Everyone knows a morning person. They’re the person in the office with a bright smile and an alert and friendly personality at 8am when you’re barely processing that you’re even awake. Chances are, they know how to get the most out of their morning and with some new habits, you can too. Here are 4 quick tips for your morning to get it started on the right foot.
Wake Up Naturally
Your body goes through sleep cycles with five unique and separate stages and each cycle lasts about 90 minutes. It starts with the first stage, the light sleep where you might find yourself drifting in and out of sleep, and follows through the next four as your sleep gets deeper and deeper to stage 5, REM sleep. This is the stage at which we are most likely to dream. Being jolted awake by a piercing alarm clock during these later stages of sleep can leave us feeling quite irritable and out of sorts.
Being awoken when we are just leaving deep REM sleep and in the first stage of light sleep is much better for us, and usually if we wake up without an alarm this is when we will wake up. Of course, we’ll likely need to be roused at a specific time if we need to get up for work, so using an app that can detect your sleep patterns and using them to wake you up at the right time can also be useful if it’s not possible to wake up naturally.
Beat the Groggy Feeling
After a restless night’s sleep, you can sometimes wake up feeling groggy and unrested. This might be thanks to disturbances, being too hot or cold, or from lights from electronic devices or outside. Making your bedroom a conducive sleeping environment can make a big difference to the quality of sleep you get. This means having a cool bedroom that is nice and dark without any ambient light from electronic LEDs or outside, which is where thick curtains can be useful. Waking up with a dry mouth and having to drink water can also be a disturbance to sleep, so learning how to prevent it from happening by curbing mouth breathing can also mean a better night’s sleep.
Don’t Skip Breakfast
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day! Eating a good nutritious breakfast in the morning means you’re getting in some fuel for your body for the morning hours when you’re probably feeling the most tired. The right kind of foods are also important, because you should opt for low GI foods with the right balance of proteins and vitamin rich foods to stabilize your blood sugar and provide a steady supply of energy to your body throughout the morning. Eating a sugar rich breakfast might give you an early spike, but it won’t sustain you until lunch.
Take Your Shower in the Morning
Some people enjoy an evening shower because it warms them up and gets them ready for bed, while others like the waking up effect of a good morning shower. You’re waking up your skin and body with a blast of warm water and you’re washing away the sweat and dead skin cells that have built up while you’re sleeping. It’s a great way to boost alertness if you opt for a cooler shower instead of a warm comforting one.
Now that you’ve had a good quality sleep, been woken up gently, taken a cool shower and have fueled your body with the right foods, you can put on your finest and head to work with the renewed glow of a morning person!
