Everyone has a morning routine. Whether it includes an intense workout and a 15-step skin care regimen, or hitting the snooze button 4 times and then frantically grabbing a coffee on the way out the door, everyone has some sort of schedule for how they start their day.
Whatever your routine may be, it can make or break your entire day so it’s important to make good choices or your day may suffer for it.
A good start to your morning doesn’t need to be complicated. There are a few simple ways you can elevate your morning routine to get the best start to your day, and it starts with a little morning light.
Start with Morning Light
If you can, try to start your morning with exposure to natural daylight. Sunlight exposure upon waking can help to regulate your circadian rhythm, your body’s internal clock.
This is essential for your body to maintain a regular and healthy sleep-wake cycle, which can help keep you energized during the day. However, your circadian rhythm regulates more than just sleep; it also impacts many other important body processes, including your metabolism.
Your circadian rhythm and metabolism sense and adjust to each other’s changes. For example, your circadian rhythm helps to regulate processes like lipid metabolism, which is essential to your metabolic health. A disruption in this internal clock can cause metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes and obesity [1].
According to Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and popular podcaster, “Viewing sunlight within the first hours of waking increases early-day cortisol release (the ideal time for elevated cortisol) and prepares the body for sleep later that night. A morning spike in cortisol will also positively influence your immune system, metabolism, and ability to focus during the day.”
Seems like a small price to pay for a major boost in your mental and physical health.
Practice Mindfulness
While it’s easy to rush through the morning like all your other daily tasks, taking a little extra time to practice mindfulness can go a long way. Even just 10 minutes of yoga, meditation, or deep breathing exercises can help you reduce stress and enhance focus and concentration for the day ahead. This can bring more positivity to your day, better help you manage life’s stressors, and nurture your emotional well-being [2].
Although these benefits are not limited to the morning, practicing them at the start of your day helps to set a positive tone. If you are new to practicing mindfulness, consider downloading an app such as Headspace or Alo to help. There are also plenty of resources online from sites such as YouTube that can help guide you through various mindfulness practices.
Start a Journal
Mornings are often filled with mental to-do lists, chores, tasks, and even goals for what you want to accomplish. Instead of keeping it muddled up in your brain while you’re trying to do a million things at once, take some time at the start of the day to do some journaling.
Getting your thoughts, goals, and desires for the day out of your head and onto paper can help you clear your mind and tackle the day more productively. It can also provide a sense of accomplishment as you check things off your list and help keep you organized as the day goes on. This can alleviate added stressors that come from trying to juggle several things at once.
Give Your Body an Energy Boost
Most of us start our day with a cup of coffee. How you prepare this can also set the tone for your day. Some like it with sugar and creamer, some with just creamer or milk, and some like plain old black coffee. Then you have your super deluxe frappuccino people. While this will boost your energy, the sugar crash not only takes a major hit on your productivity levels later in the day but can negatively affect your gut health and, believe it or not, skin health over time.
Including a nutrient-dense supplement like flavored collagen powder in your morning cup of joe instead of sweet creamers and sugar can provide several benefits that will surpass just an energy boost.
Although often considered a beauty supplement, collagen provides more benefits than just giving you a youthful glow, it also helps boost gut health and joint health so you can be more comfortable and confident all around [3, 4, 5].
Consider swapping a collagen creamer to make a healthy morning routine both easy and enjoyable. Boost your skin, gut, and joint health so you can add a little pep to your morning step, and look, move, and feel like the best version of yourself every day.
