Your Morning Routine Is Either Building Your Dream Body & Life — or Destroying It

If you wake up, grab your phone, scroll, compare yourself, and rush into your day already stressed — your morning is working against you. And not just for your body goals. For everything.

I used to wake up dreading the day, already anxious before I even got out of bed. Now I genuinely look forward to mornings. In this episode I'm walking you through exactly what changed, the mistakes to ditch, and a simple framework you can make work no matter your season of life.

We talk about:

• The 4 morning mistakes that are tanking your energy, motivation, and progress
• Why snoozing is actually self-sabotage (and the 3 reasons you do it)
• The no-phone rule and what scrolling first thing is literally doing to your brain and willpower
• The RAS — the science behind why your morning sets the tone for everything
• The Mind, Body & Soul framework for a morning that actually serves you
• What I personally do every single morning and how it changed my life
  
  
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Her Revival. I'm your host, Lainey. This podcast is about one thing, helping you care for your body, your mind, and your life in a way that actually aligns with who you want to become: fitness, food, mindset, habits, all of it. Think of this as your owner's manual because when you understand how you actually work, taking care of yourself stops being a fight. It just becomes who you are. Let's get into it. If you scroll your phone first thing, compare yourself on social media, and never actually give yourself a second before rushing into your day. You're already stressed and rushed before you even started work. How do you think that's setting you up to feel for the rest of the day? I would invite you to take a look at your mornings because here's what's actually happening. It's not about productivity or some trendy wellness checklist. It's about self-respect. Your morning is a self-respect practice. And right now, you might be letting everyone and everything else decide that for you. Now, especially if you can relate to this, where you forgot your phone first thing, you're constantly bombarded with messages, you're scrolling social media, you're comparing yourself, you struggle with motivation to show up for you and your goals, even though you know what you want, or maybe you don't even know what you want, what you actually want. You're just doing what the world and social media and everyone around you tells you that you want. You're constantly exhausted and drained, and you don't have the energy or the motivation to show up for yourself. And you just wonder am I always gonna be on the back burner? Am I always gonna feel like this? Am I ever gonna actually reach these big goals that I almost don't even want to say out loud because I don't know if I'm capable of reaching them? Yeah, I used to feel like that and waking up, I did not want to start the day. I did not feel motivated. I was constantly distressed and anxious, feeling like I was on the hamster wheel of life. Like every day was just a checklist to have to get through. And being honest, it felt awful. It was so miserable. And I just thought, this can't be, this can't be it. This can't be how I spend the rest of my life. And then I heard this quote, yeah, your mornings make your days, your days make your weeks, your weeks makes your months, your months makes your years, and your years are your life. And I just thought, okay, so mornings are really important because if I don't love how my day is going, I need to start at the root of it. And I realized, yeah, my morning was not setting me up for success. I would grab my phone immediately. I would check all of my work messages, all of my personal messages, all the people that needed me. I would check social media, I would scroll, I'd be comparing. I already would just feel this stress and this dread like welling up inside of me. And then I would get up and I would rush through the day and think about okay, I really don't have time for this. I gotta get to work, I gotta do this thing for that person and that and whatever. And I'm already exhausted, I'm already stressed, I'm already not feeling motivated and clear and like the person that I want to be showing up. I genuinely did not love the person that I was. I was not a bad person, but I was just not this joyful, motivated, excited human that I knew that I could be, at least not all the time and not in my head. And I realized that my mornings were setting me up with that. It was making it really, really hard to be the person that I wanted to be to accomplish the things that I wanted to accomplish because of how I didn't realize I was unintentionally not actually prioritizing those things. So about a year ago, when I realized this and I decided to get serious and intentional about my mornings, everything changed. Because what's actually happening when we're just rushing into the day or not actually taking a second to take care of ourselves, like you know that quote, you can't pour from an empty cup. You are just setting yourself up to scrape the bottom of this empty cup over and over. If you are someone who has a tendency to put yourself on the back burner, you're yet again communicating to yourself that you aren't important enough to prioritize that little bit of extra time. That taking care of your body, this one body that you get for the rest of your life, isn't important enough to do something, even if you don't have a whole lot of time. If you can't do the whole three-hour gouache, matcha affirmations in the mirror, whatever wellnessy, trendy routine that you see on social media, you don't have to do that. Probably is gonna be more stressful of a checklist and then trying to rush into work than just being intentional with five, 10, 20, 30 minutes of your day. But here's what's actually happening when you're not intentional about your morning. You are starting the day focusing on everything and everyone else but yourself. You aren't giving yourself a moment to figure out what's actually important for me. How do I want to show up today? What is my energy going to be? What are my values? What do I want to focus on? What actually gets my energy and my attention? And if you are not the first thing that gets your energy and your attention, we already lose because so many of us, especially women, have just been brought up thinking, and this is not our fault, by the way, like this is just the society that we live in that we are need to put everybody else ahead of ourselves. Essentially, that we are better women and mothers and daughters and sisters and employees if we put everybody else ahead of us and we are on the back burner and we get table scraps. Now, we do need to show up for other people in our life and how blessed are we to have other people in our life to be able to show up for. And we want to give them our best, don't we? But we can't give them our best if we aren't intentionally making sure that we are at our best. We are the only person we are guaranteed to have the rest of your life with. Even if you are married, you have kids, those people are not guaranteed to be with you, especially every single waking moment and sleeping moment of your life for the rest of your life. You are the person that is going to be there for everything. You need to learn, and we all need to learn to be our own best friend, to have our own best interests and heart and understand number one, that if we take care of ourselves, especially in the morning, we are a better version of us to then show up for everybody else and we can give our best to everybody else. But on top of that, we're not just doing it for everyone else. We're doing it for us so we can be the best version of ourselves, so we can feel happy and fulfilled and grounded and motivated and energized and be that version of us that we know that we want to and can be. And then we are so full from pouring into our own cup, there's overflow that just gets on everybody else. So we're not intentionally doing it just for them all the time, but everyone else is going to benefit when you do it for you. And if that feels uncomfortable, this is especially important if it's uncomfortable for you to be able to prioritize taking care of yourself solely because you deserve to take care of yourself. I feel like we're a lot of us are taught to believe that is selfish and that it's just so wrong. Like it, that's not selfish. It's selfish to not take care of you and not and not be able to give your best to everybody. So if you're catching my drift and you understand just how important that this is, I want to show you that number one, it doesn't have to be complicated. I want to walk through a couple of common, we're gonna call them mistakes that people make in their mornings and just simple things that we can do instead. And I want to show you that this can be really simple. If you have two minutes to get yourself ready before you leave the door in the morning, you can still be intentional with your morning. So I want to give you some really actionable things. So the first mistake that a lot of people make in their mornings that negatively impacts their day, their life, their progress, their goals, all the things. We're gonna start at the very beginning is snoozing their alarm for a couple of reasons here. What snoozing is, is procrastination. It is procrastinating, getting up and going into the day. So if the very first thing that you do in the day is procrastinate, what does that communicate to yourself and to your brain that you are someone who procrastinates, that puts things off, that can't just step forward and go and trust yourself that you can get into the day and into the things and figure it out. And don't you want to be someone who, when they wake up, they're just ready to jump out of bed? And you don't got to be clicking your heels, have all this crazy energy because sometimes we just don't. But being able to get up out of bed the first time that alarm goes off and get into that day. Like, don't you want that? As someone who used to snooze, it feels a million times better to be someone who can just get up at her first alarm or even without an alarm. And in case that's you and you're like, I know, I know, I've been wanting to fix this, I don't know what to do about it. Really quickly, there's three different reasons that people snooze, depending on what your reason is. That's what you're gonna do about it. The first one is you're just simply not getting enough sleep. An adult human needs an average of eight hours. You can do okay with seven. Anything less than that, you're probably not gonna feel that good. I have a whole episode on sleep on my podcast. If you want to go listen to that episode, I'll link it in the notes below. But we need to get enough sleep. So if you're not getting enough sleep, know the time you need to wake up at. Count back eight hours from there. That's when we're gonna be asleep by. Notice I didn't say in bed by because it takes time to fall asleep. Count back 20-ish minutes, however long it takes you to fall asleep. That's when we're in bed by. I always joke, adults need bed times too. We need to take care of our bodies. Sleep is so important because if we're not getting enough sleep, it's gonna be really hard to not snooze your alarm and get up. The second reason people snooze is because it's habitual. If you've been snoozing over and over, and especially if you're like, I just do it in my sleep, I don't realize that I do it. That's habitual. Really easy to break this. So we just need to create a little bit of friction between you being able to reach over and press that snooze button. My favorite thing to do is take whether it's your phone, your alarm clock, whatever you're using for your alarm, put it across your room, put it by your light switch or put it in your bathroom if you have a connected bathroom. So you have to physically get up out of bed. You can't just roll over and press the snooze button. You have to get up, go over, put it by a light switch so you can turn the lights on, like all of them, or put it by the window so you can open the window, get the light in there so we're already really waking yourself up. Bonus points if you something else that I used to love to do is have some kind of song or music or something enjoyable as my alarm versus just an obnoxious thing that just kind of jostles you awake and doesn't feel too good to wake up to. And the third reason that people snooze is because, and this one's a little bit deeper, and there's a whole lot more to this, but what we're gonna talk about the rest of this episode is gonna help with that inadvertently, is you're just not excited for the life that you're waking up to. And this one's kind of heavy. And this is honestly where I was at before. It wasn't habitual. I wasn't pressing snooze, I was getting enough sleep. I honestly was just so stressed and anxious and unfulfilled with what I was getting up and going to do in the day. That was what was hard, made it hard for me to want to get up and just go into my day and attack my goals and show up as my best self. The rest of this episode isn't fully addressing this, but I promise you this will help. But if that sounds like you, that needs to be one of your main focuses as you go forward for the next, I don't know, couple of weeks, months of your life. Because I coming from experience, I can't say it was easy to figure that out and to create a life and things that I truly loved and enjoyed working toward. But over the past bit, that has been one of my big focuses. And life is just so much better. It's so much better when you get intentional about it. If there is something that you don't love that you are not excited to wake up to that you're not fulfilled with, you likely can't change it immediately. Some things you can, some things you can't. But at least knowing that you have your own best interests at heart and you are going to at least figure out what I can do about this? Let me take one step forward. And maybe it takes time, maybe it takes weeks or months or years to finally get to a place where you're like, I'm so excited for the life that I created that I get to wake up to. But I promise you it is worth it because time is going to pass either way, and you might as well be working towards something and get so much pleasure in that, knowing that is coming, being grateful for every day that you have to be able to work towards that thing that you want, that goal that you have. There's so much fulfillment and enjoyment that comes from that. That alone, not even being where I want it to be, but just knowing that I was actually actively working towards it. And every day I was one step closer to it. That was enough to help me be excited to get up out of bed, be intentional with my mornings, intentional with my days, and literally see things go forward so much faster than I could have imagined, all because of this. So that's the first mistake is the snoozing. The second one is this is what a lot of people do. If you feel called out by this, that's okay. I did this for a long time too, because I didn't realize how bad this was for me, is reaching for your phone first thing in the morning for a couple different reasons. Number one, and you reach and you grab your phone first thing and you're looking at messages, you're looking at social media. We are already bombarded by the world and what everybody needs of us and what we should think and what we should do and what is important. We don't get to decide that for ourselves. We didn't get any time for us to think about what do I want to focus on? What's important to me, how do I want to show up for today, what energy want to be. The world decided it for you. So that alone is a we don't want that. Because I don't know about you guys, but the stress from messages and what we see on social media, the comparison, the negativity, all of it, that's not the most motivating, exciting, inspiring thing to start our day with to set the tone for it. But then number two, even if it's good stuff as we're scrolling and we're looking at everything, that is draining your dopamine. That is draining your willpower for the day. So then you try to go get into work or other harder tasks. You drained it just from scrolling. Like our brains are so addicted to this thing, to the dopamine that we get from scrolling in social media. They literally have psychologists and neuroscientists and those top people that work at these companies to make it as addicting to our brains as possible. So we don't have the motivation, we don't have the willpower, we have this addiction, and we are essentially kind of like slaves, maybe hot take, slaves to just needing to give all of our time and energy, attention, and money to these things. Now, I'm not saying we can't use them. I am saying we should minimize them, we should be intentional with what we consume, but we absolutely, I feel like this should be a hard rule. We don't touch our phones for the first 30 to 60 minutes of the day. And if we do need to for work or something else, keeping it on either a do not disturb or just maybe bricking or locking or making sure we're just not going on social media for those types of things. Because that morning is for you to decide your focus and your energy, not the world to decide it for you. A little hack that I heard somewhere, if you struggle with this, is don't charge your phone overnight. So you literally have to charge it in the morning. So you're gonna get up out of bed and you can't bring that phone with you when you go do whatever you need to do that first bit of your morning because your phone needs to charge. Obviously, don't do that if schedule doesn't allow, but if it does, that's a great hack. I actually use that subtitles to help break that addiction for me. And as a little aside, a way that we can know that we have an addiction to our phones. I don't know if you guys ever heard people say this, but when you hear this, you're like, uh, kind of giggle, kind of don't feel good about that. But if you can't go to the bathroom without bringing your phone with you and needing to scroll or have some kind of stimulation while you're going to the bathroom, that's a problem. Do it that what you will. Now, the third mistake people make in the mornings is just rushing into their day of not actually taking any time to take care of themselves. And I understand if you are someone who needs to get up and immediately get your home ready, get the kids ready, get them to school, rush off to work, rush off to the gym, I'm not saying that we need to sit and sing kumbaya and do a facial gasha, whatever the heck, for an hour before we start our day, because some people either physically don't have the time for it unless they wake up before the crack of dawn, even sooner than that, or they just don't want to spend that much time. And the good news is we don't have to, but we do need to spend, even if it's five or 10 minutes just for ourselves, pouring into our own cup, setting our intention, taking care of us again as that most important person in our life, so we can be that best version of us for everybody else. I promise you, you are going to feel happier, healthier, more energized, more productive if you take that little bit of time for you before you go then give that time to everybody else. And the fourth mistake that people make here is kind of opposite of that, is they think that their morning routine to be effective has to be this crazy checklist of things to do. When in reality, this isn't meant to be a checklist that we do to just get it done. We want to be intentional with the things that we pick that actually accomplish the things that we want to. So you got to get clear on what that actually looks like. And if we can be intentional with this, that changes everything. Now, if you've ever maybe had a healthy breakfast or gone to work out in the morning where you don't usually, that changes how you decide to eat, how you decide to move your body. That changes how you go throughout the rest of your day. Or if you have a really good morning, you're a little bit happier. Maybe you're in traffic, or someone cuts you off, and you're like, ah, it's fine, you go first. Like, I don't care because you're in that good mood. But let's say you wake up and you snooze and you're cranky and you spill your coffee on yourself and you're in traffic and you're cussing at the person in front of you and you're rushing in and you're cranky, and your boss is saying this and that, and you're just having an awful day. It started at the beginning. But if we could have maybe had a better morning right there, we could have avoided those. Because then the world isn't deciding the version of you that's going to show up. You are so intentionally choosing what that version is, what is important to you, and taking that time to help work towards the goals that you have, whether they're physical goals, mindset goals, financial goals, career goals, whatever it is, that time is helping you do those things and become that person that you need to that can actually achieve and sustain those goals. Now, the last thing I want to share before we get into specifically how do we actually create an intentional morning routine that is going to serve this purpose of setting ourselves up to be the person we want to be, have a good life, have this self-respect and take care of ourselves is our brains are very suggestible, especially right when we wake up in the mornings. And we have this thing in our brain called the RAS. What this is, is essentially a filter in your brain. Now, the things that you tell your brain that's important, that is the lens that it is gonna look through the world in because your brain and your body is taking in so much information every second of every day. We can't actually process all of it. So our brain needs a filter to decide what's important, what am I gonna pay attention to, what am I gonna bring to their attention, what am I just going to kind of throw away, essentially. Now, this RAS or the reticular activating system, we can train it. We can tell it essentially, this is what's important, this is what I want to focus on. So as you're going through my day through the world, this is what I want you to latch on to, to let me know, to make me aware of. Now, if we're intentionally looking at negativity and comparison and not showing up for ourselves and negative self-talk and rushing and not taking care of us, what do you think we're gonna be focusing on and get more of in our day and in our life? Versus if we are intentional with, I'm gonna focus on positive things and things that are my goals and my values and who I wanna be and taking care of me and the stuff that I want to focus on first and pouring into my own cup because I know that's important and I can be in this good positive energy. How do you think we're gonna view the rest of the day? How do you think that's gonna go? Once we understand how our brains work and how our bodies work and we understand why we struggle with the things that we struggle with, it becomes so much easier to actually know what to do, to not just have to live with those things anymore, to actually do something about it. So I want to help you guys do something about it because as you get by now, your mornings are so important and they should be like this sacred time just for you. And I want to make this something where you can come back to when your season of life changes. Maybe you are fresh out of college, you're just single, you got all the time in the world before you start work at, I don't know, 9 a.m. because you work from home, your morning routine can look a little bit different. If you have a newborn baby, your morning routine might also look a little bit different. If you're someone who wants to work out or you have to go for a long commute to get to work and you have to leave pretty early, that's gonna look different. But the principle of all this is gonna be the same. So you can come back to this and you can use this framework regardless of the season of life that you're in. So the framework that I like to think of for your mornings to be intentional with them is we're gonna have something for your mind, your body, and your soul. And this could literally take all of five minutes to do all this. It could be 30 minutes, an hour, whatever you want to do, you can expand it to whatever time you want to give it. Now, I want to talk about why, like the purpose of each of these, and then some examples and then the question that you can ask yourself to kind of pick which you want to be able to do. So for your mind. That is the first one. Now, the purpose of this is how you direct your attention. And this is so, so important. Some things that you could do for this would be journaling, meditation, affirmations, breath work, listening to a mindset podcast, writing your top three priorities for the day, reading a few pages of a personal development book, some kind of positive self-talk practice. And the question to ask yourself when you're deciding what you want to pick here. Obviously, if you have something that you enjoy, please do it. But what I want you to ask yourself is what's gonna help me start the day focused on what I want to focus on instead of feeling scattered or letting the world decide that for me. For me, I love journaling and it can look different. There's so many different ways that you can do this. It could just free write. Sometimes I do that, sometimes I do it when I'm doing my Bible study and I'll journal based off of kind of what I'm reading that day, what I'm learning. Sometimes it's just whatever thoughts come to mind for a while when I was getting into journaling because I didn't, I had no idea what to write. I like, I don't know what's coming to mind. There are no rules to it. So it could be pages, it could be a sentence, but I would have prompts. For example, today I want to feel blank. My ideal version of today is blank. What I learned from yesterday is blank. Today I'm grateful for blank. Can be whatever you want it to be. I personally love journaling in the pen to paper aspect essentially, especially. It's very therapeutic. It kind of just gets you to slow down and be in touch with how you are actually thinking. Cause I feel like so much of our life is just us disassociating from how we think and feel and just focusing on everything else. So I would put a vote in for that if that sounds at all good for you. But something else, if you maybe don't have a lot of time, could be listening to some kind of personal development or mindset podcast to help with that mindset and how you want to think and go and focus on throughout that day. Now, the second category, the second thing that we're gonna do is gonna be for your body. And this is essentially how you want your body to feel and your energy to be as you go through that day. So the first thing that is gonna be a non-negotiable. I don't have a lot of non-negotiables. The phone is one, this is another one. We're gonna drink water right away when we wake up. You have been dehydrating all night, not drinking water. We need to hydrate. This is gonna help your brain to think clearly. It's gonna help your energy, your digestion, bloating, so many things. Very important to hydrate. So what I would encourage, my favorite way to hydrate in the morning, I can drink 40 ounces. No joke, 40 ounces, like a big Stanley Hydro jug. I can drink that in, I don't know, 20, 30 minutes, and it knocks out a third of my water goal for the day because it tastes so good. And I'll do the juice of half of a lemon, I'll do an electrolyte packet. My favorite, all the element, either lemonade or raspberry salt flavors. And the combination of those two together, put some ice in it so it's nice and cold, is so freaking good. It's amazing. Very hydrating nutrients from the lemon juice, obviously the electrolytes, which helps with hydration because hydration isn't just water, but it's also electrolytes. So we can absorb and actually use that water. It's amazing. So we're gonna do some form of water to hydrate in the morning. That's the first thing we're doing when we wake up. It's first thing that we're putting in our body. But then if we can do something else to physically move and take care of our body, that could be something as simple as stretching. Maybe you deal with a lot of back and hip pain. So you do some kind of stretches for your low back, for your hips, for your glutes, for your hamstrings, is gonna make a massive difference in two to three months from now. If you even do two to three stretches in the morning, maybe you just play your favorite song and you stretch to the song and then you get up and go throughout the rest of your morning. You will notice such a big difference if you consistently do that. It doesn't have to be anything crazy. Maybe you do yoga, maybe you do mobility, maybe you go for a walk, especially a walk outside to get some sunlight. Get the sunlight in your eyes is good for stimulating melatonin production for that upcoming night, which is gonna help with your sleep. It helps with your energy. Going for a walk outside helps with stress reduction and anxiety. So good for you. And it doesn't have to be long, it could be five to 10 minutes, just quick around the block. Maybe while drinking your water, listening to your podcast. We can have it stack here. Maybe you actually go to the gym and go for a workout or you do your cardio, just something to help move your body, get some blood flowing, get some endorphins, prioritize taking care of this one body that you are going to be living the rest of your life in. And the question that we're gonna ask ourselves here is what's gonna help me feel physically better in my body today. Now, the third thing that we're gonna pick is gonna be for our soul. And this could be a wide range of things. So I want to give a bunch of examples, but essentially this is us figuring out what's important to me, what do I want to focus on, what are my values? This is how you connect to purpose, meaning, your values, faith, and something bigger than yourself. And this is where we can get a lot of fulfillment from. And this was a really big one that I was missing before personally. There's so many different things. It does not have to be religious or spiritual, but it absolutely can be. So maybe that looks like reading the Bible or scripture, listening to worship music or a faith-based podcast or sermon, or something a little bit more broad and non-religious based could be just spending some time in nature and reflecting on values, practicing gratitude is a huge one or setting your intentions for the day. So essentially the questions here are what is gonna help me feel connected to what matters most? Who do I want to be today? What matters most today? Like what can I be grateful for? That gratitude, especially, there is so much research that shows a gratitude practice makes such a big difference in our mental health and just our overall well-being and quality of life. When I personally even just started doing a gratitude practice, and then for me, especially pairing that with my faith, that alone has made a really, really big difference in how I feel and think going throughout that day. Something that I love to do with all this is picking what works for me in my season of life because it changes. And in a second, I can walk through what I personally do right now. But especially if you don't have a lot of time, you can have it stack here. So maybe the example is you have to wake up and you have to get to the gym quickly in the morning. So you're gonna do your morning workout, and on the way there, you're listening to some kind of maybe worship music or motivational podcast. Maybe you're drinking your electrolyte water on the way there. So we're covering a couple of these bases. Maybe you have to get up early, get the kids ready to school. So you're listening to some kind of podcast, drinking your water, eating a nourishing breakfast, and throw that into the body one. Definitely should have eating a nourishing breakfast high in protein, at least 30 grams to get all the benefits of it. Maybe if you have to wake up and go do a corporate job, you're gonna listen to a mindset podcast while you're getting ready, while you're drinking your electrolyte water and you go for a little walk outside quickly, a little five, 10-minute walk before you leave for work. Like there's so many things that you can mix and match. And what we're not doing is just creating one routine and just sticking with it forever. Like mine has continually changed. I don't know how many times, and it's gonna keep changing. It's what works for you in your season of life. And let's say even you're traveling or you don't have as much time one morning, you can still pick something that helps with those components. So, for example, we were just gone in Nebraska over the weekend for a wedding. So in the morning, I would wake up and I would sit and I would pray. I would drink some of my electrolyte water still. And that was about what I had time for before we went off into the day. And it still worked, it still helped. So some of these things you can bring with you, other ones you just kind of adjust and you go with the flow of it. But you're still being intentional of how you take care of yourself and show up for yourself and set your attention and your energy going into that day. And I want to share what I personally do right now, just in case any of this sounds like something you would maybe want to try, go ahead, adjust it so it fits you and find what works for you right now. So, right now, when I wake up, first thing I do is I do not go on my phone. I used to, I will be so honest, my mental health was not in a good spot when I would do that all the time. So that bad boy is not next to me. I go brush my teeth because I don't like morning breath. So brush my teeth, put my contacts in, go downstairs, make that electrolyte water like I was telling you about. Seriously, try it. It is so good. Anytime I have someone come over, I make it for them and they're like, This is amazing. Like, I know it is. That's why I drink it every day for I don't know how many years. Like literally every day for I don't know, maybe four, five, six years. So I'll make that, I'll come upstairs, I'll pray, I'll spend some time in scripture, I'll journal on it. This is where I'm practicing gratitude and mindfulness and focusing on what I think is important for me to set myself up for the day. And this that part of my morning, I genuinely look forward to so much. It has made such an impact in just how I show up and how I think, and honestly, just kind of what's transpired from that in my life that I'm like, I never want to get rid of this. This is everything I actually needed and I didn't realize it. So taking that time for it has been amazing. Some mornings, if I'm really busy pressed for time, I'll listen to worship music or maybe I'll listen to like a sermon or on the Bible app and like read scripture and I'll do that as I'm getting ready in the morning, just so I can still fill my cup with that and focus my attention on what matters a lot to me. Then after I finish that up, I go downstairs and I make my little protein matcha latte. If you follow me on socials, you know what I'm talking about. I'm obsessed with this thing. I genuinely go to bed excited to wake up and have it in the morning. And I've been doing this, I think the entire year of 2026. It is now June, so about six months. So I do that. If I'm training that morning, I'll also have some dates and cashew butter. That's like my little snack I have before the gym. I bring my little matcha latte upstairs. I wash my face, do my skincare, which is just moisturizer. I don't know anything about skincare. I put on maybe five minutes worth of makeup. Usually at this point, I'm listening to either a sermon or I'm listening to some kind of YouTube video, podcast, mindset, something, get me a good headspace, maybe learning before the day starts. Then I go off to the gym. Oh, as a little quick thing, I finish my water, like I said, my 40 ounces by the time I have my matcha latte, because I want to finish all my water before I can have anything else. Because as the day goes on, sometimes I don't always want to drink a lot later in the day. So I front load it and I found that works really well for me. So that's like a little how I incentivize myself to have it is I have to finish my water first and then I can have that. So I finish getting ready, I get changed, and then I head out to the gym because I found for myself I'm fortunate at this point. Actually, even when I was in medical sales or as a trainer, any corporate jobs I had, I still like to work out in the morning. That just I found that worked the best for me. So I had the most energy focus I could pour into my own cup before starting the day for everybody else. Obviously, just fit it in where you cut on your schedule. But for me, I found if I go in the morning, then I'm not thinking about how I need to do this and that and trying to rush to get back into work and just thinking of everything. I want this little bit of time for myself. My phone is still on do not disturb it this time. I'm getting my workout in, I come home, I change, I eat, and then I start my workday. And I just feel so full. I feel so happy, I feel so grateful, I feel so energized. I don't have the nearly the same level of stress and anxiety that I just felt, honestly, kind of constantly. I don't think I've talked about that a whole lot, but I used to have the craziest just full body anxiety, full body stress all day, every day. And these things that I've been intentional of with my morning, that's really the one thing that changed that and just my faith being a little bit bigger for me personally has made a really big impact. I feel like a completely different person in a matter of less than a year of being really intentional with this. And I've just seen the most amazing things happen in my life because of it. And that's why I want to share all of this. Because the point of a morning routine or what we're doing to start our day isn't to be this like wellness-y productivity checklist. Like, that's not, I feel like a lot of content makes it look like it's supposed to be this like aesthetic, whatever biohacking. And if you love that, do that. Like it's what you want to focus on for you, what's gonna help you be the best version of you, what's gonna help you feel happy and energized and fulfilled and focus on the things that actually matter so you can show up and you can have that passion, that excitement, that motivation to go into your day. And I don't know who wouldn't want that. Like, don't you want to feel energized and good knowing that you took care of yourself and you have a full cup so you can actually go pour into other people and make that impact in that world, be that version of you, accomplish the things that you want, and have a really incredible life, no matter the season that you're in. I don't know about you guys, but to me, if I can just spend a few minutes in my morning to help me accomplish that, that sounds like it is so, so worth it. So I hope that this helped you guys maybe change your perspective a little bit, maybe give you some ideas, hopefully, of what you can do with your morning, that little bit of time that should be so sacred to you and deciding your energy and your focus before the world decides it for you. And I promise you, if you start doing this a couple months from now, a couple of years from now, you're gonna look back, be so glad you did. Maybe not even recognize yourself or your life anymore in the best way possible. So thank you guys for watching. I love you guys. I will see you in the next one. Now go do something that your future self will thank you for. Bye, guys.