Setting a morning routine– especially one that includes yoga, breathing, or mindfulness– can help stimulate your digestion, energize you for the day ahead, clear the body of toxins, and decrease overall daily stress.
As you lay in bed, entranced from a fanciful dream, a loud alarm is yelling at you from across the room. You rise and snooze the clock quickly before crawling back into bed. A morning may consist of many snoozes or endless scrolling on social media platforms a plenty. What it is lacking is any type of structure.
Want to jump start your AM with a daily yoga practice? Try this Sunrise Yoga Challenge on YogaToday!
Is it just a case of the Monday’s, every day?
Many of us can relate to a morning that is guided only by the quickest route to caffeine and our work desk. The avenues taken in the middle to arrive at these locations becomes unimportant. Our morning routine can feel like a marathon dash as opposed to a cross country long haul. We are told throughout our lives how important it is to rise early and jumpstart our day with some form of physical stimulation. Why is this important?
During our sleep cycle, our bodies digestion uses this time to heal itself and rest. If we do things such as eating a large meal before bed, our digestion continues working while we sleep. This leads to things in the morning such as heartburn, bloating and indigestion.
Even without a large meal weighing us down in the AM hours, our bodies need fuel to begin our day. A morning routine consisting of movement and breathing can help awaken our digestive system. By awakening our digestive system, we begin our body’s process of metabolizing carbs and fats, otherwise known as fuel.
The early yogi gets the peace
This all means that waking in the morning and beginning your day with the familiar twists and forward bends of yoga could be the routine you have been searching for. The various asansas of yoga stimulate your digestion after a long night of resting these muscles. Yoga acts as a jumper cable for your bodies inner organs to begin to move and function, clearing the body of toxins. There is one other invisible guest that tends to haunt us in the morning aside from digestion: stress.
How many of us have opened our eyes to the weight of a bag of bricks on our chest? This is stress.
This is your work schedule for the day, the kid's soccer game after school or that midterm paper you haven’t quite read the book for yet.
A yoga session to start the morning instills deep breathing and focus that can eliminate this early day stress. Deep breathing serves to release tension held in the abdomen which can lead to indigestion as well. The meditative chanting of your yoga session helps focus your mind on the here and now, away from stressful thoughts.
How to build your personalized morning routine
If you do not have a morning schedule in place, that is okay. Whether you have lost the routine you once followed or, never tried one in the past, it is easy to begin building this into your day. Below are a few tips to start whipping your mornings into shape!
Are you one to sleep in?
Do not begin your morning mashup by getting up hours earlier than usual-not immediately. If you want to start making time in the morning for a quick yoga session and a non-processed breakfast, begin setting multiple alarms in 30-minute intervals. As the weeks go on, your body will adjust to waking early in increments, stopping whenever you have reached the desired time to awake each morning.
Social media before sunrise?
If your first instinct when those baby blues flutter open is to grab that smart phone, count to 20 first. This is enough time to focus and shift your autopilot thinking-and persuade yourself to jumpstart digestion with your twists and breathwork versus Instagram and mindlessness.
The most important part to this routine mastering? Repetition.
It takes 21 days to form a habit. Three weeks. Less than a month and you could be on your way to the morning routine of success. Namaste.
