“Well why do I need to become a morning person? I hate the morning. I’m a zombie in the morning.”
Does the cartoon dude above resemble you in the morning? A common theme of this blog is to help businesses and individuals achieve success through many and any means possible. Because talking only about tax strategy would be like listening to Ben Stein speak. Boring Most successful people have alarm clocks. Most of the worlds super successful are awake before the sun comes up. These super successful find the best time to get work done without interruption is between 5 and 7am. Mark Cuban wakes up, opens his laptop and starts working. See me, I would have to brush my teeth first. I can’t really do anything in the morning without brushing my teeth. Then I would need coffee. So my case to become a morning person is this: Mark Cuban is a morning person. He is a billionaire who owns multiple businesses, appears on Shark Tank, owns an NBA team and the list continues on and on and on. Want to be like him? Adopt some of his habits. Here are 5 ways you can become a morning person:
1. Break out the Yoga Mat. Go to the gym at 530am and kickstart your day with a few roundhouse kicks and punches to the heavy bag. Lift some weights. Hit the bike or the treadmill or the stair master. If you don’t want to go to the gym, then roll out a yoga mat and download a Yoga app on your iPad to start up a lesson. Do some pushups and jumping jacks and mountain climbers and squats and lunges and whatever other exercises you like. Exercise is perhaps even better than that gallon sized travel mug of coffee in the morning for the purposes of jumpstarting your day. Typically, the energy from morning exercise lasts me the entire day.
2. Program your morning. Have the coffee pot preprogrammed to begin brewing at your desired wake up time. This way you can roll out of bed and crawl over to it. It’ll be all ready to go. Have breakfast ready to eat. Whether it be a smoothie or a breakfast burrito, don’t wait until morning to prepare it. Have your clothes all laid out and ready to throw on. A programmed morning makes the process of being a morning person easier. Programming your morning will also take the stress out of waking up and having to do all these tasks when you can’t keep your eyes open.
3. Eat a nice breakfast. They do say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And yet many of us do not bother to eat ANYTHING. My go to breakfast are fruit smoothies complete with berries, banana, spinach, pineapple, greek yogurt, protein powder, skim milk etc. I also try to have some scramble eggs and a piece of wheat toast. Oh what a boost this nice breakfast provides. Your body needs fuel. So if you wait to fuel it up until lunch time and you’re running on fumes, then obviously you’re going to feel sluggish. Again program your breakfast so it becomes minimal effort in preparing it in the morning. Make the smoothie the night before. Reheat the scrambled eggs or use egg beaters to whip something up very quickly. But eat breakfast!
4. Go To Bed. You will have a significantly harder time waking up at 5am if your going to bed at 3am. My research concludes that every person should get at least 7.5 hours of sleep per night. I’m not going to get into sleep cycles and bring up terms like REM but understand simply you should be getting at least 7 hours. On the contrary, I do believe there is such a thing as sleeping too much so be mindful not to be a culprit of sleeping too much. Sleeping too much can cause sluggishness and the same feelings of sleeping too little. Going to bed at 8 and waking up at 7 is probably a bit too much sleep. So go to bed at a reasonable hour so you can wake up and carpe diem because YOLO. I can’t believe I just said YOLO.
5. Turn off the iPad. I am so guilty of this but according to the experts, 90 minutes before bed all electronics should go off, all work should cease. That includes the television shut, the iPad put to sleep, the Macbook shut down and closed. What do you do in that 90 minutes to not die from boredom? Pull out that book your reading, paint/draw a picture, prepare tomorrow’s breakfast and lunch. Electronics are a hinderance of sleep. A good way to promote good sleep and become a morning person is to turn off the electronics. This one is exceptionally hard for me. But for some it might be rather easy. Who am I kidding? We are all addicted to our smartphones. That takes one disciplined individual to be able to put it away an hour and a half before bed.
Understand that you will not become a morning person in one day. It will take a while to get used to it. But once you do you will feel so much more accomplished. Your day will feel longer and more fulfilling. You will feel more productive. Like I said, most of the Mark Cubans of the world are up before the sun. So mimicking these habits are a good start to becoming the next Mark Cuban. I myself am working at becoming a morning person because I often feel that I was carpe “dieming” more. When I wake up early, I seize the day. When I wake up last minute, I schlub along. Give some of these tips to become a morning person a try and see if it works for you. You never know walking dead zombie, you may like to become a morning person. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, contact us below.
