Hate Your Current Life? Start Waking Up Early
It’s Sunday night and you are scrolling through pictures of how rad your weekend has been, or you slept through the entire 48 hours and are contemplating how perfect it would have been if only you could do this all seven days a week.
Your body doesn’t really need that much sleep, or that crazy level of partying. However, what it is craving is something you love as much, and feel that positive towards and excited about.
This is not me typing randomly created scenarios, because I speak from personal experience. I spent over a year staying awake till late with Netflix and Prime Video to accompany me on days when whichever boyfriend I had in my life could not speak to me for hours at end. This would be followed by me waking up at an hour that would leave me with only five minutes to wash and change and rush to work to only be late by half an hour if not more. My alarms would start ringing from six or seven am, but the first one I would hear would be the one at 8:55 AM after which I would snooze twice and finally jump out of bed at 9:05. And this was on a good day.
When your routine involves rushing straight to work, doing actual work on some days and immersing yourself in busywork on others, coming back home to eat food and befriend OTT content websites, you really don’t have much to genuinely be excited about or look forward to. Even though I believed that humans are meant to create and not just consume blindly, not much creation can happen when your life is not just mechanical, but so deprived of growth in any form. Plus, even if you are only going to consume content, it has to be better than being updated on the latest episode of House of Cards/ Broklyn Nine Nine/ Insert Your Favourite Show.
If you are not the biggest fan of your job, the situation is only getting worse. You might not realise it now, but the clock is ticking and your mind is the iron that is rusting, or the plant whose leaves are slowly turning yellow, and will soon dry out and before you know it, they will all fall off. You want to be a well nurtured plant, the kind you’d want to keep on your side table, your kitchen cabinet or inside your living room.
Kickstarting your day the right way does not happen with a magic potion that can be gulped down to magically teach you the nuances of it. However, the way your day commences has a direct impact on how you will be feeling about yourself through the day, at least the first half if not the entire day.
Advocates of the 5 AM Club would hand you a list with a dozen items to include in your morning routine. Let’s be a little honest and slightly practical though — which person who has struggle with sleeping on time and waking up before they REALLY have to else they’d lose their job, would ever manage to wake up at 5 AM to do a million things, or even one for that matter?
The only running I did in my life was the one each morning to catch the Metro, right from college days to my initial months at work. Today, if I decide to go for a 10K run the next morning, I know I can. These things never happen overnight, so be patient with yourself and be kind to yourself.
Your mornings need a structure, which comes with doing one thing you choose, that you would actually like to have ticked off your checklist, and do it right after waking up. It could include exercising (which is never a bad idea), reading, writing, meditating or even making yourself some breakfast. The key is that it should either enrich your mind or strengthen your body. If either of these things are focused on, right at the beginning of the day, your day has started on a successful note and you can pass that feeling on to other tasks that you do as well.
Do this for 15 minutes, if that is all you can give to begin with. Instead of 9 AM, try waking up at 8:45 and walk around a bit. Do this for a week. Shift it to 8:30 the next week. It will seem easier. Slowly, you’d have enough time to do three things in the morning and that’s before your work day even starts. Soon enough, you’d want to have a list of tasks to do for yourself in the evening too, which most likely won’t even involve Netflix because you’d be so consumed by growing and hustling that you’d struggle to find time for bothering about who married whom and who’s going to die in all the Series you once used to follow religiously.
Have a strong what and why, and keep at it. Start small, grow slow and remain consistent.
We need to feel in control of our lives.
There are circumstances where we are stuck at a particular place and at that given point in time, there are factors that disable us from getting out of it. Of course I wish every human had the freedom to be able to say ‘No’ to things they didn’t like, but in the practical world, that hardly exists.
Your job takes 1/3rd of your day, and if you include your commute time, you might stretch it to 1/2 of your day, although it’s up to you to consider your commute time part of your work or not. I utilise mine for reading or listening to audiobooks so it’s actually a good way to utilise that one hour of my day.
You need to have things to look forward to, and the fact that you have something you probably aren’t too fond of (aka your current life), should give you enough motivation to find things that you would like or would help you grow in a way or two.
From the night owl who used to drag her half drowsy ass to work each morning and cry through it all, I managed to make myself a person who has a structure to every hour for her day both pre & post work hours. No, it is not a time table. It’s a list of things out of which some I love, and some I have to learn to love, but through each, I ensure that I grow.
So what is that one thing you will spend 15 minutes on for yourself to kickstart your mornings, starting tomorrow?
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Hate Your Current Life? Start Waking Up Early
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