Habits and routines, the automatic thought patterns you have are important. You can choose to consciously create them and have them serve you. These are precious tools and must not be left to chance. I have been particularly interested in morning routines and figuring out my own. I believe everyone has a unique one and that copying the routine of someone else without adapting it is foolish.

Here I’ll be giving some examples from my own morning routine and showing how it has evolved and how I have changed it. It will continue to evolve. I am in no way recommending you do what I do. I do however recommend a morning routine.

Morning routines I find give you some predictability in your everyday life and allow you to prime yourself. To get yourself started and plant ideas in your mind and build small disciplines, and thought patterns that you can build off of. Since you wake up everyday, waking up is a powerful cue you can use to implement the habit loop: cue-action-reward.

My routine is mostly centered on the mind. I am shaping how my mind works so that it can in turn shape me. It is a process.

Here is what my routine looks like as of the writing of this article.

• Alarm goes off.
• I stop it.
• Lay on my back a few moments and assess how I’m feeling. Feel the inevitable Resistance and push through it.
• Make my bed.
• Take a cold shower.
• 5 J-curls.
• 10 minutes of meditation.
• Write 3 things I’m grateful for.
• Note my bed and wake times.
• Write two morning pages.
• Write a blog post.
• Have breakfast.

This has gone through a lot of change and I’m constantly experimenting with it. I have found some consistent elements that I will always do my best to integrate. Those are: Getting out of bed quickly. Making my bed. The cold shower. Meditation. Gratitude.

Everything I do I do it for a particular reason. Usually it is for mental discipline and mental strength.

Getting out of bed quickly, has the use of stopping procrastination and making me get things done.

Making my bed. This I’ve been doing for a while, but then I saw this video where Admiral McRaven explains the psychology of doing it and I integrated it as an integral part of my routine.

The cold shower, though it has great physical benefits, it wakes you up in a way that’s unimaginable if you’ve never done it, is mostly something I do for what it represents to me: If you can’t do something uncomfortable for two or three minutes in your day, how can you ever expect to do anything uncomfortable for any longer.

Every time I go to take it, every single time, I have that little voice that says, “come on, is this necessary?”And every time I reduce the amount of time between that question and me getting under the water. Sometimes I let that feeling linger, knowing very well that I’m going to take the shower anyway. It’s fun to observe how you feel.

Meditation serves to calm my mind and help me focus. Learning to keep away distractions. Observing thoughts and dismissing them, or looking into ones that are of interest. This has been one of the most interesting elements of my routine. I highly recommend it.

Gratitude is to get me to focus on what I am grateful for. I do my best not to say the same thing over and over again. It’s like a muscle; the more you train it the stronger it gets. It also primes me into having positive thoughts and focus on the good instead of only perceiving the bad.

I’ve also experimented with over a year of doing 100 push ups right before my cold shower. That was something special. First getting to do the 100 then doing them repeatedly, every day, whatever I was feeling. I could do them in however many steps as I wanted, but I had to do them. This element I regarded of great value in terms of mental discipline and pushing through Resistance; that force that wants to stop you from doing what you want to do. The satisfaction of pushing through and beating Resistance every time you finish the 100 is very valuable. It has the added benefit of building up your strength and muscles. As of the writing of this article I have stopped doing this. I had experimented with it sufficiently and wanted to try out other elements in my routine, to figure out what works best for me.

Writing morning pages, is something I’m doing that is quite fun. It consists of writing two pages of whatever comes to mind. And I call it continuous writing because I force myself to write continuously even If I think I have nothing to say. You’d be surprised what you can write when you force yourself to write. Even when you have nothing to write, just write “I don’t know what to write”, or “this is getting weird”.

I believe my mind is my greatest asset and that I must train it to do what I want. This mental discipline is precious. When you tell people that you do 100 pushups every morning they look at you like your amazing and have superpowers. This is nice for your ego, but they only see the number. You see the work that you put into getting there, what it represents and the discipline you had build to get there.

Everything in this routine was built incrementally. I didn’t wake up one day and say, as of now on I’m gonna, get up on time, do 100 push ups, take a cold shower, meditate and be grateful. I woke up one day and said, I want to get up when the alarm goes of. Then another day, I said I want to be able to do 100 push ups every day, because it sounds cool. So I started by doing 20 every morning and increased that by 5 every week, until I reached 60 and though I wasn’t getting there quick enough so incremented by 10. I didn’t start with 10 minutes of meditation. I started with 5. I experimented with 7, 10, 15, 20. I found that 10 works well for me. And don’t even think for a second that I got to doing cold showers just like that. It was painful getting to do it. But the reward is worth so much more than the effort needed to get there.

What I’m getting at here is that there is no fixed routine that works for everybody. You make your own. I have no Idea what my routine is gonna look like in a year. But, I can guess some elements will still be there. I pick things up from other people and try it out. It’s a good idea to keep experimenting with it. Routines set you up for the day and get you rolling. And as it’s been said:

The way we spend our day, is how we spend our lives. —Annie Dillard

Now I’m trying to get into setting up an evening routine, and I’m going through the struggles of being consistent. If you want to start something, you need easy steps and time. What does your routine look like? What has worked for you? Go ahead and start something and do it every morning. Try it for 30 days and if it doesn’t work for you, you can always go back to what you were doing before.