Morning Routine Checklist

"When you arise in the mornings, think about what a privilege it is to be alive" - Marcus Aurelius

This checklist has been designed to be run in as little as 6 minutes, creating a quick, perfect start to your day.

The way you start your morning will often define what kind of day you will have. You want your first moments in your day to release feel-good dopamine, making sure you are fully awake.

Run this checklist to charge your batteries and begin your day productively

Regardless of what time you wake up, whether you are a morning person or not, having a good routine will start your day on the right foot. To illustrate this point, let's take a look at the morning routines of a lot busier ordinary mortals like us...

Barack Obama: The former U.S. president starts his morning routine two hours before his official first appointment. In these two hours, he shuts off all media/news and exercises for 45 minutes a day, six times a week. He then has breakfast with his family.

Arianna Huffington: The editor-in-chief of the HuffPost begins her day with breathing exercises, 30 minutes of meditation, writing down three things she is grateful for, and her goals for the day. She is so convinced of the positive effects meditation has had on her life, that she offers free meditation courses to her staff.

Jack Dorsey: Inventor and co-founder of both Twitter and Square. A CEO of two billion-dollar corporations he works 16 hour days, yet still finds the time to wake up at 05:30 to meditate for 30 mins. He then exercises for 30 minutes or more.

How to use this checklist

At the beginning of this checklist, you will be presented with a set of specialized questions given as form fields. You are required to populate each form field with your specific data.

This checklist is short, designed to assist you in quickly creating a healthy routine, and begin your mornings on the right foot.

Each task in this checklist can be completed in 1 minute. We have therefore utilized Process Street's dynamic due date feature, setting the due date for each successive task 1 minute after the previous task.

In this Morning Routine Checklist, you will be presented with the following form fields which you are required to populate with your specific data. For more information on each form field, go to our help page.

• Long Text
• Date
• Short Text
• Dropdown

Let's start by recording the date for this checklist.

Get ahead of the game

"Make it so easy you can't say no"  - Leo Babauta

Even though this checklist has been designed to be completed in 6 minutes, in your busy schedule, there is the danger of forgetting about your routines.

Get ahead of the game and think about what obstacles could prevent you from using this checklist every morning.

Take the time to consider how you could overcome these obstacles.

Practicing daily gratitude has been shown to help you sleep better and live longer.

Gratitude helps you direct your perception of the things that make you happy and the things that you enjoy. Dr. Philip C. Watkins wrote the book Gratitude and the Good Life, which looked at multiple studies and analyses to conclude that gratitude is one of the most important components of a happy life. This study drew the following conclusions:

• Being grateful makes you more likable and pleasant to be around;
• Gratitude helps you build and maintain relationships in a very unique way;
• Gratitude fosters prosocial behavior in yourself and your environment.

Let's start your morning by listing three things you are grateful for using the short-text form fields given.

This Morning Routine Checklist is to be used in conjunction with our Annual Self Care Planner, Daily Self-Care Checklist and our Evening Routine Checklist.

For our Self Care Checklist, you are asked to set monthly goals. Think about these goals you set in the morning, and ask yourself: What can I do today to help me reach those goals?

Use the long-text form field provided to record how you will make your day great.

Social media comes with its benefits. But as a source of stimulation and distraction, when used outside moderation, the impacts of its use can become negative.

Facebook addiction is now classified as a psychiatric disorder. Also, studies have shown a correlation between increased social media use and increased feelings of isolation.

With that said, it is important to be aware of how social media impacts your life, and adjust its use in accordance.

Start your day off by turning off social media, to create a space to control your use of these platforms.

Use an app such as Rescue Time to manage and control your social media use

Did you know that 95% of your decision-making origin is in the subconscious mind?

With the help of positive affirmations, you can put the unconscious brain mechanisms in the driver's seat: remove subconscious obstacles to push your limits and create the reality that you want.

Brain imaging studies have shown when used effectively, positive affirmations can prime the brain creating a gradual change from within.

There are two different approaches to choose from when it comes to formulating positive affirmations:

• The Jackhammer approach: You pick the positive affirmation that you want to integrate into your life and write it down every day. By doing this, you are hammering home the specific message into your subconscious.
• The hummingbird approach: With the hummingbird approach, your affirmation depends on your current feelings or plans for the day. This means that you determine what it will be every day anew.

Acknowledge how you feel when writing down the specific affirmation. 

• Do you feel worse? Your subconscious mind probably doesn't believe in your affirmation.
• Do you believe what you just wrote? Do you feel better and motivated? If so, you are on the right track.
• Do you feel neutral? Then you are probably not thinking big enough.

Record your positive affirmation in the long-text form field below.

Not everyone - including myself - likes working out in the morning. The benefits of doing so, however, are profound. Healthline gives the benefits you can reap from working out in the morning:

• Fewer distractions
• Beat the heat
• Healthier food choices
• Increased alertness
• More overall energy
• Better focus
• Better mood
• Weight-loss support
• Appetite control
• Increased overall activity
• Blood glucose control
• Blood pressure management
• Improve sleep

Aim to do 30 minutes of exercise in the morning. You can use Process Street's Fitness Planner checklist to assist you in reaching your fitness goals. This could be anything from pumping it hard in the gym, to dancing around your living room listening to Low by Flo Rida - or is that just me?

Breakfast is often described as the most important meal of the day. Having a good breakfast jump-starts your metabolism, helping you burn more calories throughout the day.

Various studies have shown the advantages of starting your day with breakfast to include, as given by Rush:

• A lower BMI
• Consumption of less fat
• Meeting fruit and vegetable recommendations
• Having a high daily calcium intake
• Having better performance (memory and attention)

You can use Process Street's weekly meal planner to plan your diet and stick to it.

Note down what you will eat for breakfast in the long-text form field below.

• Business Insider - I followed Barack Obama's morning routine for a week, and it taught me a valuable lesson about mental toughness
• Arianna Huffington - My Morning Routine
• Mail Online - Twitter billionaire Jack Dorsey sticks to his bizarre daily routine of meditation, multiple ice baths, 'salt shakes', sauna sessions, and five-mile walks
• Power of Positivity - Science Explains Why Grateful People Live Longer
• Time - 7 Surprising Health Benefits of Gratitude
• Dr. Philip C. Watkins - Gratitude and the Good Life
• Harvard Business School Review - The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer (And How To Reach It)
• NCBI - Self-affirmation alters the brain’s response to health messages and subsequent behavior change
• Healthline - 13 Benefits of Working Out in the Morning
• Rush - The Science Behind Breakfast
• Psychiatry Advisor - Facebook Addiction Associated With Social Insecurity
• Affirm - Social media can increase feelings of isolation
• Zen Habits - The Four Habits that Form Habits
• Image - Free-Photos, re-sized
• Image - skeeze, re-sized

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