Having a consistent morning routine will decrease your stress and increase your productivity. In this episode, we’ll discuss why you may have failed to become a morning person in the past and get you motivated to become a morning lover even if you are in a very busy season.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Your Morning Motivation
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This Episode Discusses:
Why mornings increase your productivity.
The beauty of uninterrupted time.
How to decide what to prioritize in the mornings.
Mornings and your spiritual health.
How to recognize a hard season but not take advantage of it.
How to reevaluate your schedule and why it might be negatively impacting your morning.
Why systems and routines help your mornings to go smoothly.
Don’t Have Time to listen? Here’s the episode all typed out:
Simply Freeing? Motherhood doesn’t feel simply freeing when you’re on autopilot in a home filled with chaos, stress and a ton of pressure. In order to survive the chaos we NEED the right strategies and mindset to embrace the simple and enjoy the few short years we have with our kids. I believe that we are called to see that we CAN rise up, get out of our head, shut out the expectations of the world and what mom life is supposed to be like and change what’s not working so that motherhood is fulfilling. Join me as we discuss all things motherhood, homeschooling, minimalism, faith and health. My mission is to help you embrace simplicity and find freedom in your motherhood. I’m Jackie from Whole9Family and this is the “Simply Freeing” Podcast.
Today on the podcast we’re going to be talking about morning routines and why having a morning routine matters more than you might think and we’ll also discuss why yours may have failed in the past and try to figure out what we can do to implement a better morning routine for you.
Having a morning routine that is uninterrupted is going to increase your productivity. You will get more done for sure. Waking up to the kids is hard and it can easily throw you off and get you started kind of angry and overwhelmed…
I’m hungry.
I have to pee.
I want milk.
I’m still tired but I’m awake and I don’t know what to do. (How about go lay down in your bed and go back to sleep, something I’d like to be doing right now…Sound familiar?)
You may end up being a better mom when you get some uninterrupted time, even if it’s just a small amount. Getting a jumpstart on your day helps you to be more calm and collected when your kids do wake up. Having that of coffee or tea and having it kick in...That might be all you need to make you smile a little bit more and make you feel happier in the morning. Being alone in the mornings is going to give you time to sit and think and pray and take care of yourself before you can pour into your kids and that’s not a bad thing. You can’t be pouring from an empty cup. I’ve said this and other episodes. You can’t be running your days on empty. Anxiety and depression are often hidden and can creep up on you really suddenly. Taking care of yourself mentally is not optional.
Having uninterrupted time at the start of your day will give you more peace. Being alone in the mornings will give you time to do the things that you say you don’t have time to do when the house is awake like exercise. I have tried to have an exercise routine with my kids so many times and it’s just one of those things that I fail at. When you have little ones they asked to be picked up while you’re exercising and for me that kind of throws me off because I really don’t want to be carrying a child and exercising at the same time. In reality, I know I need to be improvising and using them as weights but sometimes I just want to follow whatever is happening on YouTube. I don’t want to be carrying my child at the same time so exercising in the morning for me works better than trying to do it with the kids. There are different seasons that I might prioritize exercising in the morning versus later on in the day. Creating healthier habits might be something that you could do during the morning.
If you want to browse Pinterest for recipes in order to meal plan... That might be something that you’d want to carve out time for in the morning. You’ll be able to sit in the quiet and think about what’s important to you and act on it without distractions. You can focus on things that you really want rather than being in a constant state of being in reaction mode on autopilot thinking of the next thing on your list and the next thing on your list and being distracted and forgetting what the initial thing was on your list that you originally thought about... from the minute your kids wake up until your head hits the pillow. Listen to episode 7 for more on what it’s like to be on autopilot and why you need to get out of that.
You don’t want to feel like you are always catching up on homeschooling and the house or putting your marriage on the back burner at night because you didn’t get to something that you needed to do that day. If you don’t get a consistent jumpstart on your day, it’s going to be a lot harder for you to feel like you’re getting anything done. Psalm 88:13 says, “But I oh Lord cry to you. In the morning my prayer comes before you.” This is not the only Bible verse that talks about prayer in the mornings. There are a lot! As a Christian, it is not optional to grow spiritually. You need to be praying, reading God’s word and seeking His will for your life. Mornings, in my opinion, are the best time of day to do that as a mom because you are able to spend more quality time on what matters and it helps set the tone for the day.
I know that sometimes certain life seasons are harder than others and you may end up with early morning visitors depending on how old your kids are but even a few minutes alone before your kids wake up to tune out the world and focus on your spiritual health…Just a few minutes will have a positive impact on your day.
But like me, you might have tried to be a morning person and failed which is why this episode has been on my heart for a while. And here’s the reason why you might’ve failed…
You can’t be a morning person and a night owl at the same time. This just doesn’t work. We are human. We are not robots. We need rest to function properly. Each person is different with the amount of sleep that they require. I looked this up before this episode. On average most adults need about 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night in order to function best. That seems to me like a lot because right now I’m getting 5 to 6 hours a night and that’s most often broken sleep because I happen to have super needy children that love me. Let’s just put it that way.
I used to teach ESL online to children in China and overtime those early morning hours destroyed me and I ended up stopping. This was because I was up late at night the night before. When I worked those super early morning hours, I noticed that a lot of our unhealthy eating habits started creeping in because of it. I was ordering takeout for dinner because I was just so exhausted and I couldn’t even think. I didn’t want to plan. I just wanted the food to be delivered and get the kids in bed as fast as possible so I could veg out. I ended up burning out and I had to go to sleep earlier. I realized this overtime. For me, having those 5 to 6 AM wake ups consistently was really really hard on my body and it just didn’t work. In the next episode, I’ll be talking about what I do now that has worked out a little bit better and helped me to be a little bit more flexible but yet still get stuff done.
If you’re a night owl, what are you doing when your kids are in bed? Are you scrolling social media? Are you binge watching your favorite shows? Are you exercising? Those are not bad things. Sometimes we need to have time to ourself. I totally get that but what are you doing at night? Why are you staying up late? Really sit and think about if this is beneficial to you? Is what you are doing worth staying up late for? If it is...GREAT! Keep doing it but don’t stay up late and think that you can get up early the next day consistently. It will destroy your health and it’s going to impact your attitude and ultimately your kids are going to be impacted. If you aren’t receiving enough sleep and trying to implement a morning routine, it will not work! It may work but not for the long-haul.
You have to recognize that in certain seasons it may not be possible for you to be a morning person, especially not every day. Give yourself Grace and stop beating yourself up and trying to do it all when you’re in a hard season with little ones. Mornings for you might look like grabbing a cup of coffee and journaling or reading while in bed with your little one who is oh so attached to you. If this is the season that you are in and you’re beating yourself up for it, stop right now and enjoy these slower mornings knowing that they will not last forever. Do what you can with the little pockets of time that you do have and if you’re a homeschooling mom, you have complete control over your schedule. If you need to start later in the day, that’s fine!
The problem lies when you start later in the day or when you say you’re going to start later in the day and you don’t actually start at all. It becomes a problem when you drop the ball and do nothing with your kids. You use this “tough time” having a baby as a way to kind of get out of doing anything at all because you’re in a hard season. You have to be really careful not to overuse the “I’m in a hard season” excuse because sometimes we have a hard season because we keep having children over and over again and that hard season can last for years. We have to be careful that that doesn’t become an excuse as to why we’re not getting anything done.
I was the I am not a morning person queen. I asked literally every mom I met that was a morning person how they got up each day. They were like superstars to me. I always wanted to be one but I just couldn’t get myself there no matter how hard I tried. And when I worked as teacher before I had kids and even when I went to college, I would come home and immediately throw my pajama pants on and take a nap because anytime I had to be somewhere early in the morning, I was dead by the time I came home. I just couldn’t do it. It got to the point that I was even late to work on some days because I just couldn’t get on board with being a morning person.
Before we finish up, I want to talk about 2 common things that prevent us from being a morning person aside from the typical I’m trying to be a robot mom I spoke about before:
1. Your schedule might be completely overwhelming causing you to shut down.
If you frequently have thoughts like...Why in the world did I sign up for this? Or Is it Wednesday again? You finally get the strength to get out of bed to do your activities and it ends up with the entire day being one big mess. The kitchen looks like a disaster, laundry is piled up and nothing but that activity gets done .
What’s going on with your schedule? Why is it so packed and how much on there is really worth doing? Only you know the answers to these questions but it’s definitely worth thinking about. Sometimes our efforts to become morning people fail miserably because we’re unnecessarily overwhelming ourselves with too much and it makes us unmotivated to get up in the mornings.
When I became a stay at home mom I didn’t have a real reason to get up before kids. I really didn’t enjoy or feel on board with the Homeschooling curriculum we chose to go through even though I said I did. I didn’t really enjoy homeschooling at all. It felt like a chore because at the core of things I didn’t set it up based on the right things. I didn’t feel passionate about many of the homeschool co-op‘s we signed up for. We signed up for a lot of activities for the wrong reasons. I began to realize that my lack of intentionality with our scheduling was making me unmotivated to get out of bed. I had a habit of making decisions based on the wrong things. I set up our schedule based on what others did around me and based on what was in closest proximity to my house without ever considering maybe it would be better to just stay home and not keep running from activity to activity. I was putting our activities on a pedestal to satisfy my need to feel like they were getting the experiences that they needed to get as homeschoolers. I always felt like they would miss out if I didn’t enroll them activities.
2. You don’t have systems and routines set up to automate things so that your mornings go smoothly.
Your mornings should not feel as stressful as they do. Maybe you aren’t a planner. I know I wasn’t. But as much didn’t want to hear this when I was in the middle of the most chaotic time of my life, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
Imagine what it would feel like to CONSISTENTLY wake up in the morning and walk into a clean kitchen. Your coffee is all set up and ready and you know exactly what to do for that morning. Is it possible to actually be a morning lover? To get up in the mornings before everyone else and happily get out of bed, ready to start your day? Imagine what it would feel like to accomplish some of your pressing tasks before everyone else in the house is up. I created “Your Morning Motivation.” It’s a free resource that will help you get motivated to get up, keep you focused and productive on the right things and keep a morning routine going CONSISTENTLY. If you want to finally be a morning lover for good, this free resource is exactly what you need! You can download Your Morning Motivation at simplyfreeing.com/morning.
Thanks for listening to the podcast! I can’t wait to share all the details about my current morning routine as a busy homeschooling mom of 4 in the next episode. I’ll see you next time!