Morning routine: small habits, big changes

As I enter the clinical years of medical school, time will be limited due to the hectic schedule (up to 80 hours per week), and time will often be out of my control. I expect this to drain my willpower. How do I ensure I continue to take care of my health, relationships, and personal goals?

The solution is to create consistent routines that turn activities like exercise and organization into habits.

I developed my morning routine over the past 4 months while finishing up my PhD thesis. The routine is intended to build momentum for the day and make me focused and relaxed. It already kept me sane while preparing manuscripts for publication, presenting at national conferences, and writing that 210 page dissertation. 

Time to share it.

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Staples of my morning routine

These habits survived a dozen rounds of experimentation. They will be the core of my morning routine for a long time.

1) Clean up and de-grog: When I first get out of bed, I'm groggy. I used to dislike cleaning up my home, because it is mindless. It got cluttered quickly. Solution? Clean up when I'm groggy- just one section of the condo. This takes no mental energy, but gets me active and wakes me up. When fully conscious, I look around and get both joy and focus from the uncluttered living space. The small win, so early in the morning, brings easy motivation.

Lesson: look at problems in your own life, and pick habits that help you solve them.

2) Speech warm-up: I used to stutter and not articulate my words properly. A regular routine of practicing speech (I use alliterative poems) gave me the confidence for the next step: a lot of public speaking. This mostly fixed the problem, but I still do the habit to warm-up for the day, and to remind myself of my continuing goal to become an articulate and clear speaker.

Lesson: use morning routines to remind yourself of personal goals and warm up for the day.

Decide ahead of time exactly what the routine entails

3) 7 minute bodyweight workout: short, super-intense workouts are highly effective. NYTimes posted one anyone can do, but I found a far more intense version on Fitocracy (BURPEES). Don't be fooled by the short time interval- I'm dying by the end of it. For a challenge, just go faster. By this method, I can truly work out every day, no matter how busy I am.

Lesson: well-designed habits dispel the excuse "I don't have time."

I also listen to motivational videos while working out. Serves as a timer, motivates me, and reminds me of principles that help me solve life problems. Here's one of my favorites that teaches the power of habit.

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Experimenting

A morning routine is endlessly adaptable to meet one’s changing life needs, so I continue to experiment with it. 

Currently:

1) Make my bed. Never did this before, but I easily tacked this on to my established cleanup routine.

Lesson: use habits as triggers for other habits

2) Write for 30 minutes. Where do you think this article came from? Consistency.

Lesson: morning routines make side projects possible on a busy schedule

3) Meditate. I’m using meditation to train the ability to re-direct my attention at will. Unproductive rumination about something that makes me angry, sad, etc. severely hampers my effectiveness and happiness. Re-focusing my attention should prove invaluable in any tough situation. I use the Headspace app.

How to experiment:

Last time, I wrote about a dangerous trap when trying new things. Don’t simply collect a list of useful-sounding habits and string them together into a morning routine. You must prioritize taking concrete action on them, and see for yourself if they are useful to you.

But how you do choose a habit to take action on?

Method: 

Pick 2-4 habits. Try them all once, immediately.

The ones you like, commit to them everyday for 7-10 days. Discard the others.

The ones you still like, commit to them everyday for 1 month. Discard the others.

After 25-50 days, it’s a habit (exact time depends on the habit)

Find a way to visualize your progress.

At any point in this process, use your experience (what worked, what didn’t, and why) as feedback to identify other potential habits to try (again, try them as soon as you find them).

Warning: for the 1-month commitment, note that internal resistance occurs around 7-14 days, making you want to give up. During this period, motivation disappears (motivation is an emotion, and emotions are always temporary), and the habit is not yet ingrained. Your brain will come up with excuses like “I don’t have time” and “maybe what I'm doing doesn't matter.” Don’t give in at this point- otherwise you’ll never deliberately build any habits at all.

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More than just the habit

Bonus!!! Because of my speech warm-up, I find myself subconsciously working on my articulation throughout the day. This reminds me to pay more attention to others, and I feel a frequent impulse to smile, make eye contact, and listen to others. My morning workout reminds me to use occasional free time to go cycling or hit the gym. After a small morning clean-up for 4 months, I felt ready for a major overhaul: I gave away 60% of my possessions, and adopted a new organizing strategy that is both easy and beautiful.

You are what you do frequently. By doing things everyday, you change how you view your own identity. You no longer feel constrained by your current situation, personality, and weaknesses. Thus, the mental benefits far exceed the direct effects of daily action.

In summary, a morning routine allows you to:

• Feel in control of your day
• Target specific problems in your life
• Remind yourself of personal goals
• Warm up for the day
• String habits together as progressive triggers
• Dispel the excuse “I don’t have time.”
• Gain confidence to make bigger changes in your life

All this, by expending minimal time and willpower. What are you waiting for?

The Art of Trying New Things

“Someday.”

During grad school, I fell in love with trying new things. I saw the power: I was a fat kid who had never run more than 3 miles at a time, and thought “I’m not a person who works out.” Four months of half-marathon training, and now daily exercise is integral to my identity. I used to have social anxiety and now I give seminars on networking. Every time I deliberately sought out new experiences that seemed impossibly outside my comfort zone, they completely changed how I think, act, and value.

In practice, there were sprints and crawls in my self-development during grad school. Often times, I dreamed of trying new things, but my life pretty much stayed the same. Goals went nowhere. I got discouraged, and in darker days I blamed my environment or people around me for holding me back. Any life-changing sprints would always fade back into a soul-sucking crawl.

Clearly, I was falling into a trap when trying new things. Finally, at the end of my PhD, I figured it out. When did I sprint and when did I crawl? The determining factor: whether or not I applied the Ultimate Rule.

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 The Ultimate Rule for successfully trying new things:

When you encounter something new you can try, you only have three choices: 

1)    Do it immediately. 

2)    Schedule it for a specific time in the next 1-3 months. If it is not accomplished by that deadline, do Option 3. 

3)    Discard it and forget about it. 

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Option 3 is hardest. You may think it’s foolish. You may have trouble letting go of the dream of trying it. Or you may simply be used to accumulating ideas you don’t do anything about. All three applied to me. But now I know: Discarding and forgetting goals is the key to accomplishing goals.

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The trap

Let’s consider the basic anatomy of trying new things:

Step 1: Discover that this new thing exists

Step 2: Decide to act

Step 3: Act

Step 4: Learn from action

It’s easy to do Step 1 over and over and over again. For some reason, this step is really addictive. That’s the trap.

The world is filled with new things to try. Just look around you, or at the Internet. Bucket lists. So many books and Internet articles! Juggling! Ukulele! People skills! Lucid dreaming! Rock climbing! Memory techniques! So many countries to travel to! Thousands of hobbies! So many skills that will open so many doors! I put these on a list titled “Someday/Maybe.”

A “someday” list feels like the right thing to do. I thought, “Gotta dream big, right?” After all, it energizes and motivates me. Good thing, right?

Wrong. It’s a drug. It’s a hit of energy and motivation.  It’s getting a reward without doing anything. Your brain gets addicted to reading and dreaming about cool things to do, which is fun and easy. Actually trying new things is scary, and your brain will rationalize putting it off with “I don’t have time right now” or a similar excuse. After all, you already got your hit. If “someday” is an option, then “someday” will become the default choice.  

What’s worse, you’ve gathered all this information about new things to try. It’s floating around in your brain, it’s bloating your to-do list, and now you have half-started hobbies strewn around your home. You constantly see all this clutter, and every time you see it, you are forced to say, “I’ll do it someday later.” The “someday” mentality is self-reinforcing, and now you’re trapped by your habits and your environment.

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Discarding goals is key to accomplishing goals

So Step 1 is the problem (discovering new things). How do you consistently get to Steps 2 and 3 (deciding to act, and then taking action)? You must make it a habit to implement the Ultimate Rule. Again, you either try the new thing immediately or schedule it for a specific time. If you fail to do this, you MUST drop it and forget about it.

Get a clean slate as quickly as possible. You have a lot of goals floating around in your head, and reminders of goals strewn around your home. These will clutter your mind. If you have a lot of things on your bucket list built up, delete them all now. If you have a guitar you haven’t played in years, get rid of it. If you have 20 unread books on your shelf, donate them now. All at once.

Then, face reality. “Someday” is a myth.

You will never “find time.” You have to make time for personal growth. If you want to run a marathon, is it worth clearing space in your schedule to train? You WILL need to say no to your buddies going to the bar, you WILL need to sacrifice sleep to get other work done, you WILL need to sacrifice other hobbies.

Trying worthwhile new things, by definition, should take you outside your comfort zone. You WILL have to fail many times, because that is how you learn. If you want to learn a language, you WILL need to commit to speaking no English for set periods of time. And you WILL embarrass yourself stumbling over words. This is emotionally draining, and you MUST be willing to fail and deal with frustration.

Apply the Ultimate Rule and decide once and for all whether to take action, by doing something new immediately or scheduling it. What is this really worth to you, and is it worth re-organizing your life for it?

If the answer is no, forget it. Discard it. Simply don’t think about it. You don’t want the thought of “someday” to paralyze you.

If the answer is yes, then this very act of deciding between taking action and discarding has forced you to clarify the value of the activity. If the answer is yes, then you will see this new venture through to the end, no matter what. You will make time and energy for it. Force yourself to act, the only thing that will ever make a difference. Nothing will stop you from becoming what you want to become.