It’s just as good as exercise all these things that came back a month later they reevaluated them and they had decreased their systolic blood pressure and Their weight decreased their waist and hip ratio decreased and the other group who didn’t get any of that mindset stuff Insignificant results they were in the same spot and we just see these things over and over and over again. I Could sit here and talk about studies like this all day They’re out there So if you need to if you need something to push you to believe in the power of the mind go find it’s out there But once you believe it start asking yourself, okay, I believe fitness is important. So I exercise in a regular basis I believe the power of the mind is important.

So where’s that? I Know we have so much to fit in our day But can you squeeze five minutes in to visualize to do affirmations to do something like that?

the savers framework as a starting point

That’s going to affect your mindset and make it better Now a great place to get started is the book the miracle morning by Hal Elrod and his recommendation And this is just a starting point again There’s no magic to the steps or anything else, but it’s nice to have a framework to follow He recommends the savers principle. So savers is silence, which is like meditation affirmation visualization exercise reading and scribe that last scribe is like for writing or journaling Do one of these do two of them.

You don’t have to do all of them Okay Just like if you sat down if you woke up in the morning and did five minutes of affirmations or five minutes of visualization You’re gonna be so much further along and on such a better track in your mind for the day And you do you compound this over time and it’s just gonna get better and better so if you feel like you’re a negative person or you feel like You know just the world is collapsing around you or you struggle with anxiety any of these things It tried to introduce a morning routine knowing there’s no secrets to the steps There’s no secret to the actions the secret is we’re working on our mind and we already know the mind is an incredibly powerful thing and We’re putting in the daily practice to improve our mind.

That’s what we’re doing. There’s no magic beyond that. It’s just like fitness There’s no magic beyond, you know on the lifting the barbell three sets of ten It’s doing the sets in the reps every single day compounded daily over decades That equates into a result and it’s no different when we’re trying to work on our mind So, can you add?

Mindset work into your daily routine and become a better human for it