Welcome back Mamas! It’s been a minute since I wrote a blog post! I am happy to be back from summer and ready to jump into Fall with two feet!
Lately, I’ve seen and heard so many Mamas talking about starting a morning routine! Routines can be amazing for some people. For this mama, routines are made to be broken! LOL! If you are like me, or find it challenging to stick to a morning routine, you are not alone and you’re in the right place! At first, I thought I should be the last person to give advice on having any routines (as noted above), but then I thought, who else to offer suggestions than someone who has tried them all and finally found something that generally “works”?! So today, Mama, I offer you a few suggestions to create a routine that works for you and your family in the morning. 1- Think of the routine more as a general rhythm to your day. Life happens, lack of sleep, sick kid, mom life, and your morning can be unpredictable. It really doesn’t help anyone if you are exhausted because you didn’t sleep enough to be up by 6am to do your morning routine! You are not a slave to your routine! Your routine or rhythm needs to fit YOUR life! 2- Notice how your morning naturally runs and if there’s already a rhythm that you can enhance upon. Do you usually eat when you first get up, or do you walk the dog first? Notice if this rhythm is helpful or unhelpful for you to do the things you want and need to do in a day. 3- Start small. Once you’re aware of your usual rhythm, and if you would like to enhance it to help you create the life you want, start with one small thing at a time.
Choose one action that you’d like to include, and ask yourself what the minimal effort goal could be, that you can do most mornings, and feel like you accomplished it (this works for many goals too by the way). 4- Add- in other things as the first one has become a natural habit. As you well know, trying to cram too much into your morning can be counterproductive and the same goes for trying to add too many new actions into your morning. Only add something into your morning if it will truly improve your day AND you are habitually doing the previous thing, most days. 5- Self-Compassion, give yourself a heaping dose of self-compassion each and every morning. Starting anything new comes with ups and downs. It is generally unhelpful to beat yourself up for sleeping in or not accomplishing your goal. Instead, give yourself compassion and ask yourself if anything needs to change about the habit and if it is something you truly want to do or is it something you think you "should" be doing. If it’s a "should", see if there’s something else you’d rather be doing that could get you the same result.
Bonus- Start the night before. This is truly the biggest barrier to any sustainable morning rhythm. If you have a child who doesn't yet sleep through the night, a complicated morning routine may be out of reach for this season of motherhood...and that's OK! Your sleep is worth more than any morning routine because sleep is one of the truly important things that affect your health both physically and mentally. If however, your kids are sleeping through the night, mostly, and you have the ability to have a restful sleep then preparing the night before can be very helpful including preparing yourself for sleep. I recently found the app BetterSleep, and it is improving my sleep and my son's immensely! It not only has various ways of helping you fall asleep but it also has bedtime stories and meditations for kids! It is my new secret weapon to a night of better sleep and a better morning. If you’re having difficulty creating a morning rhythm that you can actually do, it may be helpful to talk to a coach, like me, who can help you get to the bottom of what is stopping you from reaching your goals. Here is an example of my morning routine: ⁃ get up (7-7:20) ⁃ Coffee & breakfast ⁃ Gratitude journal/Pray ⁃ Feed dog and child
- Connect with son during his breakfast ⁃ Pack lunches ⁃ Walk son to school with dog ⁃ Exercise/movement ⁃ Start work
It really doesn’t have to be extravagant! I am not a morning person, so I don’t bust my butt to get up extra early to exercise, instead, I exercise after I drop my son at school and I make it fit into my day!
Resources you may enjoy, I am not affiliated with any of these, I just like them!
⁃ 5 min Journal
⁃ High Five Habit
⁃ Better Sleep app
Wishing you a beautiful start to Fall. Please let me know, in the comments, how these tips helped you create your own morning rhythm to fit your life!
xox
Gillian
Gillian Yuan
BN BSc MBEC
Mothers' Transformational Coach
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