Building Better Mornings Guide
How you set the tone early in the day has a cascading effect on your energy, your ability to resist unhealthy behaviors, and your ability to stick to healthy goals. Those successes and failures, in turn, can play a huge role on how well you sleep at night.
It might sound a bit abstract, but remember—energy, stress, and mood all have a basis in biology. Specifically, certain behaviors can ensure that you’re setting your sleep systems up correctly—from your sleep/wake homeostasis and your circadian rhythm to your stress levels.
Incorporating some of these strategies into your morning routine works like natural fuel. This allows you to harness your body’s rhythms to function in your favor, helping you to stay alert when you need to perform and to settle down easily when you need to feel calm.
Below, you’ll find a list of tips for making your mornings work for nights. Chances are, you’re probably doing at least some bits and pieces of these already. This is your chance to up your game, so you can really feel the results come bedtime.
Forget the snooze button
Breaking the snooze habit so you get better rest and are less groggy leads to lower stress, better decisions, and much less sleepless anxiety at night.
As a starting point for understanding why, you might remember from Level 2 that not all sleep is the same. When your alarm initially wakes you, you emerge from whatever phase of sleep you’re in. But when you hit snooze, you don’t just return to that phase of sleep. You start over at the first and lightest phase, which is the least restorative (this helps explain why snoozing never feels as satisfying as you think it will).
Some sleep researchers believe that each time you snooze, your brain begins secreting neurochemicals that prepare you for more sleep rather than the busy day you’re about to embark on. This leaves your body in a confused and drowsy state when you do finally get up.
Other scientists point to the fact that repeated wake-ups from the REM sleep you typically experience in the morning can be especially jarring, putting your mind and body in a fight-or-flight state, with spiking blood pressure and heart rate.
No matter what the explanation, this is not a pleasant or easy way to start your day. However, if you’ve been a chronic snooze-button user for years, the habit can be hard to stop. So try giving yourself some positive reinforcement as you work on making this change by using the additional non-snoozed time in the morning for a small reward—like spending a few extra minutes savoring a cup of tea, stepping outside for a breath of fresh morning air, or taking some time all by yourself listening to music or a podcast in the car.
By linking your reward directly to the additional time you have in the morning, you’ll help reinforce your new no-snooze rule by giving you something concrete to look forward to in its place.
Give yourself time to wake up
Giving yourself sufficient time to get going so that you can start your day’s activities fully alert helps to reduce the kind of daytime stress that builds up and leads to sleep-blocking anxiety at night. You’ll feel more in control because your brain will be fully in the game as your day gets started, and this translates to better decisions as the day progresses.
As for how to go about this, it’s important to first understand the concept of sleep inertia—that mental fog you feel first thing after waking. Studies show that sleep inertia causes significant impairment in your cognitive performance and usually takes about 30 minutes or so to wear off.
Researchers are still working to fully understand the causes of sleep inertia, but what’s well documented is the impact it has on decision-making abilities. Unsurprisingly, people’s performance is most dramatically reduced right after waking (generally by about 51%). By the time you’ve been awake about 30 minutes, you’re likely functioning at or above 80% capacity.
In practice, what this means for your morning routine is that it’s wise to give yourself a grace period of at least 30 minutes to burn off any fogginess before you make any big decisions or respond to important emails. For most of us, this corresponds nicely to the amount of time it takes to get ready, but if you’re itching to start on something before those 30 minutes are up, be sure to make it a task you do all the time and don’t need to be sharp for—like organizing your house or working through the mundane emails in your inbox.
Get some sunshine
Scientists have found that early morning exposure to natural daylight or some types of bright indoor light helps “entrain” the circadian rhythm in the body, improves sleep quality at night, and makes it easier for people to fall asleep (reducing “sleep onset latency,” the transition between wakefulness and sleep).
Light exposure can also make for better days and, therefore, more peaceful nights by improving your psychological health. Several studies have found patients being treated for mood disorders in the hospital were released between two and four days earlier if their hospital rooms happened to receive more natural light in the morning!
Most sleep specialists recommend you get as many as 15 minutes or more of direct sunlight exposure (ideally, outside) within the first hour of waking—but even just a little bit of light is beneficial. Be it opening the curtains right away, stepping onto the back porch for a few minutes, taking a walk around the block, or parking a little farther away from the office, it all counts.
Hydrate
During sleep, it’s common to become dehydrated, since you go many hours without consuming fluids. This effect can be especially pronounced in winter when your home’s heating system is on, drying out the air. Dehydration can cause headaches and has also been associated with reduced performance among drivers.
In other words, just the simple act of drinking a bit more water in the morning can help set you up for a day during which you perform better and that, as a result, you’ll feel better about when bedtime comes along. So if you’re not having a first-thing glass of water already, think of this as yet another reminder to start that habit.
Rethink your best timing for coffee hour
Many of us instinctively reach for the coffee cup as soon as our sleepy feet make it to the kitchen. While this may feel like a necessary jumpstart to the morning, it might not actually be doing you as much good as you think. Remember cortisol, the body’s stress hormone? Our cortisol levels naturally peak first thing in the morning, helping with get-up-and-go for the day, so if you combine that with an added jolt from your morning joe, you may be setting yourself up for a crash a few hours into your day. The optimal time for your morning coffee may actually be several hours after you awaken when cortisol levels have settled down for the day. If you normally wake up around 6:30 or 7:00, you could experiment with how your daily energy feels if you push your coffee time back to 9:30-11:30. And this becomes another bright spot to look forward to late morning.
Move your body
Morning movement is a healthy habit for a few reasons. First, it’s been linked to improved sleep quality in people who have difficulty falling asleep. While exercising in the evening can also be a healthy habit (especially compared to not exercising at all), it wasn’t found to have the same sleep benefits that morning exercise did.
Building a movement habit into your morning routine (like one of the ten-minute walks, or if that feels too ambitious, even one of the do-anywhere ideas in the Making Time for Exercise Guide is a great start) has also been found to increase people’s ability to stick to an exercise routine and to manage their weight.
Have a mindful moment
Mindfulness has been shown to lower stress levels and improve sleep, and practicing it in the morning can help set the tone for the rest of your day. Your Level 2 mindfulness exercise is one easy approach, or if you prefer doing that later on, consider this: Mornings are times when most of us do a variety of simple tasks on autopilot, like brushing our teeth, washing our face, or making breakfast. Something as easy as bringing conscious awareness to these habitual tasks can make a big difference.
To get started, choose a morning ritual you’d like to build mindfulness around. Leave a note to remind yourself by your bathroom mirror, kitchen counter, etc. Then try to remain attuned to the sensations of that activity while you’re doing it: how it sounds, feels, tastes, smells. You might be surprised at how dramatically this practice can change your mood as you begin your day!