Hey, what's up guys?
So, today we are going to talk about your morning routine.
Now there is a ton of stuff out there on the internet
about morning routines.
There's tons of books, there's tons of blogs,
there's tons of podcast episodes
but it seems like the majority of those are focused
on what you should be adding to your morning routine,
what you should do.
I wanna take a little bit of a different tact today
and focus on what you should stop doing
in your morning routine.
So today we are going to break down eight different things
that you should stop doing when you wake up in the morning,
if you're doing them right now.
The first item on our list
has to do with that magical little rectangle
of plastic and silicone in your pocket.
If you wake up in the morning
and immediately check social media on your phone,
you need to stop doing this
for two important reasons.
First and foremost, if you make checking social media
the first action of your day
then the first action of your day
is giving into a craving for novelty
and that counteracts all of the work that you've been doing
to build your focus muscle.
By contrast, if you wait a little bit
before you check those feeds and maybe do some other things
like breakfast or working out or reading a book for a bit,
you are telling your brain that,
yes, you have to wait before you can go check
all those novelty-inducing social media feeds.
And that's gonna make you much more able to focus
on your work later on in the day.
Reason number two why you should
stop checking social media in the morning
is because if you're anything like me,
you tend to just grab the phone
and start checking your feeds in bed.
And you intend to only check your feeds
for about five minutes
but you end up looking at them for 20 minutes sometimes
and from personal experience I can tell you
there is no healthy position
to be looking at a phone in bed.
You're either looking at it with your arm above your head
or you're propped up on one elbow.
Either way you are putting your body
in a bad postural position and if you do this enough
you can actually end up causing nerve damage.
I've actually caused nerve damage in my own arms before
and it is really painful and impedes my work
and it takes a surprisingly long time to heal.
So, in short, use your bed as a place for sleeping.
Check your social media when you're out of bed
and do it a little bit after you wake up.
Item number two on our list
is eating an unhealthy breakfast.
So, I'm actually reading Jordan Peterson's book
12 Rules For Living right now
and in this book he actually talks about
how eating a protein and fat-heavy breakfast
can actually decrease feelings of anxiety.
Even putting that aside, I know a lot of people
like to wake up
and they eat a breakfast full of sugar or simple carbs
and neither of those things
is gonna set you up for
sustained healthy energy throughout the day.
And this is not me getting on a high horse here.
This is yet another area where
I actually struggle with temptation
because it can be very easy for me to fall into a pattern
while I wake up every single day,
convince myself I need to work right away
and then go to Starbucks and get a breakfast sandwich.
And those things are not healthy.
So, you might be asking yourself,
how do I make sure that I'm eating a healthy breakfast
on a regular basis?
And one of the easiest ways to do this
is to bulk prep your meals.
This basically means taking one or two days a week
to bulk cook a bunch of food in advance
so it's really easy and quick to grab it in the mornings.
The great thing about this is that it's efficient.
You don't have to get out the pots and pans
seven different times.
You don't have to clean them seven different times.
It's just one or two times
and you reap the time saving benefits.
One really great candidate for bulk prepping
is hard-boiled eggs
because if you have a pressure cooker
you can cook them really, really quickly
and the shells are very easy to peel off
and if you don't, you can easily do it in a pot.
It's a little harder to peel the shells off,
it's still pretty easy
and saves you a lot of time.
Or you can do what me and my girlfriend love to do
which is making egg bakes in a casserole dish.
Item number three on the list
is hitting the snooze button on your alarm.
And you knew this was coming on the list.
So, aside from the fact that hitting the snooze button
is basically denying yourself good quality sleep
that you could've had
because you are interrupting your sleep cycle
and then attempting to get into a new one,
which is going to be inevitably interrupted early again.
Hitting the snooze button is also a terrible idea
because doing it is admitting defeat
as your very first action of the day.
If you hit the snooze button on your alarm,
it means that you had set an intention
to wake up at a specific time the night before
and then you failed.
So, do yourself a favor and get out of bed
the moment your alarm goes off.
Now, this might sound a little bit weird
but I've actually found it pretty helpful
to picture myself setting this intention
and telling it to a specific person.
And the person who always comes to mind for me
is Jocko Willink, who is currently a podcaster and author
but was a Navy seal
and, to be honest is somebody that I would definitely
not want to disappoint in real life.
Of course, if that's not enough
I've also devised a system for basically forcing myself
to go get up in the morning using a scheduled tweet.
And if you're curious about that,
I will have a link in the description down below
and on screen right now.
Now, we're moving on to item number four.
It's a brand new John Cena for my door.
Just kidding, it's complaining.
Seriously, a lot of people love
to wake up in the morning and complain.
They complain about how early it is.
They complain about having to go to work.
They complain about how tired they feel.
And the problem with complaining
is that the words that you choose to use,
the way that you choose to express yourself
actually has a tangible effect on your state of mind
and your level of motivation.
So, instead of waking up in the morning and complaining
why not think about what you have to grateful about,
what you can be positive about.
If you dwell on these things
you're gonna be an overall happier person.
Alright, item number five
is cleaning up your living space and your work area.
Now this is definitely not a bad thing to do
but I'm putting it on this list
because I think it is much better to do it the night before.
You might have heard me talk in the past
about a concept called Clear to Neutral.
This basically means setting your work area
or you living area back to its neutral state
after you're done using this.
And the reason you wanna do this
is that the next time you come to use it,
which, in the case of your living space
would be the next day when you wake up,
you want it to be in a state that is already usable.
When your living space, your workspace
is ready to be used immediately when you start the day
you don't have to waste any of your willpower
or your time getting it ready.
It's just ready to go.
So, when your building your before bed routine
build in a little bit of time
for cleaning your space up and clearing it back to neutral.
Your future self is gonna very appreciative.
On a similar note, item number six is planning your day.
Now, planning your day in the morning
can be very useful for some people.
Some people love to have that
as part of their morning routine
but for other people it can actually be a lot better
to plan their day the night before.
Personally, I find that when I wake up
to a concrete plan that I set up the night before,
I almost feel kind of beholden to my past self
and I'm much more clear on the direction
of going to go in immediately.
It's kinda similar to how Barack Obama
used to outsource the decision for what outfit
he was going to wear during the day
because he didn't want to deal with that decision.
He already had a ton of other decisions
and that was just going to make him less focused.
Item number seven is starting your day with negative news.
And if you're the kind of person
who likes to check Reddit or the news app on your phone,
this is something that you need to be wary about.
As somebody who likes to browse Reddit,
I mean, heck, I've even got
my own subreddit for College Info Geek.
I am well aware that many of the default subreddits
on reddit.com are filled with tons of negative news.
And yes, you might wanna keep up to date on world events
but if you're waking up every single morning
and bombarding yourself with a ton of negative stories,
that's gonna put you in a negative state of mind.
And it's also likely to send you down rabbit holes
that end up wasting a ton of your time.
So, if you are going to wake up and check news,
check your feeds, if that's something you like to do,
tailor those feeds to be full of positive
or interesting information not negative news.
Or, if you wanna do something even more effective,
just read a book in the morning.
Make that part of your morning routine
and then check your feeds later on during the day.
Again, if you wake up in the morning
and you start with some long-form content,
that's building that focus muscle.
And that brings us to our final item on the list
which is getting up at different times every morning.
If you don't currently have
a at least somewhat consistent time
that you wake up in the morning,
if you're getting up really late on the weekends
and really early during the days
or you have totally different wake-up times during the week,
then you are negatively impacting
your body's circadian rhythm
and negatively impacting the quality of your sleep.
So, as best as you can, try to establish
a consistent wake-up time for yourself.
And I know a bunch of you are gonna ask me
can I still sleep in on the weekends?
And, biologically speaking, you would be best off
by having a consistent wake-up time
that includes the weekends.
Your body doesn't have like a special,
magical weekend mode.
It doesn't switch over all of its biological processes
because you're not in school or work.
But that doesn't mean that you are going to ruin your life
by sleeping in on the weekends.
And to be quite honest, I actually sleep in
about an hour later on Saturdays and Sundays
than when I get up during the week.
So, if you wanna be like me,
you don't wanna be completely uber efficient,
then go ahead and do that
but from a scientific perspective,
a consistent wake-up time is better
than an inconsistent one.
Now, in future videos we are definitely
going to talk about things that you can add
to your morning routine to further improve
the quality of your daily life
but the nice thing about the items on this list
is that, well, they don't take a lot of effort
to put into practice.
So, earlier in the video we talked about
how it might be a good addition to your morning routine
to read a book.
And this is something that I like to do myself
but because I'm very committed
to having some form of exercise
in my morning routine as well,
whether it be going to the gym
or going for a bike ride or for a long walk,
I typically listen to my books.
And my favorite app for finding those book is Audible.
Audible has an unbeatable selection of audio book titles
in a ton of different genres
ranging from psychology to science fiction to biographies.
So, no matter what's sitting on your reading list,
you are most likely going to be able
to find it in their library.
Now, in the past you've probably seen me
talk about how you can use Audible on your phone
but today I wanted to show you
how you can also use it on an Amazon Echo.
And it's really easy.
All you do is ask Alexa to read an Audible book.
Alexa, read Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance.
- [Alexa] Getting the selection from
Thomas Audible Library.
Resuming Elon Musk.
- And from there you can easily listen
while you're cooking dinner,
which is what I usually use it for
or while you're doing anything else at home.
Also, as a guy who sometimes likes to listen to audio books
while I am going to sleep,
I love the fact that you can ask Alexa
to set a sleep timer so your book doesn't get too far ahead
once you actually do fall asleep.
And, of course, you can also use voice commands
to ask Alexa to pause or go backwards or skip forward
and at any time you can pause what you're listening to
on your Echo device
and pick up right where you left off on your phone.
So, if you've got an Echo device
you can try this for free right now.
And when you're ready for more
you can go over to audible.com/thomas
or text Thomas to 500-500 on your phone
to get a free one-month trial
that also comes with a free audio book download
of your choosing.
Now, as you con probably tell from all the B-roll here,
the book that I'm gonna recommend for you guys this week
is the Elon Musk biography by Ashlee Vance
which covers Elon Musk's early years
as well as the development of Tesla and SpaceX
and if you saw my recent video on Elon Musk,
a lot of the lessons about how productive he is
came straight from that book.
So, if you wanna start listening to that book for free
or any other book of your choosing,
once again you can go over to audible.com/thomas
or text Thomas to 500-500 on your phone.
Big thanks to Audible for sponsoring this video
and helping to support this channel.
And, as always, thank you guys so much for watching.
You can hit that Like button if you enjoyed this video
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You might also wanna pick up a free copy of my book
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right around here.
Thanks for watching
and I will see you in the next video.