My Morning Routine (How To Jumpstart Your Brain & Day)

How can you jumpstart your brain and day for greater productivity and peace of mind? I believe if you can win your morning, you can win your day. Creating routines in the morning and evening helps me insulate myself from decision fatigue.

You can only create a finite number of good decisions each day. Setting up habits early in the day creates positive momentum and a vision and direction for my day. I don’t always do all of these, but here are some ideas for you.

My Ideal Morning Routine

Recall Your Dreams

• Episode 14 is all about the power of dreams to transform your life.
• Some of the greatest breakthroughs in history came in dreams.
• When you dream, your subconscious mind processes solutions to problems you work on in the daytime, but most people forget them.

Make the Bed

• Making your bed is a success habit.
• How you do anything is how you do everything.
• Making your bed well teaches you how to do everything else well – that’s why it’s required in the military.
• When you return at the end of the day, you come back to success.

Drink Water and Take Supplements

• Water is important because most of us are very dehydrated at night.
• I take my supplements and probiotics.
• Your gut is your second brain. You have an incredible amount of nerve cells in your gut, so make sure they’re fed.

Breathe

• Breathing techniques fully oxygenate your body and your brain.
• Try box breathing, alpha breathing, or the Wim Hof method.

Meditate

• I meditate for 15 – 20 minutes because mindfulness is so important.
• I want to have a clear mind as I enter the day.
• Try the Headspace app or the Muse device.

Move

• I move for 1 – 2 minutes so I can get into my body.
• I do intense movements like calisthenics, jumping jacks, crunches, or burpees.
• I exercise later in the afternoon, but this movement gets my heart rate moving.

Take A Cold Shower

• Cold therapy works for me and helps to reset my nervous system.

Nourish Your Brain

• My favorite tea is a combination of gotu kola, ginkgo, lion’s mane, MCT oil and other gems.
• This concoction stimulates my brain and increases my focus throughout the day.

Journal

• I’ve been journaling since college.
• Many geniuses – like Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison – write journals.
• Studies have found that many geniuses journal. But do they journal because they’re geniuses, or does the process of journaling and reflection make them geniuses?
• I prefer to handwrite my journals since studies say handwriting is better than typing.

Create A To-Do List, A To-Be List, and A To-Feel List

• My to-do list: I pick 3 personal and 3 professional goals to complete for the day.
• My friend Clay Hebert calls it a “champagne moment.” What can I accomplish that will make me feel like I crushed it at the end of the day?
• My to-feel list: A lot of who we are is our states and emotions.
• I don’t want to feel a certain way by accident but by design.
• I decide how I want to feel so I can design my day that way: to feel loved, to feel curious, to feel bewilderment, to feel connected, to feel gratitude.
• My to-be list:
• Who do I want to be today – a good partner? A good friend? A good leader? A good teacher? A good coach?
• We’re not human doings. We’re not human beings.

Read

• I read for about 20-30 minutes.
• If you schedule the time, you can read one book a week just by reading 30 minutes a day.

Make A Brain Smoothie

• Most of the ingredients come from my top 10 brain foods – green leafy vegetables, water, blueberries, avocado, and more.

Do Brain Training

• I do certain exercises that I teach in my Kwik Learning programs.
• I want to jumpstart my brain in the morning.

Start With Your Most Difficult, Important Task

• You can’t manage your time as much as you can manage your priorities.
• Priorities used to be a singular word. Now everyone has multiple priorities.
• In the morning, I have the most nervous system energy so I like to take on the biggest thing on my list.
• Usually, the thing I don’t want to do is the thing I should do that will make everything else easier.
• If you have trouble, refer to the Kwik Brain 010: How to Stop Procrastinating.

Why I Manage the First Hour of My Day:

• Usually, the first hour of your day is the hour you can influence the most.
• If you need help adding these, listen to Kwik Brain 015: How to Create New Habits.
• This conversation is all about self-love and self-care.
• Self-love and self-care are not selfish.
• You can’t be good for somebody unless you’re being good to yourself.
• Set up your morning so you can win – and then you can check your phone and email in a resilient state. But you start the day with momentum and having already checked off some important items on your list.
• Come back and celebrate at the end of your day.