Morning routines…. they’re constantly evolving/changing/improving/worsening. If you Google “Morning Routine” there are “about 422,000,000” posts. You guys, this is crazy. It’s so stressful to always feel like others are handling their life better than you. While it can absolutely be useful to get ideas and tips from others, we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others. I absolutely fall into this pitfall of comparing myself to others and not feeling like I’m handling life as well as I should be.

Mornings have always been hard for me. Not only am I not a morning person, but my cortisol levels tend to be lower in the morning and higher in the evening so I feel like my mornings are always working against me. On the occasional morning I wake up energized but most mornings I wake up feeling like a total zombie, like my body is moving but my brain is still asleep.

Like all of us, I have gone through countless renditions of my morning routines, but it’s nice to write the current routine down to appreciate the changing seasons of life.

Since moving to Denver in July, and working from home, I feel like my mornings have started to have a little more semblance of a ‘routine.’ I typically wake up before my alarm goes off because I’m a light sleeper and my boyfriend always gets up before me. At this point I am in and out of sleep for 30 min to an hour depending on how early he got out of bed. Sometimes I’ll stay awake and read some of my morning newsletters, but most days I just go back to sleep. By the time two of my silent Fitbit alarms have gone off, I wake up, cuddle with our dog for a bit (who refuses to leave me until I’m out of bed) and get ready to head out for a walk with her.

I head downstairs, take my B12 and drink Body Bloom while Lacey patiently waits for her morning walk. I then lace up and we head out the door. In the last two weeks, as I’ve been trying to have more time in the morning before starting work, I made a goal to walk 10,000 steps 3-4 days a week with Lacey. I know this might be a typical step count for some every day, but especially since working from home there will be some days where all I walk is 2,000 steps.

The first few days on this new routine I was listening to some podcasts, but I ultimately decided to walk without any headphones. I’m hardly ever present throughout my day, and I’ve found that when I go on my morning walks with Lacey without any podcasts/music playing that I’m actually present. It’s 30-40 minutes of my morning where I can start off being fully in the moment before my day begins.

I can’t promise that I’ll keep this routine up when the mornings are cold and dark, but I’m going to keep it up as long as I can. It has been really nice to get out and explore the neighborhood a bit and take the time to be ‘here.’.

What are the highlights of your morning routine or do you prefer to not have a routine so you can have more space to go with the flow?

Thanks for reading, have a great week everyone!