“If you want to make your dreams come true the first thing you have to do is WAKE UP”
Hopefully by changing few evening habits you have improved your sleep and recovery. Finding your best macro mix will take a bit of time but rested body can deal better with all these challenges. This week you will continue working on NAC. You may still be working on changing one habit or decided on the new one. Take your time and enjoy feeling successful and healthy.
This week check out our morning routine tips. All that will improve your weight, fitness, health, focus, creativity, mental clarity, etc. All the tree elements that we introduce and master each week, together will make the life lasting change that you are looking for!
WEEK 3: MORNING ROUTINE
Below you will find some great ideas about how you can start your day. Choose three things from the list and commit to doing them every morning from now on. When you feel comfortable with the first three start adding more. Your morning is the most important part of your day. It will set up a direction of your day. So start it in a successful way and have a successful, fulfilling day! This list is a combination of habits of the most successful people. Every successful, effective and efficient person has a certain morning routine that will empower them for the challenging day ahead. It will jumpstart your brain and day for greater productivity and peace of mind.
If you can win your morning, you can win your day. Creating routines in the morning and evening will also help you insulate yourself from decision fatigue. Decision Fatigue: Research has confirmed that you can only create a finite number of good decisions each day. Setting up habits early in the day will create positive momentum, a vision and direction for your day. You don’t always have to do it all, but this will give you some idea:
1. Don’t touch your phone for minimum of an hour after getting up! Better if you don’t even have it in your bedroom. I know what you will say: “But I use it to wake me up? Then get an alarm clock for God’s sake!
If you start your day by checking your phone you give away your serenity and power. You will get your dopamine fixes, it will rewire your brain and it will just make you distracted all the time. The world will dictate your day. You train yourself how to respond, how to react on everybody else’s requests. Therefore, managing the first and last hour of your day is the priority so you can take control of your life.
2. If you are working on solving the problem, if you are looking for solutions it may be a great idea to RECALL YOUR DREAMS in the morning. Some of the greatest breakthroughs in history came in dreams. When you dream, your subconscious mind processes solutions to problems you work on in the daytime, but most people forget them.
3. Make the bed. Making your bed is a success habit. Within the first few seconds of the day you have already succeeded at something. How you do anything is how you do everything. Making your bed well teaches you how to do everything else well – that’s why it’s required in the military. When you return at the end of the day, you come back to success.
4. Drink water and take your supplements. Water is important because most of us are very dehydrated at night. Take your supplements and probiotics. Your gut is your second brain. You have an incredible amount of nerve cells in your gut, so make sure they’re fed.
5. Think about a minimum of three things you are grateful for. Gratitude is the best way to help you deal with your fears, worries, anger and anxiety. Be grateful for big things as well as for small things, like meeting someone fun the day before or finding an inspiring quote. If you don’t feel like there is anything good that happened to you think what you could be grateful if you wanted to. If you achieve a massive success, lets say you get to your ideal weight and look fantastic, but have nothing you can be grateful for you will not feel happy with your success. The poorest people are the ones who have achieved an incredible success and still feel unfulfilled and unhappy. Do appreciate small things, find joy in your life and never stop reaching higher!
6. Focus on your breathing. Breathing techniques fully oxygenate your body and your brain. Try box breathing, alpha breathing, or the Wim Hof method. Breathing is also one of the best ways to change your state and calm you down. This is why people find smoking calming, they breathe deep, even though they breathe in nicotine. And it changes your biochemistry, it makes you feel better immediately. You can use breathing during the whole day! Whenever you feel stressed or anxious go outside and take a few deep breaths! It works miracles. This technique saved me many times when my stress level was sky rocking!
7. It is not easy but it is a great way to quiet the brain and get the clarity: meditate. Do it for 15 – 20 minutes because mindfulness is so important. Enter the day with a clear mind Try the Headspace app or the Muse device. There are many ways to meditate. You can meditate by simply choosing your focus and directing all your thoughts towards that. Meditating for me is not only quieting your brain but deciding what you are thinking about and trying not to get distracted.
8. Another great idea is to spend 10-30 minutes in the morning on visualising your new self. Imagine you have lost those extra pounds, feeling super fit and looking fantastic. What you eat, what you wear, where do you buy your clothes, who do you hang out with. Your brain cannot tell the difference between things that really happened or those you have vividly imagined. So the more details you can see the better directions you are giving to your nervous system and the faster you will get there! It is like with GPS. The more accurate the address the easier it is to find your destination. It will help you make good choices during the whole day. You are already the person you want to be!
9. Move. You can move for only 1 – 2 minutes to get into your body and get the full workout later, or you can start your day with your workout. Get your heart rate going. Scientists have confirmed that exercising for minimum 20 minutes a day will improve your brain functions so why would you wait to the evening to exercise. You need the power in the morning! Doing something more intense like lifting weights or doing some fast cardio will make you feel strong and full of power. Can it get any better? Stop doubting yourself and get the confidence back! You will be effective, efficient and successful as opposed to feeling sluggish and having no energy until you get that cup of coffee and a muffin! Ditch that shit and start your day the most empowering way!
10. Take a cold shower. Cold therapy will help you to reset your nervous system, wake up and recover from your workout faster. Plus it will cool you down and make you stop sweating after the great workout.
11. Make a tea. Jim Kwik’s favourite brain tea is a combination of gotu kola, ginkgo, lion’s mane, MCT oil and some other gems. This concoction stimulates the brain and increases the focus throughout the day.
12. Journal. Many geniuses – like Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison – wrote journals. But do they journal because they’re geniuses or does the process of journaling and reflection make them geniuses? Handwrite your journals since studies say handwriting is better than typing.
13. Instead of writing your to-do-list, what outcome you would like to achieve that day? Do you want to take control of your emotions and begin to consciously and deliberately reshape your daily experience of life? Or would you like to condition your metabolism and muscles to produce the levels of energy and fitness you desire? Or maybe you would like to measurably enhance the quality of your personal relationships and deepen your emotional connection with the people you care about most?
When you focus on your outcomes you will be able to start taking actions that guarantee you these results so by the end of the day you feel like you have achieved something, instead of just taking actions.
14. Read. You can read in the morning or anytime during the day. Scheduling 30 minutes a day to reading will help. Feed your brain, learn something new, expand your knowledge. If you schedule the time, you can read one book a week just by reading 30 minutes a day.
15. Make the Jim Kwik brain smoothie. Most of the ingredients come from his top 10 brain foods – green leafy vegetables, water, blueberries, avocado, and more. Check the full list here: http://jimkwik.com/kwik-brain-005
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