How To Win Your Mornings

How To Win Your Mornings

Motivation is fundamental to our daily life. It's what allows us to get out of bed in the morning. It's what allows us to pursue long-term goals or short-term goals. It's tightly wound in with the neurochemistry of movement. - AH

Dopamine tells your body to move. Without it, you can't reach out to get food and eat. So how can you get that dopamine? You reverse-engineer this. Because moving also increases dopamine. Fascinating!

Motion itself, without an end goal or intense exercise, increases motivation. So if you usually feel groggy in the morning, or you scroll your phone, or don't feel like doing anything, this alone, gives you the momentum to start and do harder things/routines later. It's step 1.

You turn the groggy feeling into a refreshing one. You get excited for what's to come and feel much more motivated to work, spend time with people, and engage in activities you enjoy.

Action for the day

If you're seated, get up, walk across the room or hallway, and come back. Maybe stretch a bit.

If you're lying in bed, don't worry about all the tasks you have later. For now, stick to step 1. It increases your motivation enough to make the other activities much easier.

So do this now. stand up, walk around, stretch a bit, and come back. It helps if you're already up and going. Do it either way.

It could change your entire day. And only takes 10 seconds!

Get up and move.

Here's the clip from the podcast. p.s. thanks, Evan for requesting a tool like this. Neural circuits for motivation can be trained. So if you do this for the next 3 days, it gets easy.