What I do at 2 AM: My Morning Routine

It all started with somebody taking an interest in me. He sent me a message, came over for dinner with my wife and I (he wore a suit), and told me about the Miracle Morning. After dinner, he gave me a copy of his book.

The rest is history. I will say that it is an interesting thing to be “seen” by somebody who you didn’t think you were on the radar of.

The Miracle Morning provided a framework for how to tackle your mornings. It was one of the first books to not just provide great information, but actually inspired me to take action. The framework is based on the Life SAVERS. SAVERS is an acronym for activities you do every day as part of your morning routine.

Silence (meditation/ prayer)
Affirmations (positive thinking)
Visualization (mental imagery)
Exercise (physical movement)
Reading (learning)
Scripting (journaling/ writing)

Why I Wake Up at 2 AM

The primary reason I wake up that early is because I want to spend one hour with my wife before the day begins. She gets ready at 5 AM and leaves for work at 6 AM. That means my wife and I have 4 AM – 5 AM together. Waking up at 2 AM gives me two hours towards my personal routine.

By doing the SAVERS before our time together I will have accomplished more than most people do all day! Time dedicated to my SAVERS is about an hour with the following breakdown:

• Silence: 5-10 mins
• Affirmations: 5-10 mins
• Visualization: 2 mins
• Exercise: 10 mins
• Reading: 20+ mins
• Scripting: 10-15 min

Another huge benefit of waking up early is that NOBODY else is up that early. That time is YOUR time. You get to work on YOUR to do list. Not somebody else’s. This is your time for personal growth and getting done what matters the most to you.

Anybody Can Wake Up Early (with practice)

I’ve been a night owl my whole life. Even when I was a kid in middle school and high school, I was always up late. It would be rare for me to go to bed before 12 AM. The trend continued through college.

I even had a graveyard shift for 2.5 years working 10:30 PM – 6 AM. It actually took me a long time to adjust back to a normal work day after working graveyard for such a long time. Side note: working that graveyard shift when daylight saving time ends (fall back) is horrible.

Even as I transitioned to a professional career, it was pretty common for me to be up late. I had a job where I lived 1.4 miles away. Knowing that, I’d sleep in until 8:15 AM to maximize what sleep I could get, rush as fast as possible to be ready for work, and be in the office by 9 AM.

At the time, my wife would get up at 5:00 AM to get to the gym. Getting up that early was such a foreign idea. I couldn’t even comprehend waking up that early.

I tell you this to show you that waking up early is possible. I am by no means saying to wake up at 2 AM. Start small. Wake up 30-minutes earlier. Then an hour earlier. Feel the difference that waking up provides you and you’ll naturally want to wake up earlier and earlier.

Getting Setup For Success: A Winning Night Routine

Here’s a dirty little secret, your morning routine is built off your night routine.

If you take anything from this post, it should be this. You want to bookend your days. I don’t care if it’s 15-minutes, 30-minutes or more, but you have to bookend your days. What does that mean? That means you control the start of your day and the end of your day. In a crazy world where you feel like you have no control over your life, taking ownership of the start and the end of the day can be an EMPOWERING practice.

With that said, I’m pretty bad at my night routine. I’m just being honest.

I’ll touch on at least one of my routine items every night, but it’s rare that I complete every aspect of it. Here’s an outline my ideal night routine.

Write your to-do list for tomorrow

Get that information out of your head and onto paper! You’ll be surprised how much of a relief it is to have your ideas laid out AND have an action plan for tomorrow.

Complete a brain-dead activity

I’m not sure that’s the best way to explain it, but the idea is to do an activity where you can coast on autopilot and not have to think too much. For me, that is doing the dishes.

Drink herbal tea

Continue to calm your mind with a chamomile tea or caffeine-free tea of choice to unwind and relax your body.

Read a book

Specifically, read a fiction book. A book that you can escape into and not use your critical thinking skills.

State your bedtime affirmations out loud.

This is a crucial step. Probably the most important one. I would say this is almost single handedly responsible for getting me out of bed in the morning and ready to start my day. I use the affirmations included in the Miracle Morning.

More Night Routine Tips

Again, this is my ideal routine. There are plenty of other good habits to build into your night routine. I recommend doing some research on your own and testing what works for you. One popular item that didn’t work for me was taking a bath. With everything in life, the process is to learn, implement, and improve. You’ll just have to see what works best for you.

I do want to add some other quick tips to think about:

• Reduce blue light exposure after the sun goes down
  • You can use himalayan salt lamps and red light
  • Alternatively, you can also get blue light blocking glasses
• No coffee after 12 pm (I can generally stretch this to 2 pm being the latest for me)
• No screens 1-hour before bed
• Sleep in a room that is in complete darkness
• Try to sleep in a relatively cool room

My Morning Routine

We finally made it. As promised, I’ll be sharing my morning routine. I could have jumped right into this, but I think there was a lot of benefit going through the previous sections and laying out the approach and considerations.

First Hour

This can pretty much be thought of as an hour of waking up. I really do appreciate slow mornings so the first hour is… well, slow. My goal is to get my body moving and not do anything too brain intensive.

Depending on the morning, I’ll put on some light music, a podcast episode, or an audiobook. I start with clearing out the dishwasher. Then, I start boiling water for coffee, use a hand grinder to grind my coffee and make bulletproof coffee which includes: Trade Coffee (referral link – you get 50% off your first order!), ghee butter, MCT oil, Himalayan salt, cacao, NeuRoast Supercream. I also make a version with turmeric for days I want to reduce inflammation.

This usually puts me half-way through my first hour. I switch to an audiobook if I haven’t been listening to one already, review my to-do list, make sure it aligns with my time management spreadsheet and work/personal calendars. I may also check in on any personal/ professional growth related Facebook Groups that I’m part of.

Second Hour

Now we start to get into the SAVERS! But first… I need to give a shoutout to light therapy lamps.

Light therapy has been a life changer. This is one of the few things that I do for my health that I instantly see the impact it has on me. It was recommended to me by Hersh from Becoming Legendary.

When you wake up at 2 AM, it is DARK. Light therapy works to help wake up your body through your eyes. Every organ has its own clock, and the eyes know it is daytime based on exposure to sunlight. Light therapy works to mimic that. It’s still early in the year, but it is my top purchase of 2019.

Okay, now to the SAVERS. I usually spend about thirty minutes on the following:

• Affirmations: Cycle through the Miracle Morning affirmations and read my 2019 goals
• Visualization: I use a vision board that I created or spend time focusing on an area I want to improve and visualize the situation, struggling through it, and then overcoming whatever the obstacle it is.
• Silence: I use the app Headspace for 5-10 minutes. I know a lot of people like Calm as well.
• Exercise: My goal is to do 10-minutes of movement which typically breaks down into one song of cardio (jumping jacks/ shadow boxing), one song of bodyweight exercises (push-ups, squats, planks, etc.), and one song of stretching (focus on hip flexors and tight muscles).

The second half of the hour is dedicated towards working on a blog post. One of my goals every month is to introduce one new habit. I picked this up from BYLR and my new habit for March is writing for 30-minutes everyday towards the blog. Listening to this tends to help me get in a flow state quicker.

Third Hour

This is my favorite hour. It’s the whole reason I get up super early.

It’s relationship growth hour! I’ve actually never called it that, but I think it has a nice ring to it.

Every morning, we dedicate one hour to growing as a couple. You can essentially think of it as doing personal growth activities with your significant other. We usually spend 10-15 minutes with some side chatter and making sure our to do list for the day still makes sense.

We then dedicate the rest of the time towards learning/ improving. Our relationship growth hour is something we do 7 days a week. From a high level, this is how we tend to dedicate those seven days:

• 3 days – Learn something new
• 1 day – Work on the blog
• 1 day – Free session
• 1 day – Recap what we’ve learned/ share other learnings from personal development
• 1 day – Planning (next week/ month)

This is definitely fluid and has changed over time. There was a period where it was 5-6 days of learning something new, and 1-2 days that were “free sessions.”

The point is to grow together. To create alignment. To foster a relationship and help each other accomplish our dreams.To become better people and bring value to the world. Who knows what our relationship growth hour will look like in the future, but the purpose will remain the same.

Fourth Hour

Back to the SAVERS! At this point, we’ve already completed Silence, Affirmations, Visualization, and Exercise. That leaves Reading and Scripting with 20-minutes and 10-minutes dedicated to each respectively.

My goal for the year is to read 30 books. I’m incredibly behind on that, but I’m working to build this habit. I’m a huge fan of the library and get all of my books/ audiobooks from there. It does have a nice motivating factor to finish a book. Sometime another person could be waiting for the book which sets a hard deadline for when it’s due and you have to finish the book. I also create my whole book list within the library interface so that I can add books to the “For Later” category as soon as I learn about a book I want to read from a friend, podcast, or any source really.

Scripting/ Journaling has been a practice that has been invaluable. I used to think I was self aware. Journaling helped elevate that so much more. It really is incredibly valuable to get your ideas out of you head and into the physical world.

To finish off the hour, I start to get ready for work. All of the fun, normal stuff, like showering and what-not.

Primed for Success

This gets me to a 6 AM start at work having accomplishing MORE than most people do all day. Imagine what it feels like to have accomplished all of that before most people have even woken up!

I invite you to try waking up at least 1-hour earlier to try the SAVERS. This could look like what I outlined earlier or something more custom that fits your needs. Here’s what I outlined previously:

• Silence: 5-10 mins
• Affirmations: 5-10 mins
• Visualization: 2 mins
• Exercise: 10 mins
• Reading: 20+ mins
• Scripting: 10-15 min

Struggling to get up an hour earlier?

Start with a 6-Minute Miracle Morning. You can find 6-minutes. JUST DO IT. That gives you 1-minute each towards each aspect of the SAVERS.