A Vastly Better Way to Start Your Days
Try this simple-yet-lush transition from sleeping to waking — and experience a day where you function like a significantly healthier, happier human being.
You’ve probably heard that doing a morning meditation or having a morning ritual is a good idea. But if you’re like a lot of people, you might be struggling to make that happen.
Why? Well, perhaps you’ve made your morning practice more complicated and time-consuming than it needs to be. So it feels oppressive rather than appealing.
Or, perhaps, like huge swaths of the population, you are in the nasty habit of reaching for your phone first thing on waking.
If so, I encourage you to aggressively challenge that habit, and I’ll give you a brain-science-backed reason for doing so.
When you first wake up, your brain is in a super-sensitive and receptive theta brainwave state. Your body-mind is operating in a highly creative, impressionable mode between waking and sleeping, a mode in which your subconscious mind is accessible, and your emotional self is also rather vulnerable.
Theta waves are often associated with deep relaxation and mental calm — the kind you might experience during deep meditation or daydreaming.
When you wake from sleep and go straight to your devices or plug into newspapers or other media, you skip right past that high-value theta state and wind up in a more alert beta (or worse, splayed-beta) brain-wave state — a state often associated with stress.
In the process, you miss unique opportunities for insight, intention, and self-reflection, and instead expose yourself to an assault of world news, worries, to-do lists, manipulative ads, petty social media matters, and worse.
As a result, you can easily throw your whole body into an inflammatory stress response before you’ve even gotten going.
Start out all tweaky and dysregulated like that, and you probably know how your day is gonna go from there.
So rather than letting the whole crazy, Unhealthy Default Reality world come at you in your most vulnerable state, and getting triggered into reactivity before you are fully awake, I suggest you reclaim the first few minutes of your day for yourself.
I’m not talking about a fussy, 45-minute obligation here. I’m talking about three minutes of pure ease and pleasure.
I call this practice the Morning Minutes. It is one of three Renegade Rituals I swear by, and like the other two (which I’ll cover in upcoming posts), it is delightfully doable.
No need here for a gauntlet of must-do “miracle morning” activities. Really, all you gotta do is wake up at a gentle pace, and — just for a few juicy minutes — avoid digital devices and media in favor of some unplugged, pleasurable experiences you crave on that particular day.
Invest just three minutes to start, and then you can extend it longer if you like, depending on your mood and the kind of day you have on deck.
It sounds easy, I know. But it’s enough of departure from the Unhealthy Default Reality way of waking that it presents a significant challenge to many.
It also presents some extraordinary, outsized rewards.
Here’s the how-to …
Right when you wake up, before you do anything else, simply give yourself the gift of coming into your waking state gently, gradually — without interference from digital devices, electronics, or demands.
Instead, use the first few minutes of your day to check in with your own body-mind and decide to enjoy an experience (any experience) that you find appealing. More on that below.
That’s it. Just allow yourself to become conscious as a being before you focus on doing anything else.
The trick here lies in completing your Morning Minutes practice before looking at ANY screens, including news, social media, email or text messages. Before you start talking, problem-solving, or making lists of things to do.
Please note: Unless you naturally wake without help from alarm-based devices, this means you will need a bedroom clock that is separate from your phone.
I strongly suggest keeping your phone outside of your bedroom at all times, and instead using a sunrise style clock that wakes you during the lighter phase of sleep, but waking to gentle music is also fine. Just avoid blaring alarms if you possibly can.
My agreement with myself is that I will do a minimum of three minutes in this mode, but you can extend it as long as you like.
Keeping the base commitment short is the best way to avoid making it feel burdensome or like something you “don’t have time for” on a given day.
And the more enticing something feels to you on that particular day, the better.
You don’t HAVE to meditate or do yoga or make green juice or do some other virtuous-sounding thing that somebody else told you was ideal.
Is is wise to commit to a minimum of three minutes, though.
And if you feel you can’t commit even three minutes to your own mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing, that is a belief worth challenging. Because I’m guessing that your challenge there might be less of a time issue and more of a boundary-setting issue or an “I don’t want to feel my feelings” issue.
It could also be a story you are telling yourself about the limits of your rights to own even three minutes of your time, mental space, and life energy.
Naturally, what you do with your three minutes is entirely up to you.
I usually light a beeswax candle and journal or play guitar or pet my dog while I sip a cup of really good coffee with heavy cream.
But on different days, I do different things: Sometimes I meditate, sometimes I do yoga, sometimes I step outside to listen to the birds and look up at the sky.
Sometimes I stay in bed for a little while, awake, just checking in with my own body and mind, stretching my limbs, and envisioning how I want the day to go.
Other times I’ll get into the shower, enjoying the steam and the smell of my favorite soap.
I never feel burdened or pressured to do or accomplish anything in particular — only what I feel like. For three whole minutes. At minimum.
Noticing and honoring what I feel like doing is part of the practice. I see it as a radical act of autonomy.
Again, the key is this Morning Minutes ritual is doing it BEFORE you start looking at screens or taking in media of any kind. That means before you start checking overnight alerts and notifications, before “just peeking” at the news or weather, before you start scrolling through social media feeds, email or text messages.
If you do any of that, you’ve let the “out there” world’s agenda for you into your sacred space, and you can pretty much kiss your three minutes of theta state bliss goodbye.
Your brain will be launched to an executive-function beta state by then, and while attempting some version of your Morning Minutes practice is still certainly worth doing, the impact won’t be the same.
Based on experience, I would also say your chances of successfully accomplishing any kind of thoughtful morning practice diminishes radically with each post-waking moment that you spend plugged into mass media and mass society — or what I call the Unhealthy Default Reality.
In my book, The Healthy Deviant, I devote a full chapter to the Morning Minutes and also supply some fun tools for overcoming common obstacles and tracking your progress over time.
Below (for paid subscribers), I’m sharing that complete book chapter, plus a video from my 5-Day Healthy Deviant Un-Challenge experience, in which I offer a bit more counsel.
But you can get the solid sense of this experience just by following the guidance I’ve offered you here.
Whatever you do, do not underestimate the power of this practice.
Do not assume that just because it is easy and pleasant it will not make a massive difference.
I realize it may sound like a tiny intervention — too simple to work. But I have heard from hundreds of people that this single, three-minute ritual has changed their lives in wonderful and unexpected ways.
And, hey, don’t be surprised if NOT reaching for your phone first thing turns out to be a whole lot harder than you thought. The addiction is real. Recovering from it is wildly satisfying. And this practice will most assuredly help.
Try it and see for yourself. Report back on how it goes. And stay tuned for next week, when I’ll be getting into another Renegade Ritual with similarly transformative results.
P.S. A lot of folks (particularly those with small children) ask me if they can just stay in bed, or go back to bed, for their Morning Minutes practice. The answer is yes, kinda — with a few caveats.
First, if there’s a decent chance you will fall back asleep, you might want to sit vs. lie down. Or you could set a timer, but if that involves messing with your phone, forget it. Get a manual kitchen timer instead.
Second, if you are generally tired in the morning, know you are sleep deprived, or are just feel resistant to getting up “three minutes early” in order to do this practice, those are concerns worth addressing, but they are not good reasons to skip giving this practice a try. Because those are all symptoms of a body-mind and life out of balance — conditions this practice is designed to help.
Rather than opting out or declaring defeat in advance, I suggest making a list of all the reasons you “can’t” or choose not to try this practice, and then — keeping in mind that we are talking about three minutes here, three minutes that could make a massive difference in your day — see if you can find a way around your resistance. Just for the sake of experimentation.
If you need help, let me know.
Okay, here’s that video and book chapter I promised you … and if you want to go through the complete “5-Day Un-Challenge” experience, you can get that here for just $49).
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