Hey, what's up guys? So, today we are going to talk
about your morning routine. Now there is a ton of stuff
out there on the internet about morning routines. There's tons of books,
there's tons of blogs, there's tons of podcast episodes but it seems like the
majority of those are focused on what you should be adding
to your morning routine, what you should do. I wanna take a little bit
of a different tact today and focus on what you should stop doing in your morning routine. So today we are going to break
down eight different things that you should stop doing when
you wake up in the morning, if you're doing them right now. The first item on our list has to do with that
magical little rectangle of plastic and silicone in your pocket. If you wake up in the morning and immediately check
social media on your phone, you need to stop doing this for two important reasons. First and foremost, if you
make checking social media the first action of your day then the first action of your day is giving into a craving for novelty and that counteracts all of
the work that you've been doing to build your focus muscle. By contrast, if you wait a little bit before you check those feeds
and maybe do some other things like breakfast or working out
or reading a book for a bit, you are telling your brain that, yes, you have to wait
before you can go check all those novelty-inducing
social media feeds. And that's gonna make you
much more able to focus on your work later on in the day. Reason number two why you should stop checking social media in the morning is because if you're anything like me, you tend to just grab the phone and start checking your feeds in bed. And you intend to only check your feeds for about five minutes but you end up looking at
them for 20 minutes sometimes and from personal
experience I can tell you there is no healthy position to be looking at a phone in bed. You're either looking at it
with your arm above your head or you're propped up on one elbow. Either way you are putting your body in a bad postural position
and if you do this enough you can actually end up
causing nerve damage. I've actually caused nerve
damage in my own arms before and it is really painful
and impedes my work and it takes a surprisingly
long time to heal. So, in short, use your bed
as a place for sleeping. Check your social media
when you're out of bed and do it a little bit after you wake up. Item number two on our list is eating an unhealthy breakfast. So, I'm actually reading
Jordan Peterson's book 12 Rules For Living right now and in this book he actually talks about how eating a protein
and fat-heavy breakfast can actually decrease feelings of anxiety. Even putting that aside,
I know a lot of people like to wake up and they eat a breakfast
full of sugar or simple carbs and neither of those things is gonna set you up for sustained healthy energy
throughout the day. And this is not me getting
on a high horse here. This is yet another area where I actually struggle with temptation because it can be very easy
for me to fall into a pattern while I wake up every single day, convince myself I need to work right away and then go to Starbucks and
get a breakfast sandwich. And those things are not healthy. So, you might be asking yourself, how do I make sure that I'm
eating a healthy breakfast on a regular basis? And one of the easiest ways to do this is to bulk prep your meals. This basically means taking
one or two days a week to bulk cook a bunch of food in advance so it's really easy and quick
to grab it in the mornings. The great thing about this
is that it's efficient. You don't have to get
out the pots and pans seven different times. You don't have to clean
them seven different times. It's just one or two times and you reap the time saving benefits. One really great candidate
for bulk prepping is hard-boiled eggs because if you have a pressure cooker you can cook them really, really quickly and the shells are very easy to peel off and if you don't, you can
easily do it in a pot. It's a little harder
to peel the shells off, it's still pretty easy and saves you a lot of time. Or you can do what me and
my girlfriend love to do which is making egg bakes
in a casserole dish. Item number three on the list is hitting the snooze
button on your alarm. And you knew this was coming on the list. So, aside from the fact that
hitting the snooze button is basically denying
yourself good quality sleep that you could've had because you are interrupting
your sleep cycle and then attempting to get into a new one, which is going to be inevitably
interrupted early again. Hitting the snooze button
is also a terrible idea because doing it is admitting defeat as your very first action of the day. If you hit the snooze
button on your alarm, it means that you had set an intention to wake up at a specific
time the night before and then you failed. So, do yourself a favor and get out of bed the moment your alarm goes off. Now, this might sound a little bit weird but I've actually found it pretty helpful to picture myself setting this intention and telling it to a specific person. And the person who always
comes to mind for me is Jocko Willink, who is
currently a podcaster and author but was a Navy seal and, to be honest is somebody
that I would definitely not want to disappoint in real life. Of course, if that's not enough I've also devised a system
for basically forcing myself to go get up in the morning
using a scheduled tweet. And if you're curious about that, I will have a link in the
description down below and on screen right now. Now, we're moving on to item number four. It's a brand new John Cena for my door. Just kidding, it's complaining. Seriously, a lot of people love to wake up in the morning and complain. They complain about how early it is. They complain about having to go to work. They complain about how tired they feel. And the problem with complaining is that the words that you choose to use, the way that you choose
to express yourself actually has a tangible
effect on your state of mind and your level of motivation. So, instead of waking up in
the morning and complaining why not think about what
you have to grateful about, what you can be positive about. If you dwell on these things you're gonna be an overall happier person. Alright, item number five is cleaning up your living
space and your work area. Now this is definitely
not a bad thing to do but I'm putting it on this list because I think it is much
better to do it the night before. You might have heard me talk in the past about a concept called Clear to Neutral. This basically means
setting your work area or you living area back
to its neutral state after you're done using this. And the reason you wanna do this is that the next time you come to use it, which, in the case of your living space would be the next day when you wake up, you want it to be in a state
that is already usable. When your living space, your workspace is ready to be used immediately
when you start the day you don't have to waste
any of your willpower or your time getting it ready. It's just ready to go. So, when your building
your before bed routine build in a little bit of time for cleaning your space up and
clearing it back to neutral. Your future self is
gonna very appreciative. On a similar note, item number
six is planning your day. Now, planning your day in the morning can be very useful for some people. Some people love to have that as part of their morning routine but for other people it can
actually be a lot better to plan their day the night before. Personally, I find that when I wake up to a concrete plan that I
set up the night before, I almost feel kind of
beholden to my past self and I'm much more clear on the direction of going to go in immediately. It's kinda similar to how Barack Obama used to outsource the
decision for what outfit he was going to wear during the day because he didn't want to
deal with that decision. He already had a ton of other decisions and that was just going
to make him less focused. Item number seven is starting
your day with negative news. And if you're the kind of person who likes to check Reddit or
the news app on your phone, this is something that
you need to be wary about. As somebody who likes to browse Reddit, I mean, heck, I've even got my own subreddit for College Info Geek. I am well aware that many
of the default subreddits on reddit.com are filled
with tons of negative news. And yes, you might wanna keep
up to date on world events but if you're waking
up every single morning and bombarding yourself with
a ton of negative stories, that's gonna put you in
a negative state of mind. And it's also likely to
send you down rabbit holes that end up wasting a ton of your time. So, if you are going to
wake up and check news, check your feeds, if that's
something you like to do, tailor those feeds to be full of positive or interesting information
not negative news. Or, if you wanna do something
even more effective, just read a book in the morning. Make that part of your morning routine and then check your feeds
later on during the day. Again, if you wake up in the morning and you start with some long-form content, that's building that focus muscle. And that brings us to our
final item on the list which is getting up at
different times every morning. If you don't currently have a at least somewhat consistent time that you wake up in the morning, if you're getting up
really late on the weekends and really early during the days or you have totally different
wake-up times during the week, then you are negatively impacting your body's circadian rhythm and negatively impacting
the quality of your sleep. So, as best as you can, try to establish a consistent wake-up time for yourself. And I know a bunch of you are gonna ask me can I still sleep in on the weekends? And, biologically speaking,
you would be best off by having a consistent wake-up time that includes the weekends. Your body doesn't have like a special, magical weekend mode. It doesn't switch over all
of its biological processes because you're not in school or work. But that doesn't mean that you
are going to ruin your life by sleeping in on the weekends. And to be quite honest,
I actually sleep in about an hour later on
Saturdays and Sundays than when I get up during the week. So, if you wanna be like me, you don't wanna be
completely uber efficient, then go ahead and do that but from a scientific perspective, a consistent wake-up time is better than an inconsistent one. Now, in future videos we are definitely going to talk about
things that you can add to your morning routine to further improve the quality of your daily life but the nice thing about
the items on this list is that, well, they don't
take a lot of effort to put into practice. So, earlier in the video we talked about how it might be a good addition
to your morning routine to read a book. And this is something
that I like to do myself but because I'm very committed to having some form of exercise in my morning routine as well, whether it be going to the gym or going for a bike
ride or for a long walk, I typically listen to my books. And my favorite app for
finding those book is Audible. Audible has an unbeatable
selection of audio book titles in a ton of different genres ranging from psychology to
science fiction to biographies. So, no matter what's sitting
on your reading list, you are most likely going to be able to find it in their library. Now, in the past you've probably seen me talk about how you can
use Audible on your phone but today I wanted to show you how you can also use it on an Amazon Echo. And it's really easy. All you do is ask Alexa
to read an Audible book. Alexa, read Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance. - [Alexa] Getting the selection from Thomas Audible Library. Resuming Elon Musk. - And from there you can easily listen while you're cooking dinner, which is what I usually use it for or while you're doing
anything else at home. Also, as a guy who sometimes
likes to listen to audio books while I am going to sleep, I love the fact that you can ask Alexa to set a sleep timer so your
book doesn't get too far ahead once you actually do fall asleep. And, of course, you can
also use voice commands to ask Alexa to pause or go
backwards or skip forward and at any time you can pause
what you're listening to on your Echo device and pick up right where
you left off on your phone. So, if you've got an Echo device you can try this for free right now. And when you're ready for more you can go over to audible.com/thomas or text Thomas to 500-500 on your phone to get a free one-month trial that also comes with a
free audio book download of your choosing. Now, as you con probably tell
from all the B-roll here, the book that I'm gonna
recommend for you guys this week is the Elon Musk biography by Ashlee Vance which covers Elon Musk's early years as well as the development
of Tesla and SpaceX and if you saw my recent
video on Elon Musk, a lot of the lessons
about how productive he is came straight from that book. So, if you wanna start
listening to that book for free or any other book of your choosing, once again you can go
over to audible.com/thomas or text Thomas to 500-500 on your phone. Big thanks to Audible
for sponsoring this video and helping to support this channel. And, as always, thank you
guys so much for watching. You can hit that Like button
if you enjoyed this video and also subscribe right there if you don't wanna miss future videos when they come out. You might also wanna pick
up a free copy of my book on how to earn better grades right there or check out one more
video on this channel right around here. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next video.
