This Morning Routine Will Improve Your Mood
This Morning Routine Will Improve Your Mood
This blog post comes at you by the way of a story. It’s a personal experience I had about 13 or so years ago. During that time, I was living in southern California. I had three children. I worked full time, and my husband was deployed with the Navy. I had a pretty normal life, but a busy life…although, I guess busy is normal for lots of folks.
At work, I sat in the corner – LITERALLY…my desk was in the corner. Nearby sat 3 ladies that I talked to throughout the day. We even had a radio…like an old school radio…that we rotated who was able to pick the radio station of the day. It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, but the fact that we were really tuning the radio to find a station and fixing the antenna really makes me feel old.
As I mentioned, we talked throughout the day. Sometimes we all turned around in our chairs and joked around. Sometimes we vented to each other to decompress. Sometimes we argued with each other – I mean we were in very close proximity for 8 hours a day – there was NO privacy. The point is that we were all connected because of our job.
One of the ladies came in one morning and put a card on my desk. The card had a word on it. I can’t remember if the definition was on it, too. What I do remember is rolling my eyes and saying “what the hell is this”? Did I mention I had an attitude at this stage of life? I definitely did. Long story short – I was so stressed out all the time and I felt like everything was an inconvenience. I managed my anxiety through controlling whatever I could.
So back to my workmate and my attitude. I’m sure I rolled my eyes as she showed me a deck full of cards with words on them. She explained that she would put a card on our desk once a week and that we were to focus on the word and incorporate it into our weekly perspective. When I tell you I laughed!! I am absolutely positive I hurt her feelings (btw – I do feel bad for how I acted that day). She barely flinched and continued to change out the cards weekly.
During this period of time, I was noticing that I was kind of acting like a bitch. I couldn’t tell what exactly it was from: deployed spouse, hormonal problems, managing 3 kids, working fulltime, living away from family – I mean it could have been literally any of those or ALL of those. I knew that I wasn’t happy and was feeling easily triggered. I began working out on my lunch break and felt like it helped but it wasn’t enough. I still had high irritability.
Did I mention all this was well before I even went to college or knew I wanted to become a therapist?
One day during one of the more serious conversations in our small work area, the lady with the cards implied that my morning routine might be a problem. As I sucked down the rest of my venti iced coffee I turned to her with confusion -lol.
She knew I listened to the morning news while I got myself ready in the morning (I used to bring up what I heard on the news). She speculated that I was starting my day off on the wrong foot. At this point, I’ve been engaging in the “word cards” for several weeks and I’m less appalled by the suggestion that I could be doing something wrong. I do remember asking her “well how will I know all the things that happen in our local area if I don’t listen to the news every morning?” Her reply was that I could access the news as I needed to. The bigger problem was listening to the news and all the difficult news stories (death, accidents, scams, kidnappings, etc) at the start of my day.
I didn’t laugh this time. I decided that I was going to try it out. No more news first thing in the morning. Instead, I opted to turn on an all-music station (no commercials) to get moving.
Within a couple of weeks, I noticed that I wasn’t as irritable during the day. I felt like my chest wasn’t as heavy and that my overall mood felt lighter. To note, I was still drinking the venti iced coffee…but we’ll leave the caffeine out of it this time.
To this day, I have not turned on the news as part of my morning routine. I find that it disturbs my peace. I still access the news, but I do so on my own time table and it’s a brief look later in the day. Creating intention during my morning routine still helps me start my day with a calm purpose.
What is it that you can change about your morning routine to enhance your day-to-day? Sit with it. Set the intention and follow through.
To the woman that helped open my eyes to setting intention, I thank you.