How you start your morning can set the tone for the rest of the day. A screaming match with your partner? Not a good way to start. A good, hearty breakfast? Much better. But your day could just as easily be derailed by other, more seemingly innocuous habits. Huffingtonpost.com highlights some bad morning habits that can ruin an entire day.
Hitting the snooze button
“Hitting the snooze button is frequently a sign that you are not getting enough sleep,” says Robert Rosenberg, M.D., Medical Director of the Sleep Disorders Center of Prescott Valley, Arizona and author of Sleep Soundly Every Night, Feel Fantastic Every Day. But it may also be a sign of ‘social jet lag,’ a condition where you are staying up too late on weekends and then because of the sleep debt you have built up, you need more sleep on work days. When you hit snooze, you disrupt your sleep cycles and you end up sleepier than if you had gotten up in the first place. You also scramble your internal circadian clock, which tells you when to sleep and when to wake.
Checking your phone before you get out of bed
A research paper from the University of British Columbia found that people who checked their email regularly throughout the day were more stressed than those who checked them three times a day.
When you check your phone first thing in the morning, you run the risk of stimulating your mind into criticism and judgment: your emails, texts, and voicemails tell you what you have to respond to or manage that day. Your Facebook page has you compare yourself to other people’s lives, and stimulates jealousy. Unfortunately, checking your phone can awaken your Inner Critic, that incessant voice in your mind that is always assessing, judging and evaluating you, and never shuts up. When you start the day listening to the Inner Critic, your stress level immediately goes up. Your brain begins to produce stress hormones, and your body responds, and before you know it, you are tense and agitated, your blood pressure is elevated, and your day hasn’t even started yet!”
Putting off exercise
Exercising at any time of day is better than not exercising at all. But if you can exercise in the morning, you may be doing your body a day-long favour. There’s research that has looked at people engaging in morning versus afternoon exercise, and those who exercise in the morning appear to have lower blood pressure throughout the day and they get better sleep.
Skipping breakfast altogether
For years we’ve heard that skipping breakfast is bad for us, yet people do it all the time! Skipping that first meal of the day is a bad morning habit, and the research proves it. Opting out of breakfast can lead your energy to flag and your appetite to increase. If you skip breakfast, you’re more likely to eat more calories later in the day. Breakfast does kick start our mornings.
Forgetting to Stretch
If you’ve ever felt stiff in the morning, almost like you can’t bend your knees or walk quite right, it’s not just you. Overnight, muscles and joints can stiffen as they ‘sleep’ right along with you. If you just try to hop out of bed, you may feel muscle twinges where you didn’t know you had muscles.
Lie on your back and stretch your arms and legs, pulling them in opposite directions. Make small circles with your wrists and feet to encourage blood and oxygen to these joints. You’ll find you get an energy boost and increase your flexibility, too. “It’s a positive, non-pharmacological approach to wellness,” says Dr. Carlson.
Source: The Leadership
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