Morning routine listed & explained

The list’s best-proven items:

Principles:

I find it easier to get good sleep quality, make effective use of each day, and get myself out of bed & doing things reasonably-efficiently (instead of dragging my feet or slapping the snooze button repeatedly) if I:

• Black-out my room from light sources.  I’ve purposely arranged my apartment so my home office is in the master bedroom with a window, and my bedroom is in a windowless den where I can close the door and be near pitch-black.  In other bedrooms I’ve used blackout curtains and/or eye masks before, and found those alternatives were helpful.
• Worry less about a consistent bedtime, and put more effort into consistency of wakeup time.  Yes, if I’m coming home from something late enough in an evening, I often shift my next morning’s alarm clock ahead an hour or few so I can get what I’ve found to be a bare-minimum # of hours of sleep for me to stay functional & not-irritable with people.  But in general, I sync my alarm clocks with sunrise time.  I use an app called Suntimes by Forrest Guice for this.  I used to set (and then virtually-always ignore) a bedtime alarm, then beat up on myself for pushing past it & getting less sleep; when I’ve got the rest of my AM routine in order, my days tend to be healthier throughout, leaving me feeling tired-enough at a reasonable & coincidentally-consistent-enough time of evening that bedtime no longer needs a goal alarm/reminder.
• Sync my home lighting brightness/colors throughout the day, and especially wakeup lights in the bedroom, to the day/night cycle.  A decade ago, I was buying up every on-clearance starter kit of Philips Hue bulbs I could find so my whole apartment functions this way, but by now, there are cheaper alternatives, especially if all you need to start with is the bedroom.  Mobile apps often include brightening the screen for wakeup alarms.  And I got a still fully-functional light-included alarm clock/FM radio less than a year ago being sent to the trash dumpster by a neighbor.  So by now I only try to pitch the Hue line as the best solution out there if you also want to sync lights to a computer or TV display.

Avoid the phone or computer until the whole morning routine is done.

• If I fall in the trap of poking at my phone any longer than it takes to turn off my alarm clocks, or sitting down at my computer because I left it on overnight from having deluded myself that “this’ll make it easier/faster to pick up where I left off whatever I was doing,” then that morning’s probably screwed.
• I’ve been generally better off ever since making heavy use of the phone’s built-in support for bedtime modes, focus modes, do-not-disturb, etc. to minimize onscreen notification indicators in the early morning.
• There are simple neurological reasons for this.  As explained by Dr. Alok Kanoja at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwptE3KmKuE&t=1065s :

“…when we wake up in the morning our dopamine stores are full. And so whatever we do early in the morning will release more dopamine because we’ve got a bunch of it. When we release more dopamine, this does a couple things. Not only will we find it more enjoyable but you will crave it tomorrow. You will reinforce that behavior tomorrow.

The problem right now is that when we spend, when we dump, all our dopamine, when we wake up first thing in the morning and we browse our phone for like an hour and a half, we dump all our dopamine.

Then there’s none left over to create cravings and behavioral reinforcement for healthy behaviors.”

…So that means for anything I want to get more-consistent at, especially if it’s something I find less-motivating to get started on or do consistently, that’s even more reasons to shove it into the morning routine.

Write down your morning routine, don’t just rely on memory

• Start with writing it in an order that makes sense to you, leaving least-essential/most-skippable tasks last.
• Then micro-adjust, including noting self-reminders for why you micro-adjusted, so future-you won’t have to rediscover the same corrections next time you overhaul your routine.
• By micro-adjustments I mean discoveries like “it was easy enough for me to decide to shower after my morning workout instead of before.  But if I wrote “hygiene” after workout, and did my tooth-brushing right then, I’d find myself afterwards eating breakfast and wishing, for cleanliness & flavor reasons, that I’d done at least the tooth-brushing afterwards.”

The effectiveness curve plots/charts of prescription medications vs. behavioral therapy are different.

• Antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, etc. are popular because their effects are noticeable within a span of weeks instead of months or years.
• Meditation, breath work, cognitive behavioral therapy, etc. statistically have a higher ceiling of potential effectiveness (see studies such as https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3563285/ or https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2748674/ ) but for the inward/introspection stuff, the graph won’t crossover the effectiveness point of popping Rx’d meds until more months of making it a frequent part of your life.  Both have their time & place, and the best outcomes usually come from a hybrid approach, so talk to your doctors and make use of both as appropriate for you.

Consider the “30 in 30”

• I subjectively find that for fat loss, it’s a worthwhile experiment to try for yourself the “30 in 30” popularized by Tim Ferriss’ “4 hour body” book (30 in 30 is more-quickly described by him in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj3ZVAjNUUk&pp=0gcJCfcAhR29_xXO if you don’t want to look it up in the full book).
• However, I don’t like working out on a just-filled stomach,; I found that demotivated me from going to the gym.  So that means I prefer to keep my workouts brief, intense, and pre-breakfast, typically just checking what CrossFit has listed as their Workout of the Day (and staying humble/modest enough to choose one of their downscaling options, if appropriate for my fitness level).  Shorter workouts also keep the overall routine brief enough to make it easier to fit consistently into a too-often-too-busy schedule — yet another reason to stay humble and opt for downscaling.

With all that said, my theoretical-best-case morning routine is now listed as:

• Wake up at consistent time.
• Hydrate with a full glass of room temperature water.
• Restroom break — importantly, without phone.
• Get at least a few moments outdoors staring towards (not directly at) real sunlight, without the interference of sunglasses or a window, for reasons described by Dr. Andrew Huberman at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDv4AWk0J3U&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tD
• Exercise (or if it’s a rest day, stretching/mobility work).
• Shower off the workout sweat.
• Sunblock/skincare now that my skin’s fresh from the shower. (I find myself regularly forgetting/skipping this one.)
• Balanced, protein-rich breakfast.
• Mindfulness or meditation (doesn’t have to be huge, even just deep breathing & staring a long way out the window on a 3-minute timer’s solid.  Sometimes I’ll do this in between the workout and showering as part of my cooldown, but that delays breakfast to later than the above-mentioned 30-in-30 ideal).
• AM planning/journaling. (This is skippable intermittently without immediately-calamitous consequence.  But doing so tends to worsen the rest of that day at least a little, and enough skipped days in a row can screw over an entire week or more.)
• Brush teeth. (Admittedly my mornings are often rushed enough by this point that I often skip it. Future-me hopefully won’t have to start regretting this until later, rather than sooner.)
• Daily affirmations (because I’m already in front of my bathroom mirror after brushing teeth.  This is by far my most-often-skipped item. It’s more like something I’m willing to experiment with because of how often I’ve heard it suggested rather than something I believe works on me, at least yet.)