Have you ever woken up late after hitting the snooze button too many times, rushed your breakfast, and felt your motivation for the day slip away? Us, too! That’s because, for better or worse, your morning habits can have a huge impact on the rest of your day.
Starting your morning the right way can help keep you motivated and productive all day long. The morning habits for motivation you choose will entirely depend on what works best for you, but below are some tried and tested ideas that can help you get a daily dose of morning motivation and stay on top form throughout the day.
Gratitude
Practicing gratitude is where you spend some time focusing on the good things in your life that you’re grateful for. It could be as simple as being grateful for a sunny day or focusing on bigger things like being grateful for your family, home, health, and career. Writing down 5 things you’re grateful for in the morning is an excellent way to practice gratitude, and you can use morning gratitude affirmations, too.
Visualisation
Visualisation is where we picture events, sounds, people, and even senses such as smells in our mind. This is something that we all do involuntarily every day, but doing it with intent can increase our motivation and success.
Imagining yourself completing a task or reaching a goal can make you more motivated and more likely to achieve it. There isn’t just one approach to using visualisation to motivate yourself and reach your goals. You could do it through guided meditation, through affirmations, through vision boards, and even through drawings.
Visualisation is often used by athletes to help them reach their goals. Plus, a study has shown that imagining moving your muscles can also help strengthen them.
Set (and stick to) a wake up time
When you don’t have a set sleeping pattern, you can really struggle to get a good night’s sleep. Keeping a consistent bedtime and wake up time will help you sleep better and make it easier for you to get up in the morning.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a morning person and wake up early or if you’re a night owl and stay up late. As long as you have a bedtime and wake up time that suits you and you stick to it on a daily basis or an almost daily basis, you should see benefits.
It can improve your mood, improve your alertness in the morning and throughout the day, improve your focus and memory, and improve your overall performance at work, at the gym, or with other activities.
Make your bed
It may seem like a small task, but making your bed when you wake up can be a powerful move.
This is because it means you can complete a task as soon as you get up and successfully completing a task can give you motivation to complete more tasks, setting a good tone for the rest of your day.
Making your bed every morning is a practice of mental discipline, perfect for getting you in the gym and fitness mindset.
Cold showers
This isn’t for the faint hearted, but can be used as part of an invigorating morning routine! Having a cold shower in the morning helps you wake up and stay more alert, it also gives your circulation a boost.
Part of the widely celebrated Wim Hoff Method is embracing the cold, and cold showers are a great way to start. Some of the benefits of having a cold shower for just a few minutes 2 or 3 times a week are increasing endorphins (hormones that make you feel good) and reducing the symptoms of depression.
If you don’t want to have a cold shower (and we completely understand why), you could have a lovely warm shower in the morning and turn the cold water on for a few seconds at the end – you’ll still see some benefits.
Gym Gear offers high quality gym equipment to commercial and home gyms in the UK. The gym equipment we have for sale includes functional training equipment, cardio equipment, studio equipment, and strength equipment. For more fitness tips and advice, visit our blog page.