Replace The Morning Bullshit With Creativity

I have recently set out to experiment on myself in the method of replacing bad habits with positive creative habits in my daily morning routine. The goal and task has been to ignore any social media, emails, “news”, and general unhealthy distractions in the morning and to replace them with reading inspirational material, writing, or doing anything creative. The task of being creative in the morning is a lot like recovering from drug addiction, during the early and most vital stages of sobriety it is pretty damn easy to stay away from drugs as long as you stay away from people who use drugs and have the support and help when you start going through withdrawals. It’s harder for some versus others but it can be incredibly easy. It is significantly much more difficult to break the habit and stay away from email, social media, and “news” right away in the morning. With cell phones or tablet notifications constantly reminding us that we have a message awaiting us is incredibly tempting to act on. I know looking will only take a second and my brain tells me, “Quick just see what it is, it won’t hurt just to look quickly”, that’s how the drug addicts brain works too. But I don’t stray, I stay focused and remind myself, it really isn’t that important what so and so said on Facebook, at least not so important that it can’t wait an hour. The thing is anything that is critically important can be conveyed in much quicker and in a more precise manner through more traditional outlets. Someone needs immediate help, easy, phones work excellent for that. Life threatening tornado looming in the skies, boom, tornado sirens. Client is completely up shits creek, well it doesn’t really matter they are still going to be fucked in an hour, this is an extremely rare occurrence with my customers . It’s harsh to say but there is no real reason why things can’t wait 1 hour for me to give them my attention; 0, zip, nada. So I’m not, they can wait.

It feels liberating to step away from societal habits. Saying “no” to social media, “news”, and email in the morning is enlightening. None of that stuff matters anyways. We as a society have put an emphasis on the importance of always being quick to respond, we’re the instant gratification generation. Getting away from these distractions in the morning are incredibly important to being creative and focused throughout the day. On day one and two of stopping the addiction of social media, email, and “news” is incredibly liberating, you are buzzing with excitement saying to yourself “This is good, this feels great, how have I not done this before!?”, now you are rebelling against the social norm. By day three and four you are now going through withdrawals from your addiction and things start getting trickier. At this point the ability to just give up or take a quick look at what that Facebook notification is or what that email from so and so says, DON’T GIVE IN, it can wait. Day five and six is easier, you still want to check those notifications but now we are replacing the bad habits with good habits and are seeing positive results. By day seven and eight you are now on your way to making things happen and things feel great! From here on out it’s habit, habits are hard to break, but good habits don’t need to be broken.

There are three ways in which I choose to spend my mornings getting the creative juices going for my day. The first thing I do is I take about 30 minutes for my breakfast. I have a nice cup of tea, cup of orange juice, and my food (I’m on an English Muffin kick recently). I like to keep things simple and light in the morning as far as eating, heavy breakfasts make me sluggish and yearning for my bed. Obviously it does not take 30 minutes to eat an English Muffin so during that 30 minute time frame I read, I read things that will inspire me, that will teach me methods of self improvement, biographies on creative people, I will read literally anything that will stimulate my mind, creativity and motivation. This is a simple way to get my mind in the creative zone. The second step in my creative morning tasks is to freewrite. If you are not sure what freewriting is, it is the practice of just writing, nothing more, nothing less. I just write. I write a minimum of 1000 words every morning which on average has been taking me 30-45 minutes to do. I don’t stop writing until I hit that 1000 word mark. This sounds like a challenge and that is is hard, well it can be. Some mornings my brain just is stuck on stupid and I struggle to figure out what to write about, so much that many of my morning writings start with “I have no idea what to write about! Damnit, what should I write about!? Come on brain tell me what to do? Why can’t I think of anything?”. No lie, that is literally what at least 40% of my writings start off as but then I catch something, anything and it all comes together. More often than not, I have a small idea that leads into an easy flowing topic. Other mornings it’s like I’m possessed and I don’t even remember writing what I wrote because I was completely in the zone. A good example of this is actually this morning, I wrote over 2000 words in under 20 minutes, I was in the zone. The purpose of free writing is to just think and write. Ponder on questions, thoughts, feelings, etc. Not only does it get the creative juices flowing it also is incredibly therapeutic. Now the third and final thing I do in my creative morning routine is exercise a minimum of 30 minutes. I personally go for a bike ride, 6 miles, every day as part of my morning ritual. Not only does exercise help get you healthy, lose weight, get fit, and look more attractive, but there are strong scientific studies that indicate that regular exercise every day improves cognitive and creative processes in our brains (here’s a quick & excellent article). I’m currently in the best physical, mental, and creative health I have ever been in my life. Exercise is important no matter what you do with your day or life. This morning routine has shown great positive results, I have noticed an incredible increase in creativity throughout my day. I’m more creative, ambitious, motivated, less tired, less stressed, and significantly less anxious over the things I have no control over. My quality of life has significantly improved just by removing bad habits and replacing them with positive creative habits.

Nearly every author, photographer, artist, musician, entrepreneur that I admire takes part in putting off the distractions and doing something of creative value right away in the morning. It promotes a healthy physical, creative, and mental lifestyle. I have actually started getting up 30 minutes to 1 hour earlier every day just so that I can fit in more time for creativity in on any given morning. The reward for doing this has been exponentially greater each day and it has provided an ability to help keep the creativity going throughout the day. I challenge you to try this for one week and if by the end of that week you think it’s a bunch of bullshit then you can go back to the social media, email, and “news” in the morning. No harm no foul but if you are an aspiring creative and you wake up strictly to distractions that do not promote creativity you will greatly struggle to be creative through throughout the day. I would love to hear other peoples results if they do accept the challenge.