Morning & Night Routines: The Most Important Part of Your Day
The Andreia Philosophy
A good routine to start your morning helps prepare your mind for the war that is your day.
Having a morning routine creates a trigger for your mind that prompts it to get to work.
Top performers all use routines to prepare for their days. Tim Ferris, former president Barrack Obama, Winston Churchill, and countless others.
How many of us wake up whenever like? The alarm rings at 5am, yet our eyes don’t open until 5:44am. We lay in bed, play on our phones, waste our time. Don’t spend an hour in bed sleeping in, doing nothing, while the world spins outside and others have already begun. Goals live outside of bed, where you need to be.
We’re dying a little bit more each day. You need to spend that time outside of the luxury of your Egyptian cotton sheets. A metaphorical womb, keeping you safe from stress and worry. This is a great place to be at night, but in the morning, you emerge from your cave ready to eat the world.
The mistake we make is believing stress is bad for us. We’re designed to fight. To lose, and to win.
Your morning routine is for clearing your mind.
When you first wake up, your mind is unfocused. You need total focus to perform at your best.
You need to breath deep and awaken your nervous system. Wipe the sleep from your eyes, and prepare to improve today.
When you begin your morning routine, you are absent cell phone. No TV, no radio, only you and your mind.
Begin your morning without your phone. No TV, no email, only you and your mind. Later in your routine you can play music and/or a podcast. But you should start with quiet, always.
Consider your morning a sacred time. This is your time, a religious moment for you. You’d never miss your morning routine, that would be sacrilege. You understand that behind every strong man or woman is a primer.
Your morning routine is the igniting gunpowder charge. A time to focus on what you will accomplish today, like a magnifying glass seeing through the sun. Full power, burning everything in its path.
Become a machine. There are no variables. You wake up, enter your routine like an android with one program.
Your morning routine is there to cleanse your mind. When you first wake up you’re frantic. You panic, almost like panic has become you.
Being late for work.
Do you have enough money to pay the bills?
Work is stressful.
These problems matter. Thinking about them does not. Thinking doesn’t solve anything, doing does. Our routines are designed to remove these thoughts.
So all that’s left is action.
Your Morning Routine
War Morning
The morning routine is a shower, for your mind. Would you leave your home filthy and dirty? Unshaved, unshowered, unkempt?
No.
Then why would you leave with your mind in the same state?
Because we can’t see our minds, we don’t understand that minds need cleaning too.
It’s like global warming, or the impending earthquake or tsunami. We don’t concern ourselves with what we don’t see.
Why do maintenance on the car if it runs fine? We know we need it but refuse because we can’t see it.
That stops now.
Your mind needs care like a car.
Your mind needs cleaning like your body.
Without care, your mind deteriorates and you cannot perform at your best.
For you to live the life you want, there is no compromise for mental health.
You need a morning and night routine. It is one of the most important events each day in your life. Routines start and end the day.
Without your routine, your day has no structure. Your mind is frantic. You have no direction.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
Order and structure build empires. You decide the fate of the day in the first hour. Will you complete your morning routine and conquer your day? Or rush out the door, espresso in hand mind running like an escaped prisoner?
It doesn’t matter what your routine is. What matters, is creating routines you’ll follow.
Below is a starter morning routine for you. Rip it apart, copy it, create something completely different. It doesn’t matter. What matters, is consistency is your practice of your routines.
The Morning Routine
10 minute warm up: Pyramid burpees. start with 10, then 9, then 8… Or, a long walk. What is a burpee?
10 minute meditation: Visualize your ambitions and goals on a wide scale. visualize your small goals for the day, and use a Breathing method to become grounded.
Drink a full bottle of water: 1000 ML. Drinking a gallon of water a day is great for health and aesthetics. Dehydration is shown to harm both cognitive, and physical performance. After eight hours of sleep, you wake up dehydrated. Water in the morning is a must.
Review your goals.
Review your personal code. What are your values? Who are you?
Night Routine
Stretch 10 minutes: Your mind and body are one. Your gut is your second brain, embedded with neurons. Taking care of your body is taking care of your mind. Mediate ten minutes: Twice a day meditation. This time is for affirmations and visualize your dreams. Real Visualization. Taste your dreams, touch them, feel them, and own them.
Schedule the following day:Always know what you’re going to do tomorrow. That way, there isn’t any room to negotiate wasted time. Set your objective, and achieve it.
Journal: Have you ever felt like life is rushing past you? Journaling prevents that. It’s your history, your legacy in words. Being able to look back on previous days is powerful. Dealing with the same problems? You aren’t progressing. Think of your journal as a daily audit. Even writing a few words is good.
Review Your Goals:Goals are life. Goals & Growth are the only reason to be alive. This is why you check twice. Once in the morning to act on them, once at night to dream about them. Both are important for you to succeed.
review code: Same as the morning. your constitution takes over your dreams. Don’t follow your code. Let your code run through your veins, every capillary of your blood. Stamp each cell with your code.
More Reasons to Have a Morning & Night Routine
Life Optimizer created a list of the morning routines of 25 ultra successful people. A pattern becomes apparent when you read the routines of these successful entrepreneurs and powerful men. Most all of them meditate, write, and engage in some physical exercise. Look at the times they rise. There is a large skew towards early risers.
The Early Human Catches Whatever He Wants.
Ben Franklin Morning Routine
When most wake up with the snooze button, winners wake up with fire in their eyes. Ready to burn away their weakness, cauterizing their dreams in their hearts. The winners know there is no a second place. Elon Musk doesn’t wait for someone else to get to Mars. He grinds every day to colonize the red planet. There aren’t excuses or second place ribbons. The only truth is whether or not you accomplished your goal, or moved closer to the target.
Benjamin Franklin, the gentleman on the $100 dollar bill. Every day he followed his routine. Every day he knew exactly what he was going to do. He followed his routine like a priest follows prayer: nothing got in the way of his routine. As mentioned above, great men follow great routines. They run their lives like a corporation, demanding an increase in performance day over day.
You don’t want a complicated routine. If your routine is too difficult or too long, you won’t commit. You want to wake up excited for the opportunity to engage in your routine.
The morning and night routine templates will average thirty minutes each.
An hour a day keeps the weakness at bay.
Routines longer than thirty minutes are unnecessary. This is the warm up, not the workout.
Daily life is the workout. We’re igniting our minds and bodies to have the best workout possible. The best day we can, the greatest life we can.
Your morning and night routines aren’t meant to challenge you. The day is the challenge. Morning & Night Routines are a warm up for being alive.
