7 Worst Morning Habits – What NOT To Do For A Productive Day

 Bad Morning Habits To Remove From Your Life

I bet you could list at least 20 healthy morning habits you should practice every day for a productive life. The web is full of tips on how to start your day properly; even I have a post about the 7  good daily habits I implemented in my days.

Yet, it’s rare to find what not to do when you start your day. 

In this post, I will list another 7 of the worst morning habits, just so we could both feel guilty we practice at least one on most of our days. I’ve got an important message for you after I list the habits, so don’t skip the end.

1. Don’t Stay In Bed

The sun tickles the window and your nose. You hug the pillow and try to express all of your love for sleep in a single minute. Or 5 more minutes. Why not 5 more? It’s a lovely morning…

Except, it’s not the weekend.

And you should get up and go to work.

And that sucks.

And you love staying in bed for “5 more minutes”.

Don’t do that! Staying in bed instead of jumping after your alarm goes off makes you lazy and grumpy. Your thoughts create your feelings, and your feelings create your actions.  Saying the last Goodbye to the pillow for 5-10-15 minutes every morning sets you up for a day of procrastination and laziness.

2. Don’t Check Your Social Media

Why Reacting instead of Acting?

If you didn’t know it so far, the endless scrolling on social media activates the wrong parts of your brain. Imagine for a moment that life is a movie. By grabbing the phone and spending half an hour on it every morning puts you on the sofa to watch that movie and keeps you away from acting in it.

3. Don’t Talk Too Much

Why would I forbid you to talk? Am I losing my mind?

Probably… not!

However, I’ve noticed that if I spend 20 minutes in the morning talking nonsense with people around me, it distracts me from my daily morning routine, activates too many thoughts, and I lose my focus on the important things of the day.

Have you noticed that if you engage yourself in a long conversation in the morning, you tend to think about it all day after that (or at least for a few hours)?

That’s not a way to set yourself up for success.

Chatting is great… but save it for after you’ve done all the important stuff.

4. Don’t Plan Your Day

Now you are sure I lose my mind. Who doesn’t plan their days? The people who waste them, obviously.

Actually, we talk about things we shouldn’t do first thing in the morning. Planning is essential for your plan for success and productive life. However, planning in the morning forces you to think of too many things early in the day.

On average, we make around 35 000 decisions daily (yes, that’s thousands, and it’s proven!). Only a certain amount of these 35 000 decisions are important, and we are limited to a certain amount of good decisions. Wasting them early in the morning limits our ability to make the right ones later in the day (when we actually need to be very active).

Therefore, every single life coach and personal development expert will tell you to plan your days ahead.

That gives you the clear path you should follow in the morning without wasting time and energy on unimportant stuff.

5. No Negative Talk

Any type of negative talk: gossiping, badmouthing, negative self-talk, whatever crosses your mind, and it doesn’t feel shiny and pretty – chase it away and don’t worry about it anymore.

It goes like that:

Your thoughts create your feelings. Your feelings create your actions. Your actions create your results. As simple as that. If you’d want positive results today start with positive thoughts.

6. No TV, YouTube, etc…

Should I say more?

Just like scrolling on your phone kills your productivity, TV and pointless videos fill your head with hundreds of unnecessary trashy stuff early in the morning. You don’t need that, right?

7. Don’t Procrastinate With Work

So far, if you’ve followed everything I’ve listed above, you should be aware that you wouldn’t have any other choice but to sit and work right after you finish with the productive morning routine.

Important Side Note: Writers usually say that a good piece of text isn’t when there’s nothing more to add, but when there’s nothing more to remove.

I think we could tweak this smart thought into our development plan and choose to exclude things that don’t benefit us. What do you think about that?

Acting Instead of Reacting

Everything we do in our lives could be categorized as either Action or Reaction.

“Acting” is doing something, going in a certain direction, creating stuff. It’s something you want and the goal of everything – to make life happen. It’s like you’re driving a car – you control it and it’s up to you which turn you’ll take.

“Reaction” is basically the exact opposite. Reacting means you respond to everything, you are dependant on the things, people, events around you. It’s like you are in the passenger’s seat – you could give an opinion on the direction, express happiness or frustration regarding that direction, but you aren’t in control of the car and you can’t make the decision.