A New Morning Routine
My morning routine currently consists of approximately the following:
- 07:00 My alarm goes off. I am ripped from the peaceful embrace of slumber. My day begins by immediately questioning my life choices.
- 07:05 Lie awake in bed, desperately trying to summon willpower to stand up and not go back to sleep. Fifty fifty chance of success.
- 07:10 Pace up and down between bedroom and kitchen, trying to work out what I can do differently to not feel like I’ve awoken out of a coma every single morning.
- 07:20 Sit down to pee. Despite further bathroom operations not being required, remain rooted in place for a full ten minutes. Contemplate the crushing weight of the existential dread that befalls me, while sat in the cold and dark. Turning on the light turns on the extractor fan, and I can’t bear the sound of it yet. Having deleted Instagram off my phone, I constantly close and re-open Strava, hating myself a little bit more each time I do it.
- 07:30 More pacing. Become progressively more baffled by how earlier in the year I managed to do yoga or go running first thing every morning. Seriously consider taking the morning off work so I can wallow in self pity in my bed for another 5 hours.
- 07:40 Self hatred intensifies as I’ve already frittered away 5% of my waking hours today, and inevitably will not have the time to complete everything I’d hoped to. Realise making coffee is the only thing that can save me now.
- 07:45 Make coffee. Forget to tweak grind settings, bloom for too long, pour too quickly, end up with a completely uneven extraction. Result is a 4/10, but I drink it anyway because I’m addicted to caffeine and need my fix. Self esteem is kicked-while-down.
- 08:00 Vainly attempt to do something “productive” before I feel like my job steals all of my motivation for today. Attempt to write in journal but attention span is so spectacularly fractured that I can’t even type out a full sentence before opening a new tab and embarking on a wild goose chase for dopamine, which I am even more addicted to than caffeine.
- 08:30 Realise that my status as a cog in the capitalist machine is not only not going to change today, it’s not going to change ever. Head to work. Hope that my colleagues will say nice things to me to boost my mood, despite acting as if it makes me incredibly uncomfortable every time that they do.
As you can see, it’s pretty good, but I think there’s some room for further optimization. Everyone says that how you start your day largely defines how it will continue, and that seems intuitively true to me. I’d like to something more wholesome, although I’ve not figured out entirely what yet. I don’t want to go on my phone or my computer first thing, so that’d be a good start. I might start reading affirmations again, maybe now I live alone I can bring myself to say them aloud in a mirror - or maybe I’ll still feel too embarrassed, even with nobody else to hear. I’ll try writing some down on a piece of paper so I don’t have to go on my phone. I want to take a week off caffeine and see if I feel any more alert before I’ve had my morning coffee, or if I get crippling headaches and become even more insufferable to be around. If I do, perhaps I’ll have to start buying some decaf beans, as I still love the ritual of making the coffee. It’d be nice to do some kind of yoga or stretching or something, though my body usually feels pretty broken until at least 10am, so it’ll have to be something light. Adopting some kind of daily skincare routine would be nice too. Maybe I’ll meditate, or pray, or listen to songs that make me happy or watch David Goggins tell me that I need to stop complaining if I want to get what I want in life. I don’t know, I haven’t figured it out yet, but I want to, and soon.