“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine. ” — John C. Maxwell

Rituals make you who you are. The morning ritual is rediscovering productivity at the start of the day. You need not wake at the crack of dawn to have a productive start to your day. Instead, you need to take a close look at how you start your day and figure out how to get more from it. One way to do that is establishing a morning ritual.

What Is Morning Ritual?

A morning ritual is something you do daily as part of your morning.It must be a right blend of both physical activities and mental activities. If you start your day with a few simple tasks, it helps you to begin a cycle of results that will increase your vigor to be productive through your day.

The morning ritual gives you a chance to center yourself and embrace your day instead of fleeing from it. It will help you to enjoy the luxury of time you’ve given yourself by rising at an appropriate time.

Why Creating A Morning Ritual Will Make You More Successful?

Establishing healthy habits and morning routine are critical for a lifetime of success. Your morning routine sets the right tone for the whole day. If you do each day right, you’ll do life right. If you don’t have a good morning routine, you may feel overwhelmed and disorganized.

The first step to work smarter and not harder is that you need to create healthy habits. The personal ritual that you set up for yourself will put you in the right mindset and offset any morning procrastination.

The other reason to create a morning routine is to avoid mental fatigue. We have only certain amount of energy and willpower when we wake up each morning. It slowly gets drained away with decisions. It is especially true if you have hundreds of small decisions to make in the morning that means nothing, but will affect how you make decisions for the rest of the day.

So try to have the first hour of your day vary as little as possible with routine. Knowing how the first few minutes of your day looks like, is powerful and it helps you to feel “in control” and “non-reactive.” This action, in turn, reduces anxiety and ensures that you’re more productive throughout the day.

Steps To Put Your Morning Ritual Into Place

• Write down a list of things you do every morning and what you like to add.
• Estimate the time it’ll indeed take to do everything on your list.
• Adjust your wake-up time to fit in your new ritual.
• Familiarize your list each morning for at least 2-3 days before making adjustments.
• Once you’ve got used to your changes, start enjoying your morning rituals.

You could work on “Habit Stalking” to craft yourself a good morning routine that works for you. Habit Stalking is a way to build a new practice into your life by stalking it on top of something that you’re currently doing.

Avoid designing something long and complicated when you’re starting off.  Start with an easily manageable chunk of time. You can start with a  five or 10-minute ritual and move your way up. Just take your time to build a balanced morning schedule. There’s nothing like starting your day off fabulous both mentally and physically.

Benefits Of Having A Morning Ritual

• A morning routine helps you to feel more grounded and embodied.
• It helps you to slow down and tune into your intuition.
• Enables you to batch your energy sources and self-care in a defined amount of time.
• Makes you less reactive and more intentional as you start your work day.
• Helps you feel more productive without feeling fragmented.
• Promotes more space and pause to make choices that nourish you.
• It syncs with your natural feminine rhythms and those of nature.
• It optimizes your decision making power for creative and productive work.

7 Morning Rituals You Should Adapt

Here are seven tips to build your morning routine that will help to become the best version of yourself and will make you take on your day confident and energized.

Meditation

Meditation helps you to start your day on a positive note. It helps you to be more at peace with yourself. Research has shown that meditation can enhance your:

• Attention
• Creativity
• Working memory
• Emotional regulation
• Immune function
• Cognitive performance
• Self-control
• Healthy habits
• While reducing stress

Researchers from the Carnegie Mellon University have found that meditation reduces Interleukin-6 an inflammatory health biomarker found in highly stressed individuals. If you begin your day with meditation, it calms your “busy mind syndrome,” which results if you don’t activate your mental spam filter.

Meditating helps to filter out the internal and external noise and negative self-talk that can sabotage your otherwise sharp, clear, perpetual acuity. Meditating as a morning ritual helps you to tame your emotions and keeps your emotional brain in check.

A study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry says that patients who were suffering from an anxiety disorder or panic disorder underwent three months of meditation and relaxation training. And at the end of the three-month period, their panic attacks had substantially reduced.

Meditation also improves empathy and positive relationships. It enhances feelings of competence about one’s life and promotes environmental mastery, ego resilience, and purpose in life.

What a beautiful way to start your day, filling your soul,mind, and body from the “Higher Power” to embark on your day’s journey.

Gratitude

Robert Emmons, the world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude,writes, “it’s an affirmation of goodness. We affirm that there are good things in the world, gifts, and benefits we’ve received.”

In the second part of gratitude, he says, “we recognize that the sources of this goodness are outside of ourselves. … We acknowledge that other people—or even higher powers, if you’re of a spiritual mindset—gave us many gifts, big and small, to help us achieve the goodness in our lives.”

After you’ve completed your meditation just take a few minutes and be thankful for all the positive things that happened to you.  You might be grateful for an unexpected visit from an old friend, a beautiful encounter with a kind stranger, or a new opportunity that shines your way.

Practicing gratitude as a morning ritual can have tremendous benefits for your overall health. Being grateful increases your self-esteem makes you more optimistic and less materialistic and self-centered.  It increases your happiness, makes you more relaxed, resilient and less envious.

Gratitude increases your energy, longevity, improves your sleep quality and immunity. It boosts your career growth by increasing your goal achievement, productivity and decision making. It results in better management and improved networking.

Your social relationships get a boost by being grateful. It results in healthier marriage, more friendships and deeper relationships. The real power of gratitude is that it helps you to pick out and focus on what is working in your life –what is in tune with your being as a whole. If you have time, you can also practice gratitude journaling.

Writing Down Your Tasks

Journaling your important tasks is a practical ritual. It helps you to focus your day and life on what is essential. It helps you to prioritize and manage your time better.

Start the ritual by identifying and writing down one to three essential tasks you need to complete during that day. They may be the tasks that support your long-term goals that are related to your purpose, passion or the general direction of life.

You can also write down mundane tasks which David Allen, productivity speaker and author of Getting Things Done calls “core dump.”this involves writing down every project, task, and activity you need to address.

You can write down every “to do” item you can think of. It clears the space in your head for more important topics.

Morning Pages is a technique developed by Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way. It involves writing approximately 750 words of conscious writing. If you follow this practice as a morning ritual, it clears your head for the day’s most important thinking.

Writing down your tasks helps you to process your emotions, gives a record of your past, gains you a sense of achievement, helps you think big and makes you more committed.

Positive Affirmations

Barrie Davenport writes in live bold and bloom that affirmations are a form of auto suggestion. If you practice it deliberately and repeatedly, they reinforce chemical pathways in the brain and strengthen neural connections.

If you practice positive thought patterns or affirmations regularly, you create neuroplasticity in the area of the brain that processes what you’re thinking about.

Some of the positive affirmations you can say are:

• I awake in the morning feeling happy and enthusiastic about my day.
• I can tap into the wellspring of inner happiness anytime I wish.
• I have healthy boundaries with my partner
• Success is my natural state,and I expect to be successful in all of my endeavors.
• I am energetic and enthusiastic. Confidence is my second nature.
• I always attract only the best of the circumstances and the best positive people in my life.
• I choose to be proud of myself.
• I am talented.
• I am attractive and beautiful.
• Every cell in my body quivers with energy and good health.
• I breathe in peace. I breathe out chaos and disorder.

Exercise

Morning is a great time for exercise. It’s quiet and peaceful in the morning.You can go for a mindful run and have little interruptions. Even a simple 5-minute exercise workout will wake up your muscles and get them ready for the day ahead.

A quick morning exercise jumpstarts your cells.You could jog, walk, dance, do yoga- anything to get your blood flowing.  The options are endless. If you’re on a weight-loss mission, a brisk morning walk is a key to shedding a few pounds.

According to researchers from Northumbria University, people can burn up to twenty percent more body fat by exercising in the morning when they are on an empty stomach.

Researchers say that the morning light helps synchronize your body clock. Researchers, from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, say that light is the most potent agent to harmonize your internal body clock that regulates the circadian rhythms. This aspect, in turn,controls energy balance. It is not rocket science to understand that including exercise as a morning ritual keeps you productive and energetic the whole day.

Listen To Uplifting Music

Music uplifts your physical and mental health in numerous ways. When you combine music and your exercise together,you get stunning results. Researchers found that participants pedaled faster when riding stationary bicycles while listening to music. Listening to pumping music helps you to run faster, and increases your workout endurance.

Music makes you feel happier because it enhances blood vessel function. It reduces stress levels and relieves depression. It improves your cognitive performance and helps you perform better in high-pressure situations. If you’re hard pressed for time, just combine this ritual while doing your morning exercise or while driving to work.

Detoxify With Lemon Water

Drinking warm water first thing in the morning helps flush the digestive system and rehydrates the body. Drinking lemon water acts as a natural flush and cleanses your liver. Lemon juice enhances stomach acid production and bile production. It results in a clean liver and lymph system.

Lemon contains vitamin C and potassium. When you drink lemon water first thing in the morning, it helps your body to absorb these vitamins and provides a little immune boost. Vitamin C is good for your adrenals and contributes to reducing your stress levels.

Since lemon water flushes your body, you enjoy a cleaner skin. The vitamin C helps in collagen production and makes your skin smooth and healthy. If you drink lemon water first thing in the morning, it will help you maintain a healthy weight.

Conclusion

You are what you frequently do everyday. If you include special routines in your daily schedule, you can turn your life around for the better. The main thing about rituals is that you can start your own and train yourself through practice.

Be conscious because routines work both in positive and negative ways. So be smart and choose the right ones. If you follow the ones that we’ve discussed above, we are positive that these morning rituals will bring only good things to your life.

Originally published on Positive Health Wellness