Start your day off with a morning routine for success – whatever that looks like for you! As someone with a day job, a blog, and multiple chronic illnesses, my morning routine is key to a good day. It helps me stay on top of my to-do list, do the social media check-in work that’s needed for blogging, and manage my body. So in this post, I’m sharing what success looks like for me (so you can see how my morning routine helps me achieve it), as well as what my personal morning routine is, and how to make a morning routine of your own.
What Does Success Look Like?
Of course, if you want your morning routine to help you be successful, you need to know what success looks like. That’s going to be different for different people!
For me, I need a morning routine that helps me ease into the day. One reason is that due to my rheumatoid arthritis, I feel a lot of stiffness in the morning.
My illnesses also mean that I need to make sure that I’m fully awake when I start work, as I experience a lot of fatigue. Some days, what happens in the morning won’t affect my day much at all, but those are the bad days. Personally, once I’m through the first hour or two of my day, I feel the best that I will the entire day and I will feel worse as the day goes on.
This also means that I want my morning to be productive. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be up to do anything at the end of my work day. This includes anything from cooking to a medical appointment or anything in between. If I’m going to cook dinner, I generally use a slow cooker, so in the morning I do all the prep and get the slow cooker ready. If I have a virtual medical appointment in the afternoon, I do any prep that I need to in the morning. If I need to have an in-person appointment, I’ll schedule it for the morning. You get the idea!
Because I start working at my day job at 8, and I work 6-8 hours a day, I try to do a bit of blog work in a 20-30 minute period in the morning. It’s crucial for my blog’s success for me to do even a little bit!
Finally, I would be remiss to talk about my morning routine without mentioning how important it is that I don’t miss my morning medications. If I want to feel okay in general and today specifically, I have to take all of my medications. This might feel obvious, but since I take pills 4 times a day and take anywhere from 30-40 pills a day (depending on my steroid dose or my allergies), it’s easy to miss a dose. That is not good. So I need to take a handful of pills in the morning and, ideally, drink 12 oz of water to set up my POTS for success.
My Morning Routine for Success
6:20-6:30 – Wake up | I get up before 6:30 on basically all week days. I do, however, have to set 4-5 alarms for this because I have a history of sleeping through 3 or even 4. I’m an extremely heavy sleeper! Additionally, if I get less than 6 hours of sleep, my pain is significantly higher. My body is doing a lot at all times, and it really relies on rest.
6:30-7:00 – Ease into the day | This is the real reason why I wake up nearly 2 hours before I have to work; I really have to ease into the day. If I’m lucky, my morning stiffness only lasts around 30 minutes, but if I’m near to my RA infusion, it can take 2 hours. And on the really bad days, or on the days when I sleep less than 6 hours, the stiffness never eases up. I try to give myself 30 minutes to just zone out, catch up on miscellaneous stuff on the Internet, etc.
7:00-7:30 – Blog work | Every day, I manually pin for about 5 minutes, make 2-3 new pins for older posts and/or schedule new pins directly to Pinterest, and do a bit of interaction on blogger Facebook groups. If I have a new blog post, I promote that new post in addition to the other tasks. I try not to put pressure on myself as much as possible; if I don’t get something done before I need to get ready for the day, it’s not the end of the world.
7:30-8:00 – Get ready for the day | When I get ready for work, I put on my makeup, take my non-pill allergy and asthma medications, and then brush my teeth. I like to do it in this order so my makeup has as long as possible to set before I put my glasses on. I don’t wear contacts any more because of dry eyes due to my RA, and glasses really mess up makeup you have on your face, mainly your nose.
8:00 – Take meds | My morning medications is the time of the day when I take the most medications at once. In addition to my normal medications, I take a higher steroid dose in the morning than in the evening. I also take a few supplements, namely Vitamin D3; sodium chloride, because POTS requires I consume more sodium than most people; Calcium, because my endometriosis treatment makes me at a higher risk for osteoporosis; and Collagen, as my skin, hair, and nails all suffer due to my Rituxan infusion. In addition, at this time of the day, I take 1 allergy pills, my POTS pill, and some of my meds for RA (Sulfasalazine) and fibromyalgia (Gabapentin).
I generally take my medications with sparkling water because a) I have to drink a LOT of water for POTS and b) Sulfasalazine has the grossest medication coating I’ve ever known. I’m not exaggerating; it’s orange and chalky and when I refill my pill boxes it leaves my hands and fingers covered in orange gross-ness.
Finally, before I start working, I also give my cat her medications. She is 18 and has a thyroid issue and chronic pain, so she gets Gabapentin in the morning, too! (She also gets a thyroid pill, which she prefers because it’s a pill in a treat instead of liquid.)
Now that I’ve talked about what success looks like for me and what my morning routine looks like, let’s discuss how to make your own.
How To Make Your Own Morning Routine
Ask yourself what success looks like to you. If you can’t answer this question, you can’t concretely make a plan to achieve that success. There’s that old saying that a goal without a plan is just a wish. That’s definitely true!
Figure out whether or not you are able to wake up early. Not everyone is a morning person – which is fine! But if you aren’t a morning person or you have a lot of responsibilities (job, kids, school, etc.), then you probably want to maximize the time you have available in your morning.
Decide what you want to get done. Are you looking to write 500 words every morning? What about 15 minutes of yoga? Want to intentionally ease into your day? I can’t tell you what a morning routine for success is going to look like for you because I’m not you. Whatever you want to do in your routine, you want to make sure that it’s attainable. Don’t try to write 500 words in 20 minutes unless that’s something that you regularly do. Which brings me to the next point …
Figure out how much is reasonable for you to do in your morning routine. If you’re giving yourself 30 minutes between when you wake up and when you start working, you don’t want to over-plan your time. If you’re constantly struggling to do creative work in a short time span, then you run the risk of your creativity always feeling rushed. You want your morning routine to actually help you, so in general you should plan on doing a smaller amount of things on a daily basis, and on the days you have the time, do more.
What is your morning routine?
Like this post? Check out:
Self-Care Tips That Chronic Illness Patients Need, Resume Tips: 5 Tactics for Putting Advocacy on Your Resume, How To Actually Rest When You Take Breaks
Kate Mitchell is a blogger, chronic illness patient, and advocate who helps people understand chronic illness and helps chronic illness patients live their best lives.
I’m a heavy sleeper too! My husband and I have an amazing morning routine that I love but now that we have a brand new daughter in our lives I feel like it is always evolving! lol
I had a decent morning routine going for a little bit but then the pandemic threw everything out of whack. Now I have to figure out how to adjust when so much about my job and my daily life is different. Commuting also throws a wrench into things, as the traffic can vary wildly – so I keep an eye on the GPS in the morning to see what things look like and if I need to leave earlier than usual or not.
Every time I read about someone’s morning routine, I’m like “that sounds like a nice idea, I should try it.” But my routine of hitting snooze five times and then scrambling to check my work email while making breakfast is what I always fall back into after a couple weeks. I like your idea about defining your own success, because it’s clearly not working for me to copy others!
What a wonderful post, Kate, filled with so much great information!
I can relate to much of it – except the early wake-up time! I have ME/CFS and need a solid 9-10 hours of sleep at night, so 8 am is about the earliest I can manage. Otherwise, though I agree 100% – my morning routine is SO important! Like you, I am at my best in the first part of the day and go downhill from there, so I have to plan my most important work (I am freelance from home so more flexible) just after breakfast. Loads of pills here, too. I do a 15-min floor yoga routine (no standing – I also have POTS and another kind of OI, too) which really helps to work out the aches and stiffness from sleeping. And if I want to feel good, I need to have a healthy breakfast, which is especially challenging when I’m not feeling up to cooking!
So glad you found a morning routine that works for you – thank you for sharing your experiences and expertise!
Sue
Live with ME/CFS
Such a great routine. I’ve been trying to wake up at 6 am so I can get an hour or two to myself to work out or work on my blog before my daughter wakes up. But I am really not a morning person so it is really hard for me to do it!
Thanks for sharing! This is really inspiring, I definitely need to start my mornings right otherwise everything just goes downhill from there.