4 top tips for reclaiming your morning routine

Take control of how your a.m. plays out in order to have a better day. 

By Skye Wellington

You get woken with a hammer to the head. A toy hammer to be fair, and the blow is delivered by a toddler, but it’s still a rude awakening. You curse yourself once again that you gave in to pleas for a big bed and wonder where that stair gate is – is it wrong to lock kids up, even for just a short time?

You stumble trip down the stairs but it’s not nearly as literary as it is in Going on a Bear Hunt. Before you manage to imbibe your hot tea, you are taking breakfast orders while collecting already scattered toys and hoping you’ll make it out the door on time. Meanwhile, you give up all hope that you’ll ever drink a cup of tea before it goes cold within the next 5 years. 

After several tantrums and some negotiation, the kids are fed, dressed and brushed but you realise you haven’t been through the time consuming routine of encouraging your toddler to use the toilet before getting dressed. You consider whether or not to chance the car ride and drop-off or go through the pain now to avoid an accident en route. 

You now have 5 minutes left in which to get yourself clean and respectable before you’re out the door. You decided to forgo daily attractiveness a while ago and reserve the groomed you for special occasions. You congratulate yourself on discovering your current strategy of slipping into exercise gear in order to make a speedy getaway. You can justify not having had time to shower, hide your hair under a hat and no one has to know that you don’t actually manage to do any exercise. You make a mental note not to stand too close to anyone though lest your scent gives you away. 

If this sounds a bit like what you experience each morning then, hello, you’re among friends. Much like having fought for fair and equal rights to the remote control with your other half, it’s time to rest control of your morning. Why? Because starting your daily mother/wife/employer/employee shift in a proactive rather a reactive way will set you up with a chance for a more fulfilling and happier day. How? Well, it’s not rocket science and they’re probably things you’ve heard before but if you can start doing them all together you should get some results. Read on for a mini domestic revolution…

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1. Wake up early

Rise and shine sunshine, it’s time to get out of bed before everyone else does. There’s no use hoping that today might be the day for a sleep in. It ain’t gonna happen unless you’re happily ensconced in a staycation, and that’s an expensive slice of sleeping. Better that you accept that there are small people in the house that are never leaving and your slumber is an obstacle to their needs. Getting up earlier than everyone else is the key to being able to deal with the morning onslaught.

Use the time to meditate, do yoga, go for a walk, journal or just shower and dress. Highly recommended is the opportunity to simply make a cup of tea and return to bed to drink it while you wake up slowly reading the news on your iPad.  Whatever you choose to do with your time between 5am and 6am or 6am and 7am, the upshot is that you will be in a much better frame of mind to handle the questions, quarrels, complaints, demands and -more often than not-   amusing interactions that are a feature of the early hours in every household with young kids. Better yet, you will probably start to enjoy those amusing interactions and see them for what they really are – the moments of gold that make parenting so worth it.

The flipside of this is that you MUST go to bed earlier in the evenings. You’ve been told. To help get you out of bed in a smart way, check out the Sleep Cycle app. You can set it like a normal alarm clock, but in addition to this you place it next to while you sleep so it can analyse the quality of your slumber and wake you when you’re in your lightest sleep cycle at the time closest to when you’ve set your alarm for. To help you stay out of bed, try the Step Out of Bed app. After the alarm goes off, it won’t shut off until you’ve walked at least 30 steps. 

2. Access your mind

For those on the outside of meditation, it seems like this big club and you don’t know where the front door is. You know everyone feels good in there but you just don’t know how to get in and get a piece of the bliss. For those already trying to get a daily practice going, it can be a bit stop start. If only all those damn thoughts would stop coming by to visit and distracting you.

The more you resent your wandering mind, the harder it is to access the stillness within. If only you could just add alcohol and be done with it. Resist this fleeting solution (it’s still early morning after all) and try a much better one instead: Headspace is an online meditation trainer that will guide you to focus. You can download the basic Take 10 programme for free and thereafter, you can subscribe to access hundreds of hours of guided meditations with various themes to unlock your mind.

3. Set your intention

This might sound a bit new age affirmation-ish, but writing a realistic sentence each morning about what your goal is for the day, or what you hope to get out of it, gets you focused and on the front foot. Whether you want to run 5 km, write a chapter of a book, properly live in the moment with your child for 1 hour (not to be sniffed at when you consider this could include upending furniture for an obstacle course or spilling glitter everywhere during an enthusiastic craft session), start a global movement or perfect a poached egg, you’ve got an exceedingly better chance of achieving it (ok, maybe not the poached egg – they’re damn hard) if you clearly state to yourself what it is that you want.  

Some people call this manifesting, some call it visualisation, some call it programming. Whatever floats your boat. The bottom line is, you won’t get what you want if you don’t know what you want, so assert yourself. Once you’ve landed on a goal and brought it front and centre to your mind eye, your creativity tends to kick in and the conscious starts to notice opportunities that will take you in the direction you need and dull the distractions that could see you heading down other paths away from your goal. Easy? Well, for a lot of people the problem might not be in working out what they want but that there are so many things they want that it’s hard to pick just one. If this is you, you could experiment with writing down all that you want to achieve each day for a period of time and see which goals keep making an appearance. Once you’ve narrowed down the most important or desirable goals you can prioritise and set them. Another option is to divide them into daily, weekly, monthly, biannual and yearly goals. Up to you.

To be successful, it’s vital to believe that you will be, have patient, recognise the chance for action, and be realistic. You can also call on a couple of apps to give you a swift kick up the bum like Strides or Habit List. Or take a gentler approach and reach for inspiration instead by reading the essay of the day from Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy. How does all this help your morning routine? Knowing that you have provided yourself with a moment to set clear intentions for the day, means you have a mental plan to subscribe to and you can get on with the business of dealing with the kids in a calmer and more proactive way. 

4. Help kids own their routine

Four observations: kids seem to like to know what’s coming next and what’s expected of them; kids seem to like doing things for themselves; kids respond well to visual cues, kids like to feel accomplished. While all these things may not be true all of the time, it could be fair to say they’re universally consistent. It’s ironic then that we seem to find it easier to keep doing things for them rather than taking the time to show them how to be partially independent.

Creating a visual morning routine chart is a simple and effective way to get their buy-in and accountability. A lot of children enjoy seeing and understanding exactly what they have to do and the sense of achievement that comes with completing their tasks. OK, it doesn’t work everyday but it does help to minimise arguing and time-wasting overall. There are hundreds of routine charts to find online but here are 2 versions that you can combine to create an advent calendar style chart – kids seem to love the novelty factor of closing the window once they’ve completed the task. Printable Daily Routine Chart and DIY Daily Routine Chart

And it’s that simple. No, really. Allowing yourself some time and helping your kids own their place in the family does mean sacrificing a bit of sleep and making an effort, but there are a lot of tools available to help you. Like anything worth having it requires a bit of hard work but it will give you back a bit of you. Remember her?