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What’s better than vacation to set up a new morning routine? Conducive to change, summer offers the opportunity to sit down, reflect, and refocus on yourself to establish new reflexes likely to improve your daily life for the rest of the year. Here are three new morning rituals to adopt this summer to feel better when you go back to school.
Do you have a (real) morning routine? It’s not just about getting up, quickly chugging a coffee, and getting dolled up, but about establishing a real ritual designed to get through the day without stress – or almost. As we’ve seen for several months, these complete routines that often require starting your day earlier have more and more followers around the world. Who praise its merits in terms of energy, productivity, and of course well-being.
While it may not be easy to adopt such a routine in the middle of the school year, due to professional constraints and accumulated fatigue, summer can be the ideal time to implement it gradually. Here are three popular ones on social media, or by scientists, that will allow you to recharge your batteries and preserve your mental health in the long term.
The ‘slow morning’, all in gentleness
No more waking up with a bang and in a hurry, make way for more gentleness and slowness, like we would do on vacation. This is the goal of the ‘slow morning’, a morning routine that has been unanimously popular on social networks since last spring. The idea is simple: it’s about taking a moment to relax and refocus on yourself instead of running around as soon as you get out of bed. A morning routine that would reduce your stress levels and allow you to fully enjoy the pleasures of everyday life, far from the hectic pace of the day ahead.
Conceptualized by American coach and speaker Hal Elrod in the book “Miracle Morning”, this method is inspired by the philosophy of ‘slow living’ known for its benefits for mental health. Unlike other rituals of this type, there are no specific rules, except listening to one’s own needs. This can be materialized by a meditation session, stretching, listening to relaxing music, a long soothing shower, or simply temporarily disconnecting from social networks.
The ‘5-9’ routine, rigor and discipline
Unlike the ‘slow morning’, the ‘5-9 morning routine’ would nevertheless guarantee the same benefits in terms of well-being. Born on social networks, this daily ritual imposes this time an iron discipline in terms of nutrition, sleep, and physical activity, and is based on the idea that men and women are more productive in the morning. True or false, it matters little in the eyes of those who have adopted it and now continue to praise its merits. And they seem numerous if we consider that the dedicated hashtags have generated several tens of millions of views on social networks.
Concretely, it involves getting up at 5am to engage in a thousand and one activities – beneficial for physical and mental health if possible – before going to work. This includes swapping your breakfast swallowed quickly for a champion’s meal based on pressed juice, smoothies, fresh fruit, and other competition dishes, then doing a sports and/or meditation session, taking a morning walk, reading a book, and taking the time to get ready before leaving the house. A morning routine that would allow for more peaceful and less stressful evenings, without cutting back on your lifestyle.
Contrary to what fans of this routine think, some people are naturally more active later in the day. This morning ritual is therefore not necessarily suitable for everyone, especially since it is essential to satisfy everyone’s sleep needs. Testing this routine in the middle of summer will allow you to know whether it is really worth adopting – or not – when you return to school.
Feel good in your body, feel good in your head!
What does science say?
What if science decided? A study funded by Special K, published in 2022, revealed a mathematical formula that would allow you to get up on the right side of the bed for sure, and to be in a good mood throughout the day. More specifically, it was Anne-Marie Imafidon, a renowned mathematician, who analyzed the responses of a survey conducted among 2,000 Britons in order to create a complex formula intended to adopt a morning routine considered ideal.
According to this work, it would be a matter of waking up at 6:44 a.m. and getting out of bed at 7:12 a.m. at the latest, then doing 21 minutes of physical exercise, taking a 10-minute shower, and finally devoting 18 minutes to breakfast. But who says formula, says possibility of adapting this routine to the needs of each individual.
To determine whether your current routine is good for your well-being, multiply the time spent eating breakfast by two, then add it to the time spent exercising, then the time spent showering. Keep this first result in mind. Then, subtract the number of hours spent sleeping from 8, add 1, and multiply this number by the difference between the time you woke up and 7:12 (to which you add another 1). Then, take the first result and divide it by the second, and – as a final step – add the number of minutes spent doing another activity divided by two. If the number obtained is greater than 37, your routine is considered effective, otherwise it may need to be improved.