Routine – Smarter Science Of Slim

How you feel in the morning has a huge impact on your mood the rest of the day. A relaxing morning makes it easier to stay positive during your workday. Feeling stressed or angry puts you on edge. Is your morning routine helping or hurting you? Here are five of the worst morning habits to avoid.

1. Checking Your Phone Right Away

Many people keep their phones next to their beds. When they wake up in the morning, the first thing they do is check text messages or respond to work emails. Unfortunately, flipping on your phone first thing is a great way to ruin perfectly good morning:

Anxiety: The second you go into “work mode,” stress starts to kick in. People who look at their phones right away in the morning have a lot more anxiety than those who don’t.
Negativity: Instead of the positive feelings of wellbeing you would normally have after waking up from a good night’s sleep, checking work messages turns on your inner critic. This negative voice makes you worry you’re not doing enough or something bad is going to happen.
Productivity problems: Believe it or not, reading work emails first thing can make you less productive, not more. It can distract you from important tasks with other things that aren’t that urgent.

Give yourself a break! Make your morning routine a phone-free zone. If there’s something truly urgent, co-workers or family members will call you anyway.

2. Skipping a Healthy Breakfast

You wouldn’t dream of driving your car to work on an empty tank of gas, right? That’s exactly what skipping breakfast is like for your body and mind. Breakfast kickstarts your metabolism.

Do you tend to feel drained of energy or sluggish all day? Do you have trouble concentrating? Those are signs you’re not getting enough fuel. A healthy breakfast with plenty of protein is the best pick-me-up!

3. Watching TV

If you work from home, you may be tempted to flip on the TV in the morning while you get ready. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a laugh to start your day, but the problem is that TV shows are purposely designed to take up at least 30–60 minutes of your time. Once you start, it’s hard to stop, and you can end up “watching” your entire morning disappear.

4. Hitting the Snooze Button

"Just five more minutes," you say. Your body doesn't understand what that means. Hitting the snooze button throws off your internal clock, your metabolism and your normal sleep routine. This makes you more sleepy than if you had just gotten up right away!

5. Getting Angry

It’s not always easy for moms and dads (or couples for that matter) to avoid little irritations in the morning. Kids can make a mess or your significant other can leave the toothpaste tube squashed the way you hate again. If possible, push those things out of mind until later.

Create an enjoyable family custom in the morning that everyone likes. It can be as simple as a hug and kiss before leaving, or sharing a cup of coffee.

A Healthy Morning Routine

Set aside time for yourself in the morning. It's worth investing 15 minutes for stretching your legs, eating breakfast, breathing fresh air and making someone smile. The benefits for the rest of your day are amazing.

How do you start your day off right? What makes you smile in the morning?

Stress is a constant companion. Nearly every day, the body and mind find something to tense up or worry about. Understanding how and why stress affects you is an insightful exercise, but the only way to get to the bottom of your anxiety and worry is to track it like you would steps.

Obviously, tracking stress is not as straightforward as tracking steps. While wearable devices can alert you to stress waves in your body or increased heart rates, those tools do little to help you understand the moment.

The most beneficial tool you can use to track your stress is a journal. However, do not treat it like a regular journal. You want to come at the writing process more stoically, analytically. For example, write down the date and time of your stressful experience, even as it is happening. Take note of how you are feeling; try to be specific. Additionally, write down everything that is happening and did happen before the start of the stress attack.

By restricting emotional responses, you can begin to look at your problem logically. Most likely, as you continue stress journaling, you will notice one or several recurring characteristics of the events, providing a potential diagnosis or cause of the stress events. Having such realizations provides a roadmap to managing stress and can offer several distinct advantages.

Improved Self-Awareness

Stress and anxiety often separate the individual from experiences. For example, if hit with a significant amount of pressure or an anxiety attack at work, the individual often feels unable to focus or continue with work. The same can happen if stressed outside of work at a family event. Your mind locks in on the stress and does not allow you to enjoy or interact with family or the occasion.

By committing to a stress diary or journal, you can free up space in your mind, allowing yourself to take charge of your feelings and life. After some experience with your journal, you will likely find you are more in-tune with your emotions and aware of your surroundings.

Release of Trauma

A stress journal is a safe place to acknowledge hard truths. Many experts recommend using such journals to write about traumatic events, fully exploring all emotions.

The writing process engages both hemispheres of the brain. In doing so, journaling helps to integrate the experience in the mind, making it more palatable for the individual without overwhelming them.

Proven Health Benefits of Stress Journaling

Researchers are only now beginning to scratch the surface of the many health benefits of journaling. For example, many experts already suspected writing could counteract the adverse effects of stress. Still, through more studies, researchers are showing incredible proof of improved cognitive functioning, strengthened immune system response, and decreases arthritis, asthma, and other health condition symptoms.

Various Journals and Track Methods

You are not only limited to tracking stress and anxiety. While stress journals are excellent tools, many experts also recommend gratitude journals, emotional release diaries, and personal planning or bullet journals. But, primarily, any diary or writing exercise that allows you to vent and focus on your life has shown significant benefits for mental health and growth.

Have you ever used a stress journal or any other mindfulness practices?

Tag: Routine

The 5 Worst Ways To Start Your Day