Crawl Out of Bed: It’s a Good Start for Your Morning Routine

I “mostly” love mornings. The times I’m in a funk or not actively working on a morning routine, I tend to not like them. I have to remind myself that each new day brings new opportunities and it’s a chance to start fresh and do better. I know for a fact that how you start your day, or more specifically, how you spend those first few morning hours has a big impact on how the rest of the day goes. (Of course, it depends on your attitude, too. Even when things go wrong, if you have a good attitude, you just roll with it.)

One of my favorite verses tells me that God’s mercies are new every morning. If He can do that, why can’t I look at each new morning as a great opportunity to do better things than I did the day before? Granted, I don’t always have that attitude when I wake up, but actively refocusing your mind to have that attitude is a key starting point.

Lamentations 3:22-23 English Standard Version (ESV)
22 The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases
his mercies never come to an end;
23 they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.

Think of your morning routine as setting the tone for your entire day. That’s why making over your morning is so important. It’s about much more than those first few minutes or hours. My mornings (and life) have been anything but routine for the past year. When your spouse becomes home-bound due to a physical problem and then surgery, all routine tends to fly out the window.

His routine used to be; get up, go to work. That was great for my routine, which was: get up, write fiction, work on other business projects, take care of home, etc. And that soon became just get up with no real plan for the day. Sigh! That really leads to nowhere other than getting yourself into a big funk. Things are starting to return to a sense of routine and it’s time to get out of the funk and get things on track again.

(Sidenote confession: I really like to wait until he leaves for the day before I get out of bed. That way I have quiet and the place all to myself to get my head on the way I want it…whether that’s straight, or not. lol)

Anyway, back to the the focus of this post.

I’m sure you’ve experienced this yourself. Let’s use the snooze button as an example. You set an early alarm to make sure you have time for exercise, meditation, or simply some much needed “me time”. You have every intention of getting up and doing whatever you’re setting out to do when you set the alarm in the first place. Some mornings – hopefully most mornings – you get up when the alarm chimes and go for that walk, do your meditation exercise, or read a book for twenty minutes. Then there are those days when you just can’t make yourself get up. You hit the snooze button multiple times, or turn the alarm off altogether and go back to sleep.

Think about how the rest of those days went.

• Did you notice a difference in how you felt?
• How much did you get done on the mornings when you got up with your first alarm?
• Were you able to do all the things you set out to do?
• How did those days compare to the ones when you hit the snooze button over and over again?

If I had to take a guess, I’d say that the mornings when you got up as soon as the alarm went off (and you were in a good head space) went a lot smoother. You probably accomplished what you had planned to do, too. Chances are that sleeping through the snooze button didn’t just affect your morning, but the entire rest of your day. You set the tone for how your day is going to go first thing in the morning. That’s what the old saying about getting up on the wrong side of the bed is about. Let’s make sure we get up on the right side and start our day off in a positive and productive way. (Note: Some days you’ll just bomb and that’s okay. At least start working towards better morning routines.)

[bctt tweet=”How you start your day has a definite impact on the rest of the day.” username=”pattistafford”]

Over the course of the next few posts, I want to share with you some thoughts about making over your morning. As we’ve already established, this is an important task and a good thing to work on and pay attention to. It will not be the definitive guide and how I do things may not resonate with you, but if it encourages you to create your own plan and start making over your own mornings, then mission accomplished.

As hard as it is to get into a routine, when you do so not only will you enjoy your mornings more, it will make the entire rest of your day go much smoother.

All the best,
Patti