Nowadays, life can be all about stress and tension. Not having enough sleep, not doing enough exercise, having a bad diet, all of this greatly affects our mood, physical shape and reactions.
Learning to seize the day to its full potential is truly a hard task at first. Procrastination, laziness, or lack of time-management can ruin productivity on a devastating scale. Setting up a daily routine can effectively improve your overall fitness as well as mental state.
In this article we will give you a few tips on setting up your own daily routine.
How do I setup a daily routine?
At first, establishing a daily routine might sound quite hard. We normally combine habits that influence every day for us without even realizing it. Shockingly enough, we understand the importance of good habits, we often just feel too lazy to maintain them.
It can take some time to create a daily routine that works for you and find out how to stick to it. What should the perfect daily routine consist of? Well, that is very individual. First of all, you have to find out what you have to get done and when you have to get it done during the day. This requires time-management abilities so that you can create a long-term regime that you can stick to.
1. Wake up softly
Choose melodic tunes to wake you up in the morning. Sounds of nature and rhythmic or melodic tunes can help wake you up with more mercy than an army-styled buzzer alarm does.
Research has also proved that music which you like, or which your brain associates with good feelings, is proved to help with morning exhaustion or stress.
Melatonin, generally known as the sleep hormone, can still reach high levels in your body when you wake up. To reach full wakefulness, use light management. The more gradual light you will expose your body to, the more awake you will be. After waking up, open the blinds or use a dimmed light and gradually increase the intensity of it. This will help with morning exhaustion. Sunlight helps start up your internal body clock. There is no better feeling in the morning than waking up and feeling well-rested.
However, morning light does not only help you wake up. Exposure to natural light in the morning can make you feel sleepier earlier in the evening which makes it easier to go to bed on time.
2. Start the day off with a mood setter
Using the correct tools and activities to start your day off in the morning is essential for how the day will often turn out in conclusion. Whether it’s meditation, exercise or a morning walk, choose any activity which supports a healthy lifestyle and overall well-being for your body and brain.
Choice of breakfast can also affect your whole day. A research from 2016 showed that people who eat less food for breakfast usually snack more and fill their stomachs later in the day, not helping them maintain a weight-loss diet. Aim for a balanced breakfast – fruit, yoghurt, eggs, oatmeal. Avoid extensively processed foods – pastries, cereals full of sugar. Such foods are absorbed much quicker and might cause levels of blood sugar to rapidly increase.
Be careful with morning coffee! While caffeine is a great defense against melatonin and therefore, exhaustion, coffee first thing in the morning is not good for your body at all. If you drink coffee on an empty stomach in the morning, it may cause releasing of hydrochloric acid inside your digestive system. This can lead to bloating and vomiting.
Drinking coffee after waking up is also harmful because it might increase the level of cortisol very quickly and the body will take a long time to return to its normal state. This hormone controls our biological clock and the ability to stay awake. Instead, experts recommend drinking coffee an hour or 90 minutes after waking up and after eating at least something.
3. Do small morning tasks
Make your bed, clean your living space, clean the kitchen, have a hygiene routine. Keeping your space clean will not only look better, but it will also contribute to feeling better. With trash lying around your living space, germs and dust will have a better place to stay. This might lead to respiratory complications which might reflect on the quality of your sleep or your overall feeling.
4. Write down a to-do list
A to-do list will help you keep track of your daily schedule. It is also an effective tool when prioritizing tasks – The more important something is, the earlier you should do it so you are not as stressed for the rest of your day.
Over the course of the day, use your list to check off finished tasks. Seeing progress will help you keep track of how much time you have left to do the remaining tasks. It will also help you appreciate your productivity during the day.
5. Commute effectively
If you travel to work in the morning, do it effectively and reduce stress. While having a car can be great, it is not so environmentally responsible and sometimes it can also become unreliable. Using public transport can of course also be unreliable at times, however, do whatever you can to reduce morning stress as it can affect your mood and attitude towards colleagues at work.
If you know that you get easily nervous in the morning due to road rage or traffic, do not drive your car to work. Try cycling or using public transport. To prevent having delays and being stressed out about being late, try to leave home earlier and use the time of your commute to listen to your favourite music or podcast to set the tone.
6. Maintain relationships
Hanging out with your peers or loved ones more often will boost your body’s levels of serotonin, dopamine, and many more beneficial hormones. Having someone to talk to about how your day went is a game changer.
If you see yourself rather as an introvert and feel happy when you are finally alone after work, fill your time with self-care activities. Sharing feelings with others is not for everyone, try writing them down and looking back on what made your day better or worse to use your experience on the next day.
Always find good moments, even if the day was terrible. Try to appreciate what you have instead of comparing yourself to others.
7. Wind down
Relaxing in the evening is important for a correct circadian rhythm. This is a biological rhythm which affects the distribution of hormones and processes in your body based on what time of the day it is. If you teach your body the correct routine, it will know when to distribute hormones required for a high-quality sleep and rest, or for peak wakefulness.
Eat a light dinner and receive less stimuli to rest your brain and set it to the mode of relaxation. A hot bath might also help set the tone for an effective rest. Find out what suits you best.
Now, it’s your turn
Having read this article, we hope you found out what might help you set up your own daily routine. Upon creating one, it is very important to maintain it for a longer time to find out if it really takes effect.
You are trying to reach the state when you will stick to your daily routine subconsciously without realizing it. That is when your body will become familiar with the routine.
We also recommend you to look up examples of daily routines on the internet which might help you with building the foundation of your own routine. Who knows, maybe you will find a perfect fit without even having to bother. Daily routine apps are also available and able to sync with your phone calendar. If you use a calendar app to keep track of time, write your daily routine schedule in it, routine apps are not for everyone.
So go on, start the creative process now!