“I wonder why I don’t go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip an hour more of sleep and live.”
– Sylvia Plath

My favourite part of that quote is the ‘skip an hour of sleep and live’ as it fits in so well with my new morning routine which I would like to share a little bit more about as it pertains to sleep. My mindset until now has always been ‘I am simply not a morning person’ and leave it at that. I never thought to ask myself, ‘Okay, so how do I become a morning person then?’. I can’t say that what I have been doing is THE answer for me or anyone else for that matter but it is working so far. As suggested in the book ‘Miracle Morning’ I tell myself at bed time how I am going to wake up and how I am going to feel and not just in my thoughts. No, I tell myself out loud and repeat it with more and more resolve until I feel satisfied.

So if I know I will only get 5 hours of sleep because I have to get up at 3:45 am to drive H to work at 4:10 I tell myself ‘After 5 hours of sleep I am going to wake up energized, happy, productive and grateful for those 5 hours of sleep. Those 5 hours of sleep will be enough and I won’t require any more to have a productive day where I do not procrastinate and I achieve the goals I set out for the day’. I say it out loud and repeat it and believe it. That belief is so important. You must believe to achieve.

Low and behold it has been working for me. I do wake up feel exactly how I told myself I was going to feel. I also have my morning affirmations after I wake up about how my day will go and how I will feel which again has been working for me. One of the hardest parts of my evening affirmations was saying them out loud in front of my husband because I am sometimes self-conscious about myself but I have been doing them now whether or not he is in the room and after explaining to him what I was doing and how it helped me, I don’t feel self conscious about it anymore because he is always supportive of my endeavors.

And (I hate starting sentences with and but there it is)… And it doesn’t matter how many hours I know I have before my alarm will go off I feel just as happy and energized. I simply make sure to state how many hours it will be in my affirmation and I am good to go.

I have a saying that I can’t remember where I heard it from but here it is, ‘I choose my mood the moment my feet hit the floor in the morning. I don’t let my mood choose me’ and something I have recently added to that is ‘I won’t let others choose my mood either’. What I mean by that is I may not have control over a situation but I do have control over how I react to it. If someone is having a bad day and they are saying or doing things that make it clear they are having a bad day I choose how I react to that. I don’t let their mood affect my own. I don’t let a snarky person make me feel snarky or bad too. I have already chosen my mood for the morning and I am sticking to it. I choose to be happy. Not to say I have never had a snarky moment back, I am certainly not perfect but those are rare moments.

Until next time… I choose to be happy, I choose to be energized, I choose to have a productive day, I choose to accomplish my goals today, and I choose to smile.

~ Crimson

It’s a miracle! Okay, okay, I am not one to use the word miracle in its traditional sense since I am more a believer in coincidence, statistics, plausible explanations, and science. I am actually referring to a set of steps or principles outlined in the book “The Miracle Morning” by Hal Elrod. The premise of the book is that by waking up only one hour earlier than you would normally and going through six 10 minute activities you will be more productive and energized which will lead to a more productive and successful life. The six steps are called Life S.A.V.E.R.S. and consist of Silence (meditation), Affirmations, Visualization, Exercise, Reading, and Scribing.

So this is obviously the portion where I am ‘scribing’ or simply writing. I already did the other five steps, well sort of. When it got to exercise and I tried to do jumping jacks it woke my dogs who started barking up a storm and living in a semi-detached, well that does not a good neighbour make. I am walking to work today though which will take about 25 minutes so I will complete that portion then (you don’t have to do them in order just as long as you do them in the morning).

Anyway, I tried Miracle Morning last year after a lovely Manager at my work mentioned the book to me and it worked really well… for about 2 months. Until I got sick with pneumonia and was bed-ridden, gasping for breath for about 3 weeks. Well here it is just after Renewal (my own values based holiday tradition around the same time as Christmas) and as part of my goals (similar to New Year’s Resolutions) I am working for the miracle again. I almost wrote looking for the miracle but realized working for is a much better way of putting it because in most cases if you want a ‘miracle’ you really have to work for it. It’s not something handed to you on a silver platter even if it may sometimes happen by chance.

Until next time, I affirm that I will be productive today, I will achieve the 10 goals I have set out for myself today, I will be energized, and I will be happy.

~ Crimson