Morning Routines Are A Waste Of Time

So recently, it has been the invogue, very popular thing to do to poo poo morning routines. I’ve been seeing a lot of content recently on Twitter, on Instagram from people who are just hating on the idea of biohacking of morning routines. And I think this is a little bit of a throwing the baby out with the bathwater situation. And the person, I think, who is the biggest culprit here of hating on the morning routines is probably Alex Ramosi. And I’m a big fan of Alex. I think he’s great. I think a lot of what he says, though, is often misinterpreted or misunderstood, specifically when you talk about a morning routine. Because one of the things I keep coming back to around the idea of a morning routine is that everybody has a morning routine.

It’s simply a matter of, is that morning routine moving you towards the goals you actually have set for yourself? And this isn’t just about morning routines. It’s actually about everything that we do in life when it comes to tasks and prioritization and understanding what are the things that are the highest and best use of my time that will actually move me towards my goals. And this is something that we historically struggle with. Because, again, there’s two versions of yourself, right? You have the biological you. You have the modern you. The biological you is lazy. It wants nothing more than just to keep you alive long enough to procreate. It wants you to survive while expending as little energy as possible.

That’s the biological you. The modern you, on the other hand, is the you that has formed because you are not overwhelmed by existential threats anymore. And it’s freed up parts of your mind to focus on questions of what does it mean to live a life of meaning, purpose, and value, right? And those questions, they require energy, they require expenditure of effort, and potentially taking on a little bit of risk, right? So these two selves, your biological self and your modern self, they are inherently at odds, because one just wants to survive, the other is looking to thrive. So on any given day, we have this battle playing out between our two selves. And the biological you is a very, very powerful source, a very powerful force in the universe, because it has succeeded in its primary objective for, like, 200,000 years of keeping you alive long enough to pass along your genes, right? So we can’t underestimate just how powerful the biological you is. And the biological you is really great at getting you to do really stupid things that aren’t actually moving you towards your goals. I call this watering fake plants, the biological you, is really good at getting you to do things that are not actually helpful in the grand scheme of things. They give you the illusion of being productive, when in reality you’re simply being busy.
So, recognizing that we have this other version of ourselves that we’re battling every single day, and that it’s a very powerful force, and that it is inherently trying to get us to not focus on the things that are going to move us towards our goals, but rather to focus on the easy things that will feel like progress while not actually having to expend the maximum amount of energy. And that’s where morning routines come in, is that most of us are doing things that make us feel productive, when in reality it’s just making us busy. And the problem with the morning routine is we go through the motions, checking the boxes, thinking, we have to do this, otherwise we’re not going to be able to do that. And that’s the part that, Alex, I think, nails, is that when we use our morning routines as a crutch, to say, I can’t be at my best because I haven’t done my morning routine well, you have just created an environment where you are inherently fragile. You miss your morning routine and suddenly you’re thrown off of your game, and there’s going to be days that happens. So does that mean the whole day is just a wash? No. You need to build resilience into your life and not become dependent on the morning routine. Now, with that said, no athlete, no performer, no speaker in the world, nobody goes onto stage or into the field of battle without doing a warm up, right? You have never heard of an Olympic athlete just stepping onto the field without having done at least a couple of stretches, right? Get the blood going a little bit.
And yet we go into our days. Sometimes we go into our tasks or to the field of focus, where we have this work that we want to do. And we don’t do a warm up routine, and then we pull the muscle. 15 seconds later, we’re like falling down a rabbit hole on YouTube and we’re like, how did this happen? Well, it’s because you didn’t prime yourself to foster focus. You didn’t prime your body and your mind. And I think that’s where the morning routine, that’s where these rituals are valuable, is, because they serve as a priming mechanism to get into the zone. But often, again, going back to the question of the biological you, often we create these elaborate morning routines that stretch two, three, 4 hours. And what ends up happening is it comes at the expense of the work itself that needs to be done.
So if you’re warming up too much to the fact that now you’re tired in the performance, you’ve really gone and thrown the baby out with the bathwater, you have missed the point entirely. Right? Like, athletes don’t warm up to the point of exhaust in. And that’s what happens, I think, a lot with the morning routines where it’s like two, three straight hours of, like, I got to do my grounding, I got to do my red light therapy, I got to do my cold tones, I got to go do my workout, I got to do my meditation, got to do my gratitude journal, right? All these little things that add up, and next thing you know, it’s taking you two, 3 hours just to show up and do the work. Now, this assumes your primary objective and goal in life is to do the work and to make money. But there’s other reasons why we might do a morning routine. It doesn’t have to be towards some end of being more productive. I think productivity is great. Don’t get me wrong.
I’m all about it. I think we feel our best when we are being productive, meaningful members of society. However, it’s not the only reason to do a thing. Sometimes it’s nice just to take a few hours in the morning for you before life starts to impose its will on you, and you can just carve out that time and just be. And I think there’s beauty in that as well. And it doesn’t always have to be about being productive and getting things done. Sometimes you just want to sit and meditate, or you just want to go for a long walk so that you can have that time for yourself before you rage into battle. And that’s completely okay.
So I think the message here is, morning routines are great or morning routines are terrible. It can be either. It just depends. And for the individual, depending on how you’re using it, it could one or the other. I know I’ve had really elaborate morning routines in the past that served me very well. And then there came a point where it no longer served me, and I had to let it go and I had to pivot and adapt. These days, I’m pretty loosey goosey, all told, with my morning routine. But I still have a morning routine that I go through.

I wake up, I sit immediately in front of my red light, and I do a little bit of reading for ten minutes while I wake up. Jamie and I, we go for a walk to get coffee. We come back I sit down and I putter. I putter for a good half an hour to an hour at my desk, checking analytics, checking my different business metrics, checking my dashboards, just getting my head wrapped around what’s happened in the last 12 hours, just getting back up to speed, and I’m not really being meaningfully productive during that time. I’m just sipping on my coffee, waking up, and getting into the flow of the day. And then once I’ve done that, by the time my coffee is done, I’m feeling pretty dang good and ready to go. It’s not an extensive crazy morning routine at this point, but it’s effective for me, and I think that’s the key here, is to find what works for you and forget everybody else, even me, regardless of forget what I’m saying. Take the parts that serve you, discard the parts that don’t.

Hopefully this brought you a little bit of value. Hopefully it brought you maybe one or two things that you can chew on and maybe implement into your life and bring you a little bit of value. If that’s the case, Hazah. We win, and we’ll catch you back here tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.