Want to Feel More Energized Throughout the Day? Start With This

Author: Leon Ho / Source: Lifehack

Do you feel busy and tired or exhausted all the time? Or, do you have trouble making the most of your time because you struggle to stay alert during the day?

Whether it’s due to a lack of sleep or your mind being overly preoccupied, many of us wish we had more energy and concentration to get through our day.

Some of us choose the coffee route, downing cups of coffee throughout the day to stay alert and productive. Others choose to sleep the weekend away in hopes of ‘recharging’ our bodies.

But what if I told you that these are all temporary, if not ineffective, ways of boosting energy?

Starting Your Morning on the Right Note

Instead, if you truly wish to be more productive on a day to day basis, you need to find a sustainable way of renewing your body’s energy levels daily. And it’s actually really simple.

It starts from the moment you wake up. That’s right, did you know that starting the morning on the right note will determine how productive you are for the rest of your day? Yet, many people don’t see the importance or need to have a morning routine.

Most mornings, we wake up likely still feeling tired from the night before, and we may even struggle to get out of bed. If you hit snooze, you end up rushing when you finally wake.

To many, getting up and out of bed is really all that is needed every morning. But how you wake up each day and your morning routine or lack thereof, dramatically affects your levels of success in every single area of your life.

Introducing the Morning Routine

Hal Elrod, ultramarathoner and author of The Miracle Morning says that focused and productive mornings carry over to successful days, and ultimately successful lives.

This is because having a routine creates structure, eliminates distractions, and eventually forms a habit where it becomes automatic, so that you don’t even have to think about it. Another great reason to create a morning routine is to avoid mental fatigue.

We often struggle to get through the day because we only have a certain amount of energy and willpower when we wake up each morning, and it slowly gets drained away with decisions as the day goes by. This is especially true if you’re making hundreds of small decisions in the morning that will affect how you make decisions for the remainder of the day. It’s no wonder you’re struggling to focus in the office by 4pm. So, with this in mind, try and have the first hour of your day vary as little as possible regarding routine.

Next, I’ll show you how to implement an ideal morning routine that will allow you to systematically get through the morning quickly and effortlessly. It’s a framework to help you plan and prioritize different actions that will help you to feel energized and conserve as much energy as possible for the rest of the day (where the real action takes place).

But bear in mind, it’s not a schedule. Instead, it’s about finding the best order to do different actions, that will help you feel more energized throughout the day to give you maximum productivity.

Prepare Your Body

So let’s start with the first part of the morning routine – preparing your body. Preparing your body in the morning means jump starting your body’s engine so that the energy that you have accumulated from your sleep is ready to be unleashed for the day ahead.

A common belief is that if you get enough sleep you will automatically feel refreshed the next morning. But, I’m also sure that many of you are aware this isn’t always the case.

So what I want to show you is that there are other concrete steps that you can take every morning to get your body and energy levels started.

Take a runner for example. Before a race, a runner usually warms up, maybe with a leisure run or something to get their muscles and body ready for the actual competition. So similarly, after a good night’s sleep, our body has a build up of energy that is ready to be used for the new day. But, if we don’t ‘warm up’ or jump start our engine, we will not be able to effectively use that energy.

The benefits of preparing your body when you awake are that you become more alert, your body’s metabolism starts kicking, and you are able to use your energy more effectively. We’ve condensed 7 key actions that you can incorporate into your morning to awaken your body for the day ahead.