Your bed - the impact on your health, finances and success
- Laraun and Sherunda
- Feb 7, 2023
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 13, 2023
The way you start your mornings directly impacts how your day goes. Starting your day with intention is a great way to increase your productivity and usher in more success in your life, overall.
Over the past few months I have begun to adopt certain activities into my morning routine.
These changes work well with an intentional night routine. Need one? Check this post out with freebie!
Try adding these 5 activities to your morning routine.
Limit social media
NO SOCIAL MEDIA FOR FIRST 1-2 HOURS
If you're like most other adults and teens, as soon as your alarm goes off, you grab your cell and begin to consume information, read and reply to emails, and comment and like posts. While it is very tempting to start your day with your face planted in your smart phone, resist the urge. Grabbing your phone and scrolling, liking, commenting and replying put your mind in a state of reaction vs. intention. Each time you scroll, like, comment, share or give an email reply, you are doing so as a reaction to some trigger. Even if it is a positive trigger that leads to a positive reaction, you are still acting out of compulsion, muscle memory, routine or subconscious feeling that you must engage and consume.
When we REACT we lose a great deal of intentionality in our actions. If we begin our morning without intention, the rest of the day will be more likey to flow in the same way. Not to mention that mindless scrolling can lead to time wasting, running late, forgetting details and deadlines and ultimately less productivity. It is a snowball effect!
Even more, when you allow your phone to guide your mornings, you will be less likely to direct your thoughts. Instead, whatever you see/hear/read will be your thoughts vs. the intentional thoughts you direct and determine.
Wake up grateful and giving
Begin each day with gratitude and determined to serve others
Years ago I started waking up with a question in my mind and heart, 'who can I help today?' This question, I pose to God, because I want to know why my life was spared another day. By starting my day off with the knowledge that I am alive to serve others, give my day inspiration and direction. Waking with the goals of selflessness makes me take my focus off of my own needs and shortcomings, wants and lack. Instead, I look for ways to help and improve the lives of those around me.
Being aware of the needs of others leads me to a heightened sense of gratitude for my life and God's blessings. There is always someone else who has it worse than you. Look for others to help and bless. Buy someone a coffee, give someone a compliment, let someone get ahead of you when merging into traffic. Small gestures of kindness go a long way and improve your morning and mindset.
Move Your Body
Stretch your body for 10-15 minutes
Moving your body is a great way to help awaken your body, clear your thoughts and improve your health. Do a simple stretch within the 1st 1-2 hours of getting up. At times, I like to stretch and listen to personal development/self improvement podcasts, songs or audiobooks. It is also a great time to work on spiritual growth.
Do 1 Discipline
Be intentional about completing one task that you need to do, even if you don't want to do it.
Productivity entails being consistent with small steps and daily tasks that will move you toward your bigger goals. Each day, we should be intentional about what we do. I have found that starting my day off with accomplishing a small but important task helps to set the tone for further consistent steps toward goals. A common daily discipline is making one's bed.
Making your bed each morning has been linked to better mood, improved focus during the day, even a better night's sleep. Interestingly, the simple discipline of making your bed each morning is considered an impactful habit that can cause a cascade of better choices throughout the day. This simple poll of 1000 people (500 bedmakers; 500 non bedmakers) showed that those who make their beds are more likely to feel satisfied in the work, more adept to sticking to healthy lifestyle choices, tend to clean up their personal space, more likely to visit their doctors and dentists regularly, and are even more likely to manage their finances better with budgeting and tracking their spending.
While the poll does not hold up to scientific case study , it does give some insight into human nature.
If you are one to make lists, try adding - make my bed - to your daily 'to-do' list and then, once you make your bed, cross that task off your list. When you do these simple actions, setting a task, completing the task and crossing the task off the list, you will feel motivated and inspired to continue in the same way for the rest of the day.
Not to mention that making your bed is more aesthetic to your space and also helps to instill a better self concept. Remember, if you don't care about the way you treat yourself, you will be more likely to allow other to mistreat you. Making your bed and caring for your personal space is an indication to you, from you, that you matter. An indication that you deserve good in life.
Simple, but effective. Over time, your mind will begin to believe the truth - YOU ARE WORTHY OF good things!
List it.
If it matters, jot it down, the night before.
I once heard, 'always trust a dull pencil over a sharp mind.' This means that even if you consider yourself to have superior memory and the best intentions of remembering important information, there is still a high likelihood that you will forget.
Over the years, I had become accustomed to saying, 'blame it on my head, not my heart.' Often times, even with the full heartfelt intention to recall an important date, event or promise, I would forget. I am sure you can relate.
While yes, a memory slip happens to the best of us, it should not be what you are known to do, often.
So I decided to make one of the most simple yet effective changes to my daily routines; and that change happened at night.
At night, in an effort to have a more productive next day, I take a few moments to jot down my next day's to-do-list. That way, I am able to focus my attentions toward well developed steps toward goals. My mornings have meaning and my days have direction.
Our lives are so hectic and constantly being bombarded with more and more to do. More deadlines. More ideas for business and personal growth. I used to try to keep it all in my head. However, I realized that not only was I forgetting important deadlines, ideas and tasks, but I was also blocking new ideas and creativity.
On a subconscious level, when we take in new information or details, we store the information in our minds. If it is a task that needs to be done, we will file it away as an open file that needs attention. A file that is a sort of nagging thought. A thought that pops into our active thoughts and interrupts our day. The random thoughts popping in and out are disruptive. These little, frequent disruptions can lead to decreased productivity and unfinished tasks and projects. Your mind never gets a moment to truly focus on WHAT IS IMPORTANT NOW.
Just as a computer with many open files and webpages begins to operate more slowly due to limited processing resources, so our minds begin to operate at a decreased level as we try to mentally carry around all the ideas, deadlines and tasks of life.
A list is powerful.
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