Having a morning routine is a great way to kick-start your day; mentally, physically and emotionally. Today, I will share my morning routine with you. A well-calculated series of steps that I take to ensure that I feel energised throughout the day. However, this routine hasn’t always been like this. A couple of years ago, my routine consisted of a 16 oz / ~500 ml cup of coffee, combined with one or two cigarettes. Not actually a #fitboy routine. But, over time, step-by-step and experimenting along the way, I developed a routine that makes me feel energised, healthy and overall good.

What you will read when you continue:

Where I started

• 08:00 – Alarm went off
  • First snooze
• 08:10 – Alarm went off
  • Second snooze, turn on the coffee machine from the bed that I prepared the night before.
• 08:20 – Alarm went off
  • Struggle to get out of bed. Pour coffee into a mug, put on a bathrobe, and go outside. Drink coffee while smoking a cigarette.
• 08:30 – Toilet and Shower
• 08:45 – Leave the house

My current morning routine

First, let’s start off with my current morning routine.

• 06:00 – Alarm goes off. Get out of bed immediately and go to the bathroom.
  • I use the Sleep for Android app. My phone is on the other side of the room and can only be turned off when I scan an NFC tag in the bathroom.
  • After entering the bathroom, I make sure to turn on all lights at full brightness.

• 06:02 – Weigh in
  • I have a smart scale that I use to weigh myself in every day. This is mainly to check in if my current diet is going according to plan.
• 06:05 – Brush teeth and drink 1 – 2 glasses of water.
  • Drinking sufficient water is essential for a whole range of health benefits such as disease prevention, cognitive functions, physical performance, skin health and much more.
• 06:10 – Cold shower
  • Inspired by this article from the Huberman Lab I started with cold showers. In addition to the fact that cold showers (most likely) have a lot of health benefits, they make sure you are immediately wide awake 🙂.

• 06:15 – Get dressed
  • Besides the normal things like putting on pants, I also put a day creme with SPF 50 sunscreen to prevent the ageing of my skin. Ali Abdaal has a great video about his evidence-based skincare routine that talks about this in depth.
• 06:20 – Take vitamins
  • Vitamine D3 1000 UI: most people in the Western world are deficient in Vitamine D3.
  • Omega-3 (Fishoil): have a range of benefits. Note: most benefits are retrieved from the balance between omega-3 and omega-6. Omega-6 is often added to your food (in the Western world) already, so you might want to focus only on supplementing omega-3.
  • Multi-vitamin: this is due to tackle any deficiencies. Make sure to check yours for the difference between water-soluble and fat-soluble vitamins, since water-soluble will just be removed when peeing, but fat-soluble can become toxic if taken too much.
• 06:25 – Breakfast and notes reviewing
  • Breakfast is high protein Quark (’Kwark’ in Dutch), with some jam for some fast carbs that help with the gym session.
  • During breakfast, I use Readwise to review 5 highlights that I have done in the past and write down any actions or ideas I might get from those. For a complete overview of how I highlight and review my notes, check out my article about my second brain.
• 06:35 – Coffee and journaling
  • The main purpose of the coffee is to have additional energy during my sports session. I try to delay this as much as possible to ensure that they don’t prevent the Adenosine receptors from clearing. For another in-depth review, check out this podcast from the Huberman Lab.
  • Journaling is a combination of the prompt “What is my main priority for today?” and the morning pages exercise from the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I notice that this gives me a strong focus for the day, as well as clearing my mind of anything that might be drifting around.
• 06:45 – Walk to the gym
  • I have the luxury of being within walking distance from my gym, which is also open 24/7.
• 07:00 – 08:00 Workout
  • I have strengths training focussed on hypertrophy. I might share the detailed routine in a later post. Let me know if you are interested.
• 08:00 – Walk back home
• 08:15 – Freshen up
• 08:30 – Leave the house

How I got there

My main goal for the next part is to show to you that my current routine didn’t happen overnight. When I read books like The Morning Miracle or The 5AM Club, these routines always seemed farfetched, since they were so different from mine. However, through continuous tiny changes, I have now incorporated quite a bit of these habits, but over a longer period of time. Maybe you can too!

“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” — (Paraphrase of) Samuel Johnson

Phase 1: The repairman

The first phase was mainly focussed on ‘not being unhealthy’. Before it had any benefit to start experimenting with optimizing my routine, it was important to get the basics in check. For me, this meant:

• Starting with a (healthy) breakfast.
• Not smoking (first thing in the morning).
• Reducing caffeine intake.

At first, this meant delaying my first cigarette by only 15 minutes (which was actually a challenge at first (!)) and eating some yoghurt with a lot of sugar-coated muesli. Over time, and stretching myself little by little, this resulted in at least a routine where I got up, ate a nutritious breakfast and didn’t rely (as much) on caffeine to get me going for the day.

Side note: I’m happy to say that I’ve completely quit smoking now. If you’re interested, I can share a bit about my approach to this later. Let me know!

Phase 2: The energizer

After the success of my initial improvements and now having found my new hobby in productivity hacks, I continued to discover how I could increase my energy throughout the day. This resulted in some successful and some less successful experiments. Though it is a bit much to cover everything in detail here, I’ll briefly share some things that did (not) work for me:

Things I liked:

1. Not drinking alcohol before going to bed. Major impact on my sleep quality (when doing it for 2+ months or more). Not drinking (or less), also helps with the next point.
2. Going to bed around the same time. By having a steady rhythm, I notice that (1) I get tired at night at the same time, making it easier not to stay up late and (2) it is way easier to get out of bed in the morning.
3. Doing sports in the morning. This has been a challenge to get in consistently, but every time I go, I feel great. It boosts my energy, my feeling of accomplishment and my general feeling of well-being.

Things I tried, but stopped doing:

1. Meditating in the morning. Though I did feel a bit more relaxed, it didn’t give me the same dopamine-boost-per-hour (DBPH) as when spending that time on sports.
2. Aligning my bed- and waketime with my sleep cycles. A sleep cycle roughly takes 90 minutes and there are some theories out there that you could reduce the total amount of sleep (say to 4 x 1,5 = 6,5 hours) by aligning them with your sleep cycles.
   …
   I just got really tired.
3. Gratefulness journaling. Though there is a lot of evidence that it helps you be a happier person, it just felt awkward to me. Maybe I’m doing it wrong. I like to think I’m already happy.

Phase 3: The optimizer

The phase I’m currently in. Though I feel that the major improvements that could have been applied, are already in place, I still like to tweak and optimize things from time to time. This is mainly driven by my curiosity to experiment with new methodologies. Sometimes I discover things that work, most of the time I find something that doesn’t, but I always learn something new about myself as well.

Conclusion

“If you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.” — James Clear – Atomic Habits

What I’ve come to learn about optimizing my morning routine, is that small changes can compound greatly over time. If you had told me 10 years ago how every morning would look like for me now, I wouldn’t have believed you, but yet here we are. And the best thing is that I’m enjoying it every day.

Who knows what I will be doing 10 years from now?