#76: Debunking the 10-step morning routine — and what to do instead

Someone out there is selling you a 10-step morning routine. Wake up at 5am. Meditate. Journal. Cold plunge. Green smoothie. Visualize your goals.

Maybe you've tried it. Maybe it lasted four days.

Here's the truth: you don't need a perfect morning. You need a morning that belongs to you.

In this episode I'm calling out the 10-step morning routine for what it is — noise — and sharing the five things I do every single morning that take just minutes but change everything about how my day goes. Plus the science behind why they actually work.

Simple. Honest. Actually doable.

✨ 3 Key Take Aways From This Episode: 

1️⃣ Your cortisol wakes you up every morning — but deep breathing is one of the simplest ways to keep the excess at bay before the day even starts. 

2️⃣ Not looking at your phone first thing isn't just a good habit — it's the difference between starting your day on your terms and starting it on everyone else's. 

3️⃣ This season is about letting go of what isn't serving you. Your morning is a great place to start.

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Transcript

Speaker 3 0:01

You're never too busy, too tired, too old, or too anything to pursue your dreams. Welcome to the Distracted Dreamer Podcast, where you'll learn how to move all those never ending distractions aside and chase your dreams with confidence.

0:22

Hello. Hello my friend. Welcome back to the Distracted Dreamer podcast. I am so glad that you're here. I am your host, Carlene, and whether this is your very first episode or you've been here from the very beginning, thank you for being here. Truly, it means everything to me that you spend a little bit of your time in this space. So curl up in your favorite chair, grab your favorite beverage, and just sit back and listen. And I wanna start out by asking you something, and I want you to be really honest with yourself. What does your morning look like right now? Not the morning that you're planning to have, someday when things settle down and not the ideal version, but your actual morning. What does it look like today? Are you hitting the snooze button and you're already running behind before your feet even hit the floor? Or are you reaching for your phone before you've even opened your eyes all the way and you're scrolling into someone else's world before you've even fully arrived in your own world for the day? Or maybe you're already calculating what everyone else needs before you've had a single thought that belongs just to you. Yeah, you know what? I see you. I get it. Today we are talking about mornings, specifically about reclaiming them. And I wanna be clear right from the start, this is not a 20 step morning routine episode. This is not me telling you to wake up at 5:00 AM and meditate for 45 minutes and journal and do yoga, and make a green smoothie and visualize your goals before the sun comes up. No, no, no. That is not what this is. This is about something quieter, something more radical. Actually, this is about giving yourself the first part of your day before the world makes demands on you. And later in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through the five things I actually do every morning. Each of'em takes just a few minutes. And why this simple little practice, it might be one of the most important choices that you can make in the season. So let's get into it. Let's start with why do mornings matter and how have we gotten this so wrong? Because here's what I've noticed about women in midlife who are in the middle of a real shift, and I mean a real one, not just rearranging things on the surface. They almost always have some version of a slow morning practice, not a perfect one, and it's not elaborate. It's just a small, consistent choice to begin the day on their own terms before the world starts asking things of them. Now for some people it's coffee on the porch. For others it's journaling. I am not talking about the pretty kind with the color coded tabs and affirmation prompts, but just kind of the, the messy kind where you just get the noise outta your head and onto a page. Or for other women, it's a walk or stretching or sitting somewhere quiet with no agenda. It really doesn't matter what form it comes in. What matters is the choice behind it because here's what that choice says. It says I'm worth the first hour of my day. My thoughts matter enough to sit with them before I fill myself up with everyone else's. My body deserves to wake up gently. My mind deserves some quiet before it has to perform. Now, that sounds simple, but for a lot of the women that I work with, it is genuinely radical because for decades, and I mean decades, the morning was the first performance of the day. Wake up, power up, get everyone else sorted out first. And their own needs were at the bottom of a very long list if they made the list at all. And the other thing that I see, and this one really gets me, is that we've been sold this idea that a good morning routine has to be complicated to count. That if you're not doing 10 things before 7:00 AM. You must not be serious about your life. The wellness industry loves to sell us a perfect morning, the five-part skincare ritual, the hour of journaling, the cold plunge, the gratitude practice, the workout, the meditation, and you, you know what? Women in midlife are especially vulnerable to this because we're already asking, okay, who the heck am I now? What do I need? What actually serves me? And someone hands us a list and says, here, do this. But here's what I know to be true. Midlife is about simplifying. It's not about adding more. It's about letting go of what isn't serving you. It's not piling on. More rituals to perform. The slow morning is not a luxury. It is a practice of self recognition. It is how you begin to remember who you are before you become who everyone needs you to be. Okay, so let's shift because I wanna share with you what I actually do in the morning, not what I aspire to do on my best day. This is what I actually do most mornings, and this doesn't require some fancy Pinterest board or a 45 minute block in my calendar. It's five simple things. That's it. Okay, the first one is I stretch before I even get outta bed, before my feet touch the floor, I take a couple minutes. To stretch everything out and get the kinks out. And here's what I want you to notice about stretching. When you do it, something happens naturally. You take a deep breath and those deep breaths, they matter more than you might think. So here's a little bit of science for you. Did you know what actually wakes you up every morning? I know, I know. Not your dog or your husband or your neighbor mowing his grass at 6:00 AM before it should be humanly allowed. But it's your cortisol. It's that stress hormone that kicks in every morning and it's necessary. It's what wakes your body up and gets you going. You need it. It's the biology of it, but a lot of us do things first thing that spike, that cortisol even higher than it needs to be. And I'll get to the biggest one that we do in a minute, but I wanna keep talking about the breaths for a minute because those deep breaths from your morning stretch, when you breathe deeply, it activates your vagus nerve and your vagus nerve. It calms your entire nervous system. So your vagus nerve is the nerve that runs all the way from your gut to your brain. And when it's activated by deep breathing and there's other ways to activate it also, but the easiest way to activate it is through a couple deep breaths. It calms your entire nervous system. So you want the healthy cortisol to wake you up in the morning. You need that to start your day. You just don't want the excess and the deep breathing is one of the simplest ways to keep it in check. So all it takes is two minutes. You're still in your bed. And guess what? You're already doing something good for your body and your brain. All right. Here is number two. Remember I told you that I was gonna tell you the number one thing that increases our cortisol? It's this is looking at your phone first thing in the morning. So I don't look at my phone until I'm ready for the day. And I wanna tell you this from experience, not just theory, because I've paid close attention to how I feel on the days that I look at my phone, first thing versus the days that I don't. And when I look at it, I can actually feel my cortisol rising. My heart starts doing this little anxious thing, and I start comparing my life to everyone's perfectly curated, highlighted reel. And basically it makes me feel like garbage. And that's before 7:00 AM But here's my favorite part of this, and raise your hand if you do this too morning. Impulse buying. You see the ad, you click it, and they have made it so ridiculously easy. Everything is saved on your phone. You don't even have to get up to find your credit card. It's kind of gross when you think about it. So here's what I started doing instead. Every time I wanna click buy, I save it. I tell myself, if you really want it, go back later today and get it. And you know what? I completely forget about it. I have a whole collection of safe posts and wishlists I never go back to. Turns out it wasn't actually something I wanted or needed. Who knew? And here is what that phone free morning gives you. Instead. Time to actually check in with yourself without the world's influence. How did you sleep? How are you feeling? Are you excited about your day? On the days that I don't pick up my phone, first thing, I have more energy, more focus, and more compassion for myself for the whole entire day. And that's not a small thing. And honestly, it was in this quiet phone free time that I discovered I needed those two to three minutes of stretching and breathing in the morning. I never would've found that if I had been scrolling. Okay. Here's the third thing that I do, and I've talked about this in past episodes, is I make my bed. I know, I know. Just stay with me. There's actually a book called Make Your Bed. It's written by, um, Navy Admiral William McRaven, and the premise is beautifully simple. When you make your bed, you signal your brain that rest is over, and the day is starting and you've already accomplished one thing. One thing is complete before the day has barely begun. For me personally, I have to make my bed because when the bed is unmade, the whole room feels unmade to me. I know that's kind of funny, right? But no matter what the rest of the room looks like, if there's laundry on the chair and stuff everywhere, if the bed is made. There's a calm, there's an order to it. And you know what else? I absolutely cannot get into an unmade bed at night. It feels like all the restless energy from the night before is still tangled up in those sheets. Making the bed in the morning resets all of that. And you know what else? I even make the bed on vacation. I know, I know. I sound a little nutty, but I'm telling you it works. Make your bed. All right, number four. I take my vitamins and my meds and I drink a glass of water every morning. Now these things are non-negotiable for me. If I don't get my omega threes and my folate and my thyroid meds in, I'm a hot mess. Full stop taking care of your body and midlife. It's not optional anymore. I mean, it never really was, but you can get away with neglecting yourself. For only so long before your body starts sending you very clear messages and the water, it's so important. Did you know we wake up dehydrated every single morning? It's been at least eight hours since your body has had a drop of anything. And here's a fun fact that I love to share all the time, is that did you know that losing focus is commonly one of the first signs of dehydration? Mm-hmm. So when that afternoon brain fog hits, before you do anything else, grab some water, but start in the morning one glass before anything else. And you know, I'm also terrible about staying hydrated throughout the day, but when I start the morning with water, I'm more likely to keep it going. It sets the tone and all of the getting ready stuff. Like, you know, the brushing my teeth and washing my face, getting dressed, taking a shower, all that stuff, that all counts too. Getting yourself ready for the day is part of your morning practice. So remember, you are worth the time it takes to feel put together. Okay, number five is I do something just for me. Most days I head to a morning bar class, and even the drive there matters. Sometimes I take the scenic route, maybe I put on a podcast or my favorite playlist, or sometimes I just enjoy the quiet and on the two or three days, I don't have class. I read for 15 minutes or I write down whatever's in my head, not fancy journal prompts, just clear on the cobwebs and give them a head, some breathing room before the day really starts. I have no agenda, no productivity goals, just something that's mine. That's it. That's the whole morning. And I want you to notice none of this is elaborate. None of it requires buying anything or downloading an app or following some program. It's just five small intentional choices that say this morning belongs to me. And here's why this matters. I want you to be the woman who puts herself first for an hour. I want you to be the woman who says, I'm gonna get up a little earlier than usual, not for anyone else, not because you have to, but just because you want a few minutes before the day starts. I want you to make your coffee and sit down. Don't open your phone, and you know what happens. Something in you will go quiet in the best way possible and you are going to think, this is what I've been missing. That's it. That's the whole thing, because here's what that moment is really about. It's not the coffee or the quiet house. It's the choice. It's the choice to say this first part of the day, it belongs to me. Before I belong to anyone else, before I perform any of my roles, before I respond or manage or fix or take care of, I get to just be, and I have so many women in midlife who come to me feeling invisible. Like they've been so busy being everything to everyone that they've lost the thread back to themselves. And what I wanna say to you, and I mean this is that the slow morning is one of the ways you start finding it again. And it's not by overhauling your whole life. And it's not by waiting until things settle down. It's just by starting here in the morning with five small things that take maybe 20 minutes. And cost you nothing except the willingness to choose yourself first. And I know what you're thinking. I don't have time. I get it. Maybe you have a job to get to or you have people who need you and the mornings are already packed. Yeah, I'm gonna say it. Get up earlier. I know that's not what you want to hear, but I'm going to be honest with you because that's what it takes. If you want this time. And I believe you do, or you wouldn't still be listening. You have to make the time, even 20 minutes. So give yourself permission to make it simple. Give yourself permission to switch it up. When it stops working. Give yourself permission to let go of the elaborate routine you are supposed to be doing and replace it with something that actually feels like you. That's what midlife is for. It's for letting go of what isn't serving you and coming home to what actually is. Okay. Before I let you go, I have a little challenge for you this week. I want you to just think about your morning, just your morning, and ask yourself, what is one thing I'm ready to let go of and what is one thing I want to add that's just for me. So maybe you're letting go of the phone. First thing, maybe you're letting go of the guilt about not having a 10 step routine. Maybe you're adding two minutes of stretching before your feet hit the floor, or a glass of water before the coffee. Or maybe you're giving yourself 15 quiet minutes that belong to no one but you. Whatever it is, I wanna hear it. So please click the link in the show notes and send me a text or leave me a voicemail and I am going to respond to you and we can have a conversation. So tell me what you're letting go of or what you're adding. Like I said, I read and listen to every single one, and honestly, these messages are one of my favorite parts of doing this podcast. And remember, this is your season. You get to decide how it starts. And I will be right here to welcome you back next week. Until then, please take care of yourself. And remember, you're worth the first hour. Bye for now.

Carlene 17:34

Oh, and one more thing. This is the legal language. You know, the stuff that the lawyers put together, and they say that I need to read this to you. So here we go. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I'm not a licensed therapist. This podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professionals. Got it? Good. I will see you in the next episode.