A Sacred Morning Routine
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My 5am wakeup sessions are my daily compass.
As previously mentioned, I’m a flailing college graduate and a broke Millennial but through this coming-of-age process (aka “life”), I have managed to craft a few highly successful rituals, which I am quite fond of. My most prized among them is my morning routine.
For years, I dreamed about one day having the opportunity of playing out the ritual of waking up at 5am and creating, rather than reacting to, my day. It’s trendy to read about morning routines and, admittedly, I’m a sucker for a good article to help me refine this most special part of my existence. But this article is not another one of those articles, at least not intentionally.
I’m writing about this topic because my morning ritual is something I truly cherish and I really just want to share that with you.
Let’s “wake up” together, shall we?
My earliest memory of being awake at 5am was as a procrastinating college student who hadn’t actually gone to bed because I had a ten page term paper I needed to write the night before. My best writing in college was always produced through this manic endeavor.
It’s absolutely unfair that children in their late teens and early twenties are capable of subsisting on nothing but ramen noodles and binge waking & sleeping and are actually at the top of their game while living this way.
I digress.
After an entire evening of pressing through the pain of crafting a ten page research paper, something truly amazing happened as the sun started to rise through my doom room window and the birds began singing. I knew this time in the day was meant for me, or, perhaps more accurately put, I was meant for it.
Unfortunately, it took me well over a decade to realize that being awake at 5am (without pulling an all-nighter) required the sacrifice of going to bed by 9pm. As it so happens, this is the simplest and truest reason I never rendered myself an early riser.
It’s funny how the solutions to our problems tend to be so incredibly straightforward, yet we remain blind to them, sometimes even for our entire lives.
Another impediment to my supposed inability to form a routine of any kind, most specifically a morning one, was my perpetually erratic work schedule. It wasn’t until I got therapy and was blessed with being unemployed that I realized I didn’t have to keep living this way.
I found that with determination, insistence, and a little grit, I could design my life around this 5am routine. My therapist helped me see that no matter what job or career I choose, I hold the power of making my time-boundaries clear and upheld. Working before 10am and after 5pm is simply off the table, if I want it to be.
Having insistence and boundaries in life certainly requires some sacrifice, sometimes substantially so. I don’t get to live as lavishly as I could be if I were still working that retail management job, making 80K per year. If it weren’t for Covid, I’d still be pedaling cheap clothing at a 90% margin, fighting to motivate my underpaid staff, and wishing I had an ounce of autonomy over my life, all in an effort to make some corporation more profitable. Regardless, being unemployed is, well, downright scary for the most part.
I am incredibly fortunate that I have a supportive super-friend who lets me — very affordably — crash in his guest room while I’m figuring out “what I want to be when I grow up.” Without this support in my life, sitting in front of my keyboard hammering out my meandering thoughts at 5am would certainly not be probable.
This latest transition in my life is most likely the culprit for why I finally sat down and designed the morning ritual of my dreams.
At first, my morning design process was clunky and awkward. I couldn’t quite figure out how to stop the snooze process, regardless how far away I placed my phone from my pillow.
Eventually, with time and careful attention, the following routine is what ended up taking shape…
1. The beginning of your day starts at the end of it.
As I’ve alluded to already, the most important element to waking up at 5am, and more specifically being a designer of one’s day, starts with properly arranging the end of the day.
After much observation, I have concluded that the process of going to bed at reasonable hours and with reasonable regularity is nearly impossible for adults because we lack agency over our days. Most working-class people spend the majority of their existence in a state of sacrificing for others. We work for someone else so that we can live in houses which are owned by someone else and, often, so that we can put food on the table for someone else.
I don’t begrudge adulting to be largely made up of sacrificing for one’s family but, from my vantage point, it’s incredibly important and all-around more beneficial to find ways and means of gaining agency over one’s life. Having a bed-time and wake-up routine is one of the best ways of achieving this.
My end-of-day routine is as follows:
7pm — start winding down
I try to stop eating and drinking any beverages by this time. I start wrapping up any TV shows or screen consumption. I make myself cut all of these things off by 7:30 at the very latest. Pushing past the 7:30 point on any of these elements, for me, is a direct recipe for a crappy night’s sleep.
7:30 — take care of bedtime business
I have ridiculously ultra-sensitive skin, so this time of day when I get to change into my cozy pajamas is like re-living a little piece heaven. I brush my teeth and then tidy my desk and anything in my sleep space that needs arranged.
Lastly, I sit for my evening journal entry. This is almost always just a short, one paragraph entry on reflection from my day and a “request” to my subconscious mind for what I’d like to accomplish the following day. Thanks for that go to Dr. Benjamin Hardy for his Journal Mastery Course and his plethora of writing on morning routines.
8pm — read in bed
I give myself the gift of reading in bed for around one hour per night depending on how tired I feel, sometimes more, sometimes less. I often get laughed at by my peers that I frequently fall asleep before 9pm, but I get the last laugh when I publish articles, before 9am. mua-ha-ha.
I’ve set a reading challenge for myself of committing to read 50 books in 2021. I love that the process of going to bed means I’m literally getting smarter and more accomplished. I feel like a badass. Please consider signing up for a GoodReads account and joining the ranks of badass nerds.
By 9pm I’m usually fast asleep because 5am, being the last time my eyes were closed, was a long time ago. It’s hard to believe that an adult woman in 2021 can manage to be doing anything other than Netflixing at 9pm, much less sleeping, but, I promise, it can be done.
2. Begin by designing your day rather than reacting to it.
If I had to pick just one, the single greatest addition to my life has been meditation. I’m starting to find that meditation is not a singular activity, but, after years of doing it, I’m realizing that it’s instead more of a continuum of awakening and awareness. Regardless of how true this may be, still the most prized and sacred of all activities in my day is the 10–20 minutes I spend sitting in active, deliberate meditation.
My default state is to wake up with spinning, hyper excitable thoughts that, if left unchecked, will start bouncing off the walls of my mind until I finally mask them by lighting up my smartphone and scrolling through social media.
5:00am — Deliberate meditation
A much better way of starting my day is by sitting in observation of these spinning thoughts. As a less mature meditator, and still at times today, I try to make the spinning thoughts simply go away. Through years of learning more about the practice, however, I now realize that the best thing to do is simply notice that they’re there and to let go of the judgement I have for them. On the days that I do this most successfully, the thoughts naturally quiet and any temptation for scrolling through Instagram fades as well.
This is usually the best win-win I conjure up all day and it’s real nice to have it smack-dab at the start of things.
5:30am — Journal into a “flow state”
As you’ll learn through the myriad of Morning Routine articles smattered across the internet, one of the best things about having a morning ritual is getting into yourself a “flow state.” For me, the transition from meditation to journaling is all about entering into this flow. Naturally, there are days when this feels much…flow-ier than others, but for the majority of my mornings I feel good about clicking my pen, opening a fresh page of my Karst Stone Paper notebook, and setting up my intention for the day.
5:45am — Take a walk
There is no better, truer medicine in this world than breathing in outside air early in the morning. It’s probably partly due to my sensory overload, but I also feel so incredibly grateful for the exceptional quiet I experience at this hour of the day. During the winter months, the sky is still pitch black and there isn’t a sound lurking beyond the wind as it passes through trees and the spaces between houses.
6:00am — Little cups of magic
And so begins the process of brewing this brown, warm, liquid goodness which I can’t really imagine my life without.
I recently considered quitting coffee but quickly realized this pursuit is good for nothing other than self-deprecation. There may come another day when I welcome a caffeine break but the day when I completely quit consuming coffee is the day that color leaves my life.
6:15–9:00am — Sit for a creation session
At the start of my morning ritual creation, for a little over two months, I used this time to study diligently for the Law School Admissions Test. Having completed that chapter in my life, I am ELATED that I finally get to spend these waking hours sitting in front of my keyboard smashing out blog articles.
You’re the ultimate judge of how well the creative juice flows at this point in my day, but regardless, I count myself “successful,” if for no other reason than it’s just so damn fun. Writing — or creating anything for that matter — at this hour of the day feels like the grown-up equivalent of playing at the arts & crafts table in grade school.
10:00am-5:00pm — Learn & Produce
Depending on what I have going on in my life (I don’t plan on being unemployed forever), this is the time when I’m either taking courses or producing some work in the world. Right now, I am fortunate to be entering into Dr. Benjamin Hardy’s Genius Blogging Course. I get particularly giddy about being a student, even albeit unofficially.
If I could get paid to be a professional learner, I would be a very rich woman. Alas, we can’t have it all unless we’re willing to give in return.
My inner producer reminds me of this truth at semi-regular intervals, so back to the job resume shuffling enterprise I go.
If there is one thing I’ve learned over the last year of this Covid upheaval, it’s that life is too short to not deliberately design your day. Morning rituals are the surest way of achieving this. So, dear reader, go forth, be bold and go to bed at 8pm.
Thank you so much for reading this whole article.
You inspire me to keep going.
Thank you also for choosing to pursue feeling good inside of your own skin today. If you’d like help in this work, please reach out to my dear friend and amazing coach, Mandy Bishop. She is a nature-integrated trauma coach and has truly helped change my life.
Love yourself first.
In love, light, and gratitude,
Lydia Catherine
