“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