Finding the energy : The miracle morning

Hi everyone ! It’s the perfect moment for me to introduce you to the first “lifestyle” article of this blog. I created this blog few weeks ago to share my journey into the making of I hope, a big and wonderful product that will revolutionise how we think about design-systems today. Most of the articles of this blog will be technicals articles but I found interesting to share also what’s going on behind the scene in a more personal way and what a better way than starting with an article about my “morning routine”.

The morning has always been experienced for me as a suffering. The Nature gives me a big deep sleep and the skill to fall asleep almost everywhere and everytime. One of the big advantages of this is that this allows me to rest whenever I want to never be in debt of sleeping. The disadvantages is that I never feel completely “awake” during the day which creates an uneven distribution of my energy where I have more energy at the end of the afternoon than in the morning. The other disadvantage is that’s its always a suffering to wake up in the morning and the snooze feature of my alarm became my worst enemy. All of that made me as someone who was used to go to bed very lately with the impossibility of waking me up in the morning.

But one day, the chance makes me read the amazing book of Hal Elrod called Miracle Morning and I thought it was time for me to change my habits as it was draining all my energy and prevent me to achieve my goals. For the one who don’t know this book (that I recommend you very hard), it’s a book written by someone who had big troubles in life and needed his life to get back on track. He creates and theorises a method called “Miracle morning” which is basically the process and waking up one hour sooner than usual in order to take time for yourself and do things that you don’t have time usually.

This book had a big impact on me as it was clearly guaranteed that mornings will not be painful anymore. Without hesitating, I tried and it’s been now more than year and a half that I’m a proud adept of the miracle morning. As each miracle morning is personal, it’s always interesting to find out what other persons are doing and maybe get inspired. In my personal case, here is my routine :

Wake up: 6am

In order to wake up fast and not to be tempted of snoozing. I put my alarm very far from my bed, It forces me to walk few rooms to be able to stop the alarm. Right after I stop the alarm, as advised in the book, i turn on the light and drink a lot of water. Once I’ve done that, I wash my face and prepare myself for my morning run.

The run :

I run approximately ten to fifteen minutes. The goal here is not to make a complete sport session but to wake up my body by oxygenating it. The circuit can change depending of the season but I have the luck to be next to a forest, so this is very pleasant during summer. I also do some stretching before and after the run to avoid aches.

The Shower :

Once my run as ended, I take a short and cold shower. In addition of washing myself, the cold shower allows my body to stay awake. It can be rude the first times but with the habit, cold showers are something that are very pleasant and relaxing.

The Meditation :

Right after the shower, I take advantage of the tonicity that the run and the cold shower gives to my body to make a session of 10 to 20 minutes of mindfulness meditation. The meditation session was for me the hardest to plan in my morning routine for different reasons. It’s impossible for me to meditate right after waking up for the simple reason that I’m not waked up enough. But I found also really hard to meditate after breakfast or later in the day for many reasons, mainly because my body is not at it full capacity of focus.

Breakfast + audio reading :

After meditation, It’s now time to eat, nothing special there concerning the breakfast in itself. Simply some roasted bread with honey and a fruit. While I’m eating, I’m listening to an audio book, usually something easy to follow like a character biography or some personal development. My breakfast doesn’t last very longer so it gives me approximately the time to listen to 1 chapter.

Reading : 

After the audio reading, it’s time for the reading. I usually read 20 to 30 minutes of a book that can be more complex than an audio book like an economy book or a history book. With this reading rhythm, I approximately end a book each month.

Writing :

When I’m done of reading. It’s now the time of my last activity before starting my work day, the writing. It takes me about 10 minutes to write about what I’ve done yesterday and what I’m planning to do today. The only goal of this is to make a clean todo list and to make a trace of what I went through during all this days. I also take some time to find and write a quote that I like.

Once I’m done with all these things, I’m now finally ready to start my day with the better mood possible and with the spirit of having already done something important for me.

That’s it for today, see you next time !

JG

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