Jumpstart Your Day with Mindful Mornings

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Are your mornings filled with stress and chaos before the day has even started?
Ever wondered how highly successful individuals like Jeff Bezos prioritize their sleep?
Are you ready to revolutionize your mornings and ultimately change your life?

Transform your daily routine and set yourself up for success by discovering the magic of mindful morning habits. We'll reveal how small adjustments can have a significant impact on your well-being and productivity throughout the day.

We even explore the importance of restful nights and waking up earlier for a more balanced life, while also touching on the science behind our body's natural circadian rhythm. Discover why giving yourself an extra 30 minutes in the morning could be the game-changer you need to rejuvenate and reset your life.

As always, thank you for listening to We All Have Something.  If you wish to connect with Rick beyond the podcast:
Website: www.CoachRickSchwartz.com
YouTube: @RickSchwartz
Instagram: @Coach_Rick_Schwartz
Facebook Page:  @CoachRickSchwartz
TikTok: @Coach_Rick_Schwartz

***If you are having any thoughts of self harm and need someone to reach out to please call: 1-800-273- TALK (8255)
Or use the new 988 number for calling or texting for support.


Episode Music "Inspiration Corporate" by Sandra Inspiration Music
Music rights purchased through AudioJungle.

Nothing in this podcast should be taken as therapy, medical or mental health care. Topics discussed on this podcast reflect the personal experiences of the host and guests of We All Have Something and are not intended to, nor should they, replace the services of medical care, mental health care or therapy.

If you are having thoughts of self harm or ending your life, please call or text 988 - Help is available 24/7.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:22

Welcome to another episode of We All Have Something, a listener supported podcast. That's right, as you know, because you've been listening along during season three here. This is a listener supported podcast, allowing us to keep these episodes ad-free. Now, if you're interested in joining the other supporters of this podcast, just look down in the show notes. There's a little link you can click on. You can get you all the information on how to become a supporter. Now, if you do become a supporter, you'll receive a personal email from me thanking you because, hey, i appreciate it, and I'll also send you a couple of stickers suitable for putting on your computer, your water bottle, your car, wherever you want to put cool stickers. And that's you know, to say we all have something. The podcast It's pretty cool, they're cool stickers, i like them. And, of course, with your permission, i'll mention your name on one of the episodes of the podcast as well to say thank you because, hey, i appreciate the supporters.

Speaker 1: 1:10

I'm Rick Schwartz, life coach, public speaker and all around curious guy. My curiosity, my life and the lives of the many people I have worked with have taught me time and time again that there are challenges to overcome and successes to celebrate. You're listening to. We All Have Something a podcast about the human experience, a podcast about celebrating our authentic self. So let's get started Now.

Speaker 1: 1:38

I know in this podcast's previous episodes we've talked about habits and routines. We've talked about how our behavior, our actions establish the life we're going to experience. Because our behaviors and actions become our habits, they become our routines and this dictates how life is experienced by us. And a lot of times, as we've discussed in this podcast before, we don't always see that We're so busy just trying to make it through the day that we don't see that we have some way of controlling to a certain degree how our life experience is, because we can choose to break and disrupt habits that don't serve us. Again, it's pretty easy to stay in those routines and those habits. It's a way our brain works.

Speaker 1: 2:24

The shortest route is the easiest thing our brain can do sometimes, and disrupting that, changing that, can almost seem insurmountable, almost impossible to do, because we have to think extra, we have to do a little extra mental gymnastics to change things up a bit. You know, a great example is you know that route to and from work or dropping the kids off at school so well that sometimes your brain can do other things without you even thinking about what you're doing with the car, or walking to work, or taking the subway, whatever it might be for you, and yet if you challenge yourself, you're going to take a completely different route. Man, you're paying attention. You got to turn the radio down to look for street signs. You know, that's one of those things where you need all cognitive functions really focused in paying attention, because your brain has to work really hard when we're doing something that's out of our routines and habits.

Speaker 1: 3:14

And I preface everything this episode is about with that bit of reminder knowledge about habits and routines and how it's very hard for us to step out of them. But we also have to become very conscious of when we are at habits and using habits that don't serve us. As a coach, i hear it all the time from my clients, from people coming to me to become a client, that they're finding themselves in life where they don't want to be. They're finding themselves at a job that they thought was going to be everything they needed to be and they fought so hard to get to a position, and now they're there and they're like I'm not sure I'm living my life properly, or they find themselves at a place in life where they seem to be doing everything for everybody else and not for them, and they don't know how to get out of that. And we start talking about the habits and routines. We start talking about how did you get there? versus what do we need to do to get you to where you want to be One of the big ones, and what we're talking about today is your morning routine.

Speaker 1: 4:11

Your morning, the way it goes, really can dictate how the rest of your day is going to feel. I know right now the majority of you listening. No, you should probably be doing things a little bit different, but your routines Usually boiled down to Getting up just in time to get yourself ready to scarf down some breakfast, or throw something in the microwave to have on the way to work, or Pick something up from Starbucks or Duncan or wherever You might pick something up from to eat in the car while you're going. To race through your morning To have just enough time to get to where you need to be Barely on time, or to race through your morning to get there early to then sit and wait for the day to start, which there is something to be said about that being early is always a good thing, because you never know What's gonna happen on the way to work right. Whatever your morning routine might look like, if it feels rushed, if it feels like if one thing goes wrong, your whole morning is derailed. If you feel like it's that pump of adrenaline, the alarm rips you out of sleep, that you jump out of bed and you're racing through your mornings. That's what how you get through the morning. I ask that you understand that your morning sets up your day.

Speaker 1: 5:22

I remember several years back when I was restructuring my life and really Re-evaluating how I got to the point of falling apart. Basically, one of the things I read a lot was all these high performance people, all these people who seem to show us that they have their life together. They get up early. I remember reading like these Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. He gets up like a 330 or 345 in the morning. Someone else I can't remember that was listening to their saying they get up at 3 in the morning to do an hour Workout before they do anything else. And I'm like three in the morning in an hour workout. When the heck do you when actually go to bed?

Speaker 1: 5:58

The Obamas, they talked about getting up at 4 30 in the morning to start their day. All these high performance people you know the hustle culture get up early, be up before everybody else. The more you get done first thing in the morning, you'll be done before them. You'll have more to do in your day, all this craziness. One thing they didn't talk about those that need to go to bed earlier, and that's the truth. If you're gonna get up early and you go to bed earlier, it's just you need your sleep. You need to prioritize sleep.

Speaker 1: 6:21

I think Jeff Bezos love him or hate him the guy's done a lot, right. He's Obviously done a lot with Amazon. He's one of those CEOs and one of those high performance people that that prioritizes sleep, that for him, the priority is to make sure he's getting enough sleep. I Agree with him. I agree with him on that front. When I coach people, i talk about fitness first and one of things I always ask is how's your sleep? What's your sleep schedule like? But we're talking about morning routine here.

Speaker 1: 6:51

I want you to consider this. If you're the type that is rushing through your mornings and you feel like just Everything is falling apart as you get through your morning and it's like, oh my gosh, this, that and the other, and if you don't even have time to tidy up a little bit before you leave the house? in other words, make your bed, do your dishes so you come home to a clean house, a tidy space to live in. I would challenge you to start waking up 15 minutes early this week And then next week 15 minutes earlier than that. Give yourself that extra 30 minutes in the morning. What would it be like to have 30 extra minutes in the morning? What would you do? Yeah, i know, i know You're saying I would sleep in.

Speaker 1: 7:31

I want you to try and change that dynamic. I want you to see if you can give yourself an extra 30 minutes so your morning routine is in more of a sense of a controlled pace. That you can make some tea or some coffee at home. That you can have breakfast at home and then rinse and wash your dishes. So you're done with it. So you have time to make your bed. You have time to be comfortable in your commute to work. That if you're even a little delayed because of traffic or something else, you still have time.

Speaker 1: 8:06

There's a lot of research out there that supports setting yourself up for a comfortable and mindful morning And if you're like. Well, rick, if I had extra 30 minutes in the morning, i don't know what I would do. Let me ask you this What's the stuff you do until 10, 30, 11 o'clock at night? What is the stuff you're doing that's keeping you up at night? Is it making lunches for the family the next day? That extra 30 minutes you can do in the morning. Here's the thing The hustlers and the go-getters are getting up early to do work early in the morning because your brain is capable of doing more naturally the way the chemicals flow for your body when you come out of a sleep cycle and get started with your day. You are more functional in the morning than you are in the evening and nighttime hours. So if you're spending your night well, i'm relaxing and decompressing watching an hour and a half of Netflix or scrolling on my phone. No, you're not really, i'm sorry. The light from your screens, that time of night, messes with your circadian rhythm And, yes, you're mentally vegging out, but you're messing with the other chemicals and hormones in your body. That's not allowing you to actually wind down, to fall asleep. It's that artificial light is messing with you.

Speaker 1: 9:13

Now, I'm not here to lecture you on how to unwind and how to spend your day, but I want you to consider what if you shut that TV or that screen off 15 minutes early and set your alarm 15 minutes earlier? What if you took one night out of the week, said no screens, for the next hour and a half before I go to bed I'm gonna read a book or I'm gonna do something else. Just relax and chill, meditate. There's a thought. I know some of you have night jobs, some of you have kids, some of you have two jobs. This isn't realistic, necessarily. I ask that you listen to this information and see what you can do in your morning routine and your evening routine to adjust, to make the best of the situation for yourself, to leverage what we know. We know this stuff. The science is out, that the research is out there.

Speaker 1: 9:57

Getting up early to allow yourself to have a relaxing, comfortable morning also allows you that if you have that extra time, you can do work that is gonna need your direct attention. Are you looking to write a book? Are you doing artwork for the fun of it? You have a hobby that you're working on. Use those morning hours to spend some time on that, you'll be amazed at how effective it is. What if you're spending $3 to $5 on coffee every day at Starbucks, some people $7 to $10. What if you brewed at home? What if you took that time in the morning to brew yourself some coffee at home? It would be less expensive and you can spend that time being thoughtful in the process of what you're doing Morning meditation.

Speaker 1: 10:40

I tell you, what if you have extra half an hour and you spend 10 of it, five of it, two and a half minutes, whatever, doing some morning meditation? super powerful. If you've always thought to yourself well, i don't know how to meditate, i don't know what to do about that. It seems kind of weird sort of woo-woo, whatever. If you're more of the traditional religious and spiritual side, spend that time doing some prayer. Spend that time journaling. If you're interested in doing meditation, there's plenty of great meditation out there. Start small, start with a minute of just focused breathing, then eventually go to two and three. There's lots of guided meditations out there, lots of things to do about meditation if you want.

Speaker 1: 11:16

Again, the idea here is to understand your morning behavior, your morning habits, your morning routines. Have you fallen into a cycle of habits and now have a routine that doesn't really serve you in your best interest at heart. For setting you up to have a good day, that doesn't mean things aren't going to come along to make it a possibly bad day. But what if your morning started off so nice that when the bad stuff happened it was like yeah, i can handle it, no worries. Versus, if you've already had a stressful morning and something bad happens, something goes off the rails, it's much harder to deal with that, much harder.

Speaker 1: 11:54

The idea behind getting up early in our culture lately has really come in with that, that hustle culture that work harder, get more done, be more productive. I'm saying getting up early to give yourself the opportunity to compose yourself, to have a thoughtful and a relaxing morning. And again I go back to set that alarm 15 minutes early for about a week or so and then 15 minutes early again for another week or so, making sure you go to bed at an appropriate time, adjust your going to sleep time as well. Here's the thing. There's lots of studies out there that talk about how our body chemistry works, the circadian rhythm, all that stuff. So going to bed at a decent hour 9 o'clock, 9, 30, sure you can push it to 10 o'clock, depending upon when you get up, but again, you go to bed earlier. You are taking advantage of your body's natural rhythm.

Speaker 1: 12:43

And here's the other side of it too. As you start this process of going to bed earlier and waking up earlier and setting that alarm a little bit earlier, you're going to notice one really cool thing Your body will naturally start waking up before the alarm goes off. It's weird, i know it's weird, but it happens. Because once you start to fall into this natural cycle that your body wants to be in, with the way the light works in our environment, in our world, all of a sudden your body's going to be like Hey, your alarm set for five, you should get up now about two minutes before five. The nice thing about that is, when you get up, when your body naturally comes out of a sleep cycle, it's much easier to wake up.

Speaker 1: 13:24

Yes, you can hit snooze and fall back into a sleep cycle, but unfortunately snooze is about eight or nine minutes. And guess what happens when you start falling back in that sleep cycle and that snooze goes off? The body chemistry of the sleep cycle is now dumped a bunch of stuff like melatonin and sleepy time stuff to say wait a minute, wait a minute. We're about to start a 45 to 50 minute cycle of sleep. We can't get up now And all of a sudden you're fine. It's really hard to get up and you're going to be groggy for the next two hours.

Speaker 1: 13:53

This research shows us it takes about an hour to two hours for our body to work through that disrupted sleep cycle. Snooze buttons are horrible. Don't do it. Get up when the alarm goes off. Get up if your body wakes you up five minutes before the alarm. Don't just say, oh, i should go back, i can lay here for five minutes. Get up if your body's naturally woken up at that time. Get up, lean into your body telling you how it wants to sleep and wake up. It's a process. You're creating new behaviors, you're creating new habits. You're going to create a new routine. This is not just one and done. This is a process to get through. But let me tell you what, as someone who's done this process, who now gets up regularly at five, it's awesome. It's so amazing to get up at that time, before the rest of the household is up, to have some quiet time, to brew some tea or brew some coffee, to sit and meditate, to read a journal and then, after being up for a while, turning on my phone to check messages, check up on things. But it's a slow process. Don't do that.

Speaker 1: 14:57

First I saw this great analogy where they said waking up and immediately turning on your phone to scroll through your phone, to quote unquote help wake yourself up would be like saying I'm going to sleep in the office and my alarm goes off. Everybody in the office comes rushing in and starts talking about work and handing me paperwork and talking about the news and everything else. It really is like that for your brain. I recommend it. I do this. My phone is my alarm. As soon as you turn off your alarm, get up and leave your phone on the nightstand and go do some stuff around the house to get your morning started and then come back to the phone later once things in your brain is woken up. But jumping right into your phone as soon as you have woken up is like jumping into the office right out of bed and expecting your brain to handle that jump from being sound asleep to, all of a sudden, engaging with hundreds of people. It's just a bit absurd And again I want to acknowledge not everybody has a lifestyle that they can make these adjustments, that they can consider doing this getting to bed 15 minutes early and waking up 15 minutes early But if you're being honest with yourself, if you're being honest with yourself, there's some version of this.

Speaker 1: 16:07

You can probably make adjustments to help you with your morning routine. The morning routine establishes and sets a tone for the rest of the day for you, and if you're the type of person is like, well, i need to sit in front of the TV and unwind for an hour, or need to scroll my phone to unwind for an hour, i encourage you to try and shorten that time and give yourself a little more buffer time. Without a screen and the fake light that comes from it, that's going to mess with your circadian rhythm. I encourage you to try to be thoughtful about how you start your day. I encourage you to also try to be thoughtful on how you prepare for the next day ahead, because your evening sets a tone for your morning. Your morning sets a tone for your day. Your evening sets a tone for the morning. See, it's all. It keeps going and going right. We have to live thoughtfully, we have to be mindful in how we're doing this And it is a process And you know I'm a coach.

Speaker 1: 17:02

You've heard this episode or you've heard this episode. You've heard this podcast. Before You go to coachrickschwardscom If you want to discuss more on how to make changes in your life, you know I use the ULA framework. I focus on the seven key areas of life, but I also bring to the table an understanding of habits and behaviors and routines and how we can figure out the habits that got you to where you don't want to be and how to make adjustments to create new steps in those habits that make them habits that serve you, to allow you to be living the life you deserve, the life you want.

Speaker 1: 17:38

Now, of course, you can always find me on social media. You can look for coachrickschwards. I recently revived my YouTube channel as well, so there's new videos coming up there. All the links are down below in the show notes. Again, my website, coachrickschwardscom, also has all the links And while you're there at the website, if you want to sign up for a free 30-minute discovery, call you and I get to chat via Zoom, talk about what's going on in your life and see if my coaching is going to be of service to you. If we both agree that it is, we'll move forward from there as a coaching client And if not, no big deal. Cool 30-minute chat with someone new is always fun. You can schedule that again on my website. And last but not least, i want to thank you.

Speaker 1: 18:15

I appreciate the fact that you're listening. I appreciate the fact that so many of you are sharing this podcast. The numbers have jumped in the last two weeks. It's been interesting to watch. We've spread further across the world. Now We have more listeners in Asia And I appreciate that Somebody has been sharing this.

Speaker 1: 18:30

I can tell because I haven't done anything different And I appreciate that because I see the ripple effect. It's that ripple effect I talk about almost every episode, but I really mean it. It's so powerful And we never know how one kind gesture can change someone's day, which then changes someone else's day and how they interact with the world. And these episodes, this information, my coaching I love doing one on one coaching, but if this podcast is reaching people and makes someone think something and ponder about being mindful in their life and it causes a change, even just a little bit, for the good, or you share it with somebody else, and that ripple effect keeps going out that far, man. That's what matters. That's where the power is. That's what we can do to change the world. It's one person at a time, taking care of each other, taking care of ourselves. That's how we're going to do it. All right, i'm going to wrap this up again. I can't thank you enough for listening. I really appreciate it. Have a good one, everybody.