This dress is probably better suited for a bedtime routine video, but I just
really like the moons and the stars :))
Hello wonderful humans, welcome back to the Bliss Bean. Before we start I just
want to let you know that I put together a worksheet that goes with this video
it's like a build your own morning routine worksheet. I've been really into
making these kinds of worksheets lately. So if you want to download that, the link
to that is in the description. I know I've talked about a lot of routines on
this blog, a lot of habits, so it's probably not very convincing when I'm like, no,
this, this, is the most important routine, this is the one. But seriously my morning
routine, I can't remember the last time that I skipped it, because I cannot start
my day without it, and here's why. Number one, it wakes me up. I don't want to spoil
too much of the routine but part of it involves cold water and another part of
it involves exercise. I just gave away two steps but whatever. As someone who is
enemies with the snooze button, these two steps really help me to feel alert and
energized no matter how little sleep I got or how dark it might be outside.
Reason number two is it keeps me calm. If I were to put together like an anti
morning routine it would go something like: picking up my phone first thing in
the morning, reading all those scary news headlines, then going on my email to see
all of the urgent tasks that await, then going on Instagram to worry about the
number of likes that I got, and feel bad about myself. This would all make me feel very
anxious, very stressed, not a zen morning mood at all. But my actual, non
anti-morning routine my anti anti morning routine... gives me a series of steps to
follow that gives me a good 45 minute buffer between when I wake up and when I
start to let the outside world. Reason three is it jump-starts my productivity.
I believe that a lot of productivity is just building momentum and keeping it
going, and that's exactly what my morning routine does. It's a little challenge
that I can surmount in the morning, not a huge one, it's not overwhelming, but there
are definitely many steps of my morning routine that I really don't feel like
doing every single morning, but after I do them I feel accomplished, I feel like
I can tackle anything else that is thrown my way that day. Finally number
four is it provides consistency, and this is an especially important one during
this time. I don't have a regular class schedule, no weekly group exercise
classes, no coffee dates with friends on the calendar. Everything is just... empty.
And so now more than ever I'm desperately hanging on to the
consistency that my morning routine provides. I know that the same thing is
going to happen every single day, at more or less the same time, and I can build
the rest of my day around that. Okay so without further ado, this is the actual
routine that I do every single morning, this is the ~Bliss Bean approved~
morning routine for ya. The first thing that happens is my alarm rings, and if I
were a perfect person or a liar, I would tell you that I get out of bed as soon
as it rings, but I am neither of those things. Especially now that I don't have
anywhere to urgently be, no classes to be tardy for, I can very easily fall into
this trap where I'm not even snoozing, I'm setting like, tiny two or three
minute timers to try and catch a few more winks of sleep, and then after doing
that a few times, I forget to set another timer and I end up sleeping in an hour.
But most mornings I'll only do that for about 10 minutes, and then I'll get out
of bed, I swear. While I'm not as extreme as putting my phone on the other side of
the room or anything like that, I did find that setting my alarm to a song
rather than that god-awful default ringtone helped me to avoid snoozing. I
only use one song, my song of choice is "It's Only" by ODESZA featuring Zyra. I
love all of their music but I think this song is perfect especially because it
starts with like a little crackling sound, and then it slowly gets louder, so
it doesn't startle me awake, and also I just love it so I enjoy listening to it.
The night before I will have put my phone on Do Not Disturb so that I don't
see any notifications on my lockscreen. When I pick up my phone I resist the
temptation to pull down the notification center, and all I do is I go to my time
tracking app and I start the morning routine task. The bobby pins always fall
out of my hair at night, so I grab those, my water bottle, my contact lens case, and
I head downstairs. The first thing I do is I get a tablespoon of coconut oil and
I put that in my mouth to swish around for a while. Supposedly this is good for
oral health, that's why I started doing it but honestly at this point my morning
just doesn't feel the same without it, so that's why I keep doing it. I fill up my
water bottle, which I aim to finish before breakfast, and then I go to the
bathroom to put in my contacts. Back upstairs, still swishing, I grab my phone
and my earbuds and I'll put on some music to do some stretching and weird
dancing that I will spare you from in this video. Usually once I find some
songs that work with my morning routine I will just play those to death, so
currently for the stretching I listen to ON by BTS because it just gets me
really hyped up, and then Ego by j-hope for my morning exercises which is 60
elbow to knee touches, 12 side steps or whatever you would call those, 30 hip
dips, and 30 crunches. A little bit of lying on the floor and then I gather my
phone and my clothes, I always just wear like sweatpants and
t-shirts around the house, I never wear stuff like this, this is literally my
prom dress from senior year, so changing into those clothes is not a huge step up
fro my pajamas, but it's something. I spit the oil out in my trash can because it
will clog your plumbing if you spit it out in the sink, remember that, okay? I
go to the bathroom and wash my face, first with an oil-based cleanser and
then a regular one. Then it's time for the cold shower. How
bad this is depends on the shower's mood that day, sometimes it gets icy,
sometimes it won't get more than just like, a refreshingly cool temperature, but
I try to set it as cold as it can go. I put on some music to distract me, lately
I've been using- oh look, another BTS song! *no one is surprised* This one is My Time which is also from
their newest album. I didn't realize how much of this video would center around
music, this is the fourth song that I'm highlighting, but again it's all about
consistency, so these songs, because they're the same songs every single day,
they're just like little anchors in my morning. So I set the stopwatch, once it
hits five seconds I step into the water, turn around a few times until it reaches
35, and then I can get out. This is definitely not a very pleasant habit but
stepping out of the shower feels SO nice and then putting on some nice warm socks
is SO cozy. The basic science behind this is that a hot shower is great at
night because when you step out, your body temperature goes from high to low
and that mimics your body's natural drop in temperature when you're getting ready
for sleep. A cold shower does the opposite and it's a signal to your body that it's
time to wake up. So then I get dressed, I put on deodorant, tone my face, and then
it's time to go back to my room. I've had trouble finding a good use for my Google
Home, so so far aside from listening to music this is pretty much the only thing
that I use it for. I'll say "ok Google, good morning'
'Hi Beatrice, the time is 7:19..." yeah so she tells me the weather and some news
stories for the day while I moisturize my face. I like this a lot because I was
feeling a little disconnected from world events but I wasn't sure how to
incorporate that into my day, and so this is a perfect time to do it because I
would spend time doing this anyways, so I might as well listen to
something productive while I hydrate my skin. After that, I head to my desk and
grab my journal. As I'm writing I make sure to drink some water so that I can
finish it before breakfast. I always label my entries with the date
the time, and my day of the cycle. I used to be super interested and still
somewhat am in the concept of cycle syncing. That's where you really pay
attention to how your menstrual cycle affects everything from your mood, energy,
skin, sleep, productivity levels, how social you are, etc, and you try to
adjust your life to work with that. There's so much interesting stuff out
there on this topic so I'll link some resources in the description if you want
to delve into that, but yeah I just like to keep an eye on what day it is so that I
can prepare for the day kind of, and understand what I'm going through better.
In my journal I just write about whatever is on my mind, maybe what I
dreamt about, what I'm excited about, what I'm worried about. Your journal is
definitely a good place to do some of that mindset work, so if there's
something that I've just got negative energy surrounding, like back when I was
doing a lot of photography, photoshoots would make me quite nervous that entire
day, and so in my journal I would consciously write about how confident I
was for the photoshoot, how great it would go, how much I would love the
resulting photos, how much I would click with the person I was taking photos of.
It's all about faking it till you... making it, because the stories you tell
yourself are not just stories, they will eventually become your reality. Some food
for thought. At the end of the entry, I will write down three things I'm
excited about for the day. This gets my mind away from anything that I might be
stressed about, and focused on the good things, because there are always three
things that you can name. A lot of times I'll write that I'm
excited to eat breakfast, that is a very exciting thing for me. After that I'll
write down whatever affirmation I'm focusing on at the moment, so the one
that I currently write is: "I create meaningful and beautiful content. I make
a difference in people's lives." After that, I grab my phone but NOPE, no
emails yet. For a little dose of thoughtfulness and intentionality before
I get into the nitty gritty of planning my day, I open up this app called Daily
Haloha. I want to thank them for sponsoring today's video. The Daily Haloha
is a free app that gives you a daily prompt where you fill in the blank to
questions like "today I would like to send some love to ____", "what I
appreciate most about my community is ______", "a moment in my life that I'd like
to experience again is ______". You get the idea. It really reminds me, as I'm
doing my morning routine and just wanting to check my emails and get on
with my day, that there's more to life than just emails and productivity, and
doing stuff. There's a lot of power in a simple moment of reflection and
connecting with others through sharing that experience. Once you answer, you send
it out there into the internet and magically, you get someone else's daily
Haloha back and you get to react to their response, which is just a nice
little way to make them feel heard. And then you can head over to this tab to
see responses from people all over the world. So I'm really excited about this
part, my friends at Daily Haloha actually let me write my own prompt
which is going live today. I can't show it to you in this video because I'm not
a time traveler, but since this is a morning routine video, I went with the
prompt "what sets me up for a great day is _____". So if you click the link in the
description, you can download the app and contribute your answer. Tell me what the
most essential part of your morning routine is. I'm so excited to see the
entire wall of responses after today! So after I've had my little moment of
mindfulness, I then move on to actually figuring out how I will spend my day. I
start out by reading out loud these 2020 intentions that I wrote for myself
back in January, just to remind myself of how I want this year to go
Obviously this year has not gone like how any of us have imagined it, but we're
doing our best. So the idea here is that I want to remind myself of how I want to
live life on the grand scale before i zoom in to the micro scale and decide
how I'll spend my day. After that I'll let myself have a quick glance at my
emails, not really responding to anything usually, just kind of getting an idea of
what's going on, what do I need to do today. I open up my planning app. You guys
know I'm a huge fan of TeuxDeux, I have a whole video on how I use that, but I am also a
huge fan of constantly evolving and trying new things,
so this week I'm actually trying this new tool called Claro, it's still in the
beta stage so it's not available to the public, but I'll let you know what I
think about it after I've tried it out for a couple of weeks. Since I do my
weekly planning on Sundays, I usually have my to-do list pretty much set for
the day, I just have to figure out what order I'm going to work on things. I've
been trying to divide my day into different chunks based on how I work
best at different times of the day, so I'll do that in Google Calendar,
I'll make headers in my planning app and then just sort those tasks underneath so
I literally have a step-by-step game plan that corresponds to my calendar.
After that's all done, that's pretty much the end of the routine. After that I'll
go downstairs and I'll make myself a nice breakfast, and then I head back up
to my room to start the daily grind. I hope you enjoyed seeing my morning
routine, maybe it gave you some ideas for things to incorporate into your own
routine, but I also want to see your ideas, so I'll be checking the Daily
Haloha app today and I want to do a little compilation of my favorite
answers on Instagram Stories, so be sure to contribute your answer. Please don't
just say like, coffee, or something boring like that, be creative! Again, there's a
worksheet that goes along with this video with tons of ideas for your own
morning routine that you can mix and match. If you want to download that and
print it out, the link to that is in the description. Thank you so much for
watching and I'll see you next week! Bye!