Benefits of Morning Routines

Morning routines have become very popular lately – and for good reason!

With this month’s experiment about building a morning routine for yourself, here’s a short summary of why a morning routine could help you to live a more meaningful life.

The Benefits of a Routine

Let’s define “routine” first:

A routine is something you do every day without fail, so that eventually, like brushing your teeth or putting on your seat-belt, you do it without conscious thought.
-Darren Hardy^[1]

A routine has many benefits.

It reduces stress by making our actions effective and by breaking complex goals down into achievable daily tasks. It enables us to take advantage of the Compound Effect in a positive direction, which means that consistently executed very small daily habits create a radical difference over time.

If set up wisely, a routine guarantees that you get done what needs to be done. Especially if you stick with your routine for weeks and months. You’ll build habits around your important tasks and make progress on them every day. This allows you to build momentum. Once your momentum has been built for a while, you’ll experience a deeper sense of self-respect, achievement, and pride based on actually daily accomplishments and progress, instead of the common myth of self-esteem through positive thinking or false pretenses.

Now, let’s look at why it is so popular to combine the power of routines with your morning.

Advantages of a Morning Routine

Structuring the early hours of each day is the simplest way to extraordinary results.
-Gary Keller^[2]

The most powerful reason to establish a morning routine is that it guarantees that our most important things get done.

While many distractions, emergencies, and problems arise during the day, they can’t prevent you from making progress on your most important tasks, if you already completed them. If you get up early you can take advantage of the fact that most people are still asleep. We can enjoy the quiet and serenity of the morning while we do our most important things.

Additionally, we can take advantage of our high willpower and energy levels. We can take a cold shower while our coffee is brewing, sit down and tackle our most important projects with more energy than we would have at the end of the day.

Lastly, having a morning routine makes it much more likely that we can make progress on our goals even if life gets in the way. If we do our routine in the morning, we always have the option of getting up earlier and guaranteeing that our most important things get done.

Doing our routine in the morning allows us to take advantage of our higher energy-levels, conveniently prevents daily problems from disrupting our plans, and guarantees that we make progress on our most important tasks every single day.

The Magic of Morning Routines

A morning routine has become a staple of my life since I’ve first implemented one. Over time I have adjusted it to the demands of today, but having a routine has hugely benefited my life.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you should copy my morning routine. Try new habits, eliminate what’s not working, and keep adjusting your morning routine until you find one that works for you.

If you don’t have a morning routine yet, you can join this month’s experiment of building one from scratch or simply pick one little thing you want to implement in your life tomorrow morning.

If you decide to start your morning with a meaningful routine or already have one, share your routine using #meaningfulpath on social media.

Meanwhile…

Stay on the Meaningful Path.