65. Morning Routines for Busy Nurses: A Realistic Approach

What’s your morning routine really like? If you're a nurse juggling on-call nights, family responsibilities, and a full-time job, mornings can feel more chaotic than calm.

In this episode, Jenny Lytle, RN, gets honest about her own struggles — and small wins — with creating a nourishing morning routine that actually works in real life. Inspired by The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod, Jenny shares how she’s adapted the “SAVERS” method to fit the unpredictability of healthcare life.

Whether you're working night shifts or simply tired of waking up in a rush, you’ll walk away with simple, realistic ideas for starting your day on your terms.

What you'll learn:

• Why your morning routine doesn’t need to be perfect to be powerful
• A nurse-friendly breakdown of The Miracle Morning “SAVERS” framework
• Easy ways to include self-care in your first 5–30 minutes
• How morning intention-setting impacts your mood and energy
• Why flexibility is key when every day looks different

Keywords: morning routine for nurses, realistic self-care, flexible morning rituals, miracle morning savers, nurse burnout, healthcare morning habits, nurse lifestyle tips

If you're feeling overwhelmed, burned out, or like there’s never enough time, I’ve got something just for you! Head to https://selfcareisntselfish.com to grab your FREE copy of my book, Self-Care Isn’t Selfish: The Compassionate Nurse’s Step-by-Step Guide to Personalized Stress Relief. It’s packed with simple, effective strategies to help you prioritize your needs—without guilt—so you can feel energized, focused, and ready to take on the day. Go to https://selfcareisntselfish.com 

Feeling stressed? Grab my quick and easy Busy Nurses' Guide to Less Stress for practical stress relief that truly fits into your life! https://www.jennylytle.com/guide

Looking for connection with people who get the stress and self-care struggles of nurses and caregivers? Check out https://thenursesbreakroom.com

Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennylytlern/

More ways to connect here: https://linktr.ee/jennylytle

Chapters

• 0:58 Framing Why Mornings Matter
• 2:58 Sleep Needs And Real-Life Barriers
• 5:28 The Miracle Morning And SAVERS
• 7:49 Adapting Rituals For Shift Work
• 9:17 Coffee Rituals And Intentional Pause
• 9:17 Coffee Rituals And Intentional Pause
• 9:49 A Practical SAVERS Walkthrough

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:29

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Nurses Break Room with Jenny Lettle, RN. Today we are going to talk about morning routines and the importance of how we start our morning in terms of setting up the rest of our day and how we feel as we go through our day. So I don't know about you, but I like sleep. Now, I don't always get as much sleep as I would like, but I'm somebody that I really enjoy sleep. I need a fair amount of sleep compared to other people to function my best. And I know that about myself. But that also means that, you know, sometimes I'm not jumping out of bed first thing in the morning. I like the snooze button too, even when I've had enough sleep, especially when it's cold and it's starting to get pretty chilly here. So knowing that about myself is something to keep in mind as I go into my morning routine. Now, having said that, I may not want to get up as soon as the alarm goes off, or I'm definitely not one of those people who just decides what time I'm going to get up and then magically wakes up then. I still don't understand uh how some people are able to do that. But I think it's cool. But when I do get up, I am frequently in go mode. When I wake up, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna do this, then I'm gonna do that. And I just kind of jump into things. Unless I intentionally slow myself down and think, no, no, no. I don't want to just jump into busyness and my to-do list. I want to really focus on what I can do for myself right now before everybody else needs my time and attention. And it doesn't have to be anything that is long and drawn out, but it does need to be something that matters to you. And I don't know if you've ever heard of the book The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod, and that's been out for many, many years. And with that, he talks about savers, and that's an acronym for these six different things that he found that a lot of very successful people do on a regular basis. And it was a study, if I remember correctly, where he talked with a lot of people and then kind of combined all of the things that they were doing into this one savers um framework. And with that, he proposed that you do each of these six things for 10 minutes each. So you do them for um an hour together, and that you do this every day, and you do it by getting up an hour before everybody else in your household does. So I did do that for a while and some form of that for a while, and then I kind of drifted away from it and had my own morning routine that I was doing. But like so many things, you know, it's easy to veer off course a little bit. My days and my weeks vary. I'm working two to three nights on call for hospice, I'm doing a home care case management daytime position, and running my business in in addition to a lot of other things that I've got going on just in personal life. So my morning routine has definitely been a bit disrupted. I don't have the flexibility that I had prior to starting this new full-time work position. And also, there's times when I'm out on call in the middle of the night. And so maybe my sleep has been disrupted and my morning is starting a little differently. So that made me realize that there's definitely lots of other people, especially people who are working in healthcare who are likely dealing with this too, where like every day is not the same. And so, what does that look like in terms of having a morning routine? And so the the six things that Hal talks about in his book are silence, affirmations, visualization, exercise, read, and scribe. I encourage you to just consider like what do you want your morning to look like? And maybe that's sitting down and just really enjoying a cup of coffee. I've started drinking this everyday dose of mushroom coffee type stuff, and I feel really good with it. And it's something that I'm enjoying, it's part of my morning ritual. I really just pause and I take that time for myself, and I just allow myself to just breathe and be. And it's something that I've been doing now for about a month, and I really can feel the difference. And I think part of it is the coffee itself. And I also believe that part of it is just that really being intentional about, hey, here's my cup of coffee, here's my couple of minutes to myself. And so today I did decide to build on that some more because I realized that I'd gotten away from some of the things that I know really do make a difference for me. And this morning I did kind of a variation of the savers. And for me, silence looked like just closing my eyes and taking some slow deep breaths while I sat there with my hands around my mug. And I just let myself be for a moment. And then the affirmations, for me, it was more of a gratitude type thing where I was thanking God for all of the opportunities that I have in my life and for all of the ways that I'm seeing him show up in my life, in my friends and family's lives. Um, because some of them have got some big things going on. And then visualization, I kind of did some visualizing like what I want some things that I'm working on to look like, and also what I want my week to look and feel like. And exercise for some people that may be going to the gym or going for a run. Um, for me today, that was just some movement, not formal exercise, but just some stretching and some kind of swaying and moving in ways that felt good to my body and reading. I um I did read my devotionals this morning and really spent a little bit of time with that. And then scribe was journaling for me, and I haven't done that in a little while. And I know that those things really impact how I feel. And so, total, I spent probably oh, 25-30 minutes on all of those things. And it could have been longer or it could have been shorter, but it just felt good to start off my day doing the things that I know fill my cup and make me a better version of myself. And so this week, I just encourage you to figure out like what is something that you could do for yourself first thing in the morning, things that that you know make a difference. And if you're somebody who maybe hasn't ever really thought about that, then you know, maybe pick one of the things that I talked about and try that on for size, see what that feels like for you. And feel free to modify that however you want to. Again, it doesn't have to be an hour-long process unless that's what you want to do, even if you're taking time to just do each of those things for a minute. That's time where you're just intentionally focusing on yourself and your own needs and setting your intentions for the day. And that can have a huge impact on how the rest of your day goes. So until next time, remember that self care isn't selfish. It's essential if we want to continue to care for others and live our best lives. Have a wonderful week.