Have you felt like you have been running on low energy for days? You wake up in the morning and feel reluctant to get out of bed, thinking all the tough things you would have to go through? It is hard. You start feeling the pressure from Sunday evenings for the uncomfortable start of a new week. If you have, you are not alone. I was in the same league. I still feel this uncomforted of welcoming another hard week sometimes. But I found relatively easy ways and routines you may want to practice to start overcoming the anxieties, fears, and stresses of starting a new week.
I promise they are not that hard, but to make habits to stick, you may want to Take up on some hacks suggested by James Clear, New York Times best selling author who has written a book, called “Atomic Habits”. In this book, he shares what helped him turn something uncomfortable to do into a habit. One way he suggests we do is to create an environment that makes it easier for us to jump into action. For example, if we decide to go for a run in the next morning, we prepare shoes and wears the night before. Then, we would not have to go through the mental hurdle of preparing them with our cloudy brains after getting up. We can even go to bed in a running wear. Then, we can just put on shoes and start running. The key is to reduce the number of steps to the action. By creating an environment that makes it easier for us to take desired actions, the chance that we take this action increases.
So, you now have a proven way to make tough habits easier to adopt and make them daily routines, let’s dive into 3 ways you want to start doing to rocket-start your day. Those are as follows. And because I do them in a sequence in this order, you may want to do them in this order.
- Wake up early
- Exercise
- Meditate
For those of you who are night owls, waking up early in the morning is a tough challenge. And you may want to stop reading when you see this. But to create free time in your day, waking up early in the morning can be one of the best things you can do. (That is, if you haven’t adopted this habit already) I was a night owl before, and it was challenging for me to start waking up early. And I came across someone saying, to wake up early, what you do is very simple, go to bed early. This was a hard pill to swallow because I used to watch TV until late at night or watch SNS or YouTube or NetFlex. It was a time for me to relax and forget a tough day I had.
But I decided to give it a shot for one day. And I loved it. I woke up around 5am and went for a run. It was refreshing and felt great. What I saw in my neighborhood was a completely different world. It felt like it was almost a different place. My house at the hour seemed eerily clam and peaceful. This experience led me to try waking up early everyday. There were days I could not wake up to the alarm and hit snooze. But I kept trying and started getting up early consistently. I think the key is to start small. If you now wake up around 8AM, you want to wake up 10 minutes early. Next week, try waking up at 7:40AM. If you succeed, try to get up at 7:30AM next week and so on. If you make a big change suddenly, you may find it too hard to continue. You want to think in a long term and make this habit stick. We can say the same thing to other 2 habits I want to introduce to you.
Exercising daily is another habit you may want to incorporate into your daily habit to boost your energy from the beginning of a day. After getting up early, you have time to exercise. I’ve found exercising after waking up is a very good way to boot up our brains quickly and gain energy to go through our tough days. When we wake up, our minds are still dull. And drinking a glass of water helps hydrate our body and brain. Doing some exercises after that helps our brains to wake up and also gain energy. And I want to do exercises that increase my heart beat rates. Increasing your heart beat rates pumps more blood and circulate blood quickly and into your brain. I believe this helps our brain to activate faster.
But what types of exercises should you take on? I recommend 3 types of exercises. 1st one is simply walking. But you want to walk at a brisk speed. This helps increase your heart beat rate to over 100BPM. You probably want to walk for about 30 mins. Walking outside in the morning is great because you can also get sunlight in your face, which helps increase your alertness, boost mood, lower your stress, and improve sleep quality.
2nd type of exercise I recommend is lifting weights. Lifting weights helps build and maintain your muscles, which are very important assets for your health. I’d recommend using lifts, such as dumbells that are heavy enough for you. Not too heavy. Not too light. Challengingly heavy enough for you to develop your muscles. There are many exercises you can do with dumbells and other weights. If you haven’t worked out with weights, you feel very challenging to start lifting, but you may want to search for videos that guide you on how to do it and follow along certain exercises with weights to begin.
There are many muscle groups that you can tackle, but I recommend you focus on big muscle groups in one day and another type of big muscle group. To put it simply, leg muscles are biggest muscle groups. So, you may want to have a few days working on specifc leg muscles. Other major muscles are back, chest, abdomen, and shoulders. You may want to think about your ideal body and schedule your week to work on different muscle groups on a specific day.
Another type of workout I may recommend you challenge is high intensity interval training (or HIIT for short). This is an intensive exercise as the name suggests, and some people cannot take it or do it on a consistent basis. But it works for me. This type of exercise is particularly useful in bringing your heart rates high in a short period of time. Just in 4 minutes, you could increase your heart BPM to over 150. By keeping your heart rate over 150 (depending on how young you are and how used you are to exercising) for a few minutes, you could burn 25-30% more calories than other forms of exercises, some research suggests. Also, your metabolic rate is higher for hours after HIIT exercises, burning more calories. If you wake up late but still want to get some exercise, you may want to engage yourself in 10-20 min HIIT video on YouTube. You’ll be done with your exercise for the day in 20 min.
The last habit you may want to bring to your life is meditation. So, I usually go through these 3 habits in this order. Wake up. Exercise. And meditation. Sometimes, I may exercise and take a shower (as I’m sometimes soaked in sweat after exercising) and meditate. Meditating after exercising calms down my mind and breathing quickly. It also helps me get clear on my mind. I am not sure how this works, but exercising helps sharpen my mind and conditions it to be in a better status for me to meditate. I am calmer after exercising than if I start meditating without it. And I have been using many guided meditation and apps that help me better exeprience meditations over the years.
These are very powerful habits that can help transform your life if you haven’t already been practicing them in your life. Please think about testing them to see if you can make any of them a part of your life. Making even one of them your habit will create tons of benefits in your life. So, please try. Remember you can always start small and build on it. Because continuing to do it every day to for a while to make it a habit is first priority rather than doing it big, please think about starting small. Like waking up 5 minutes earlier. Going for a run for 10 min. Meditating for 5 min. If you can succeed in continuing it for a few weeks, there is a good chance you can turn them into your habits.