Happy Monday my fellow Steemians!

After reading a couple of articles, I noticed that what burns me out most is that I give myself too many options that I can take in the morning instead of a morning routine that I can blindly follow.

Cutting out options

My current routine is not working for me. I wake up (after snoozing) and the first thing I do is check my phone and see what kind of notifications it has produced during the night. I can feel my heartbeat rising as my brain already is making more decisions than necessary.

It is time to fix some of my current habits and limit my options.

1. No phone in the bedroom
This is (for me) the hardest habit to break. I am so used to waking up with the bright white light and all its notifications, it gives me a weird sense of joy. While writing this, I did some research and found that it gives me more stress that my phone is next to me than that it does any good when waking up.

2. Wake up time
Currently, I set my alarm at 6:30AM and I usually wake up at 7:30AM. I snooze a lot and usually don’t even notice that I already snoozed for an hour before I actually wake up. It makes me feel as I can’t trust myself to wake up and I actually don’t need to be up at 6:30AM. To get rid of that feeling, I’ll just set my alarm at 7:30AM and trust myself to wake up at that time.

3. Meditate
Every evening I tell myself: “Tomorrow morning will be the first morning of 2017 (now 2018 already) that I’ll meditate for 10 minutes!” .. as we are already in 2018, imagine how often that happened. Zero. I always feel like I don’t have time in the morning, as I expect more of myself in a timeframe that can’t be achieved.

Morning routine now	Morning routine to be
6:30AM Alarm set – snooze	7:30AM Alarm set – wake up
7:30AM wake up and grab phone	7:40AM Getting up and shower
8:05AM Getting up and shower	8:00AM Meditate
8:25AM Make coffee	8:10AM Make coffee
8:30AM Breakfast	8:15AM Breakfast
8:35AM Get ready for work	8:25AM Get ready for work
8:45AM Go to work	8:30AM Go to work

The above table is an indication of my morning routine now, usually I'm running around like a chicken with her head cut off.

I am looking at this as a new challenge, which you will be updated about every week for at least a month. As I am curious by nature, I'd love to hear what your morning routine looks like and if it works for you! Or is there something you’d like to change?

With love, Christina