I know I’m not the only person who experiences this but I’ve struggled with negative thinking my whole life. I don’t mean that I always expect things to go wrong. It’s more like, when I have too much time to think about things, I get “down”, and when I get down, I get unproductive. When I get unproductive, I get more negative. So it becomes a cycle. And I mostly feel this way early in the morning right when I wake up and late at night right before I go to sleep, which led me to explore and experiment with my morning routine and night routine.
A few weeks ago, I started doing something that, so far at least, has gotten me out of the negativity cycle and allowed me to start my day feeling mentally at peace. I’m not saying this will work for everyone but it’s been working for me. I do the following things within the first 10 minutes of waking up:
Step 1: I write down what I am most grateful for that morning. I try to be completely honest with myself on this. If I’m honestly most grateful that I’m about to drink a cup of coffee, I write that down. If I’m grateful that a big project is over, I write that down. The key is being honest with myself. One thing I’ve noticed is that as time goes on, I’m more grateful for my problems – which sounds ridiculous! Sometimes things that seem like problems are actually blessings. I was recently struggling between a few different career moves and was really stressed out about the decision until one day it just hit me that I’m so incredibly fortunate to even have 1 opportunity, let alone several.
Step 2: I write down one thing that I want to accomplish that day. This is a lot different than a to-do list. I make sure I limit it to just one thing. We all usually have so many competing priorities that our brains can only process that there’s a ton of “stuff” to get done today. Unfortunately for most of us, there’s more “stuff” out there than we can ever do in 24 hours so we need to prioritize. Writing just one thing forces me to really figure out what my top priority is for the day.
Two steps seems too good to be true but I’m not arguing with the results so far! I may add things or tweak this morning routine as time goes on but for now, I’m planning to stick with it.