How to Create a Morning Routine That Supports You

March 20, 2025 - Season 1, Episode 37

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Morning routines get a lot of hype, and for a long time, I believed I needed the perfect one to fix everything in my life. Over the years, I’ve had all kinds of morning routines—from an intense 4-hour spiritual practice to a quick 15-minute routine squeezed between the chaos of parenting. And what I’ve learned is this: there’s no single right way to start your day. In this episode, I’m sharing my personal journey with morning routines, what I’ve let go of, and how I make mine work for me right now. If you’ve ever felt like you should have a structured morning routine but can’t seem to stick with one, this episode will help you rethink what it means to start your day intentionally—without the pressure of getting it “just right.”

Topics:

The myth of the “perfect” morning routine
How morning routines evolve in different seasons of life
Why the intention behind your routine matters more than the routine itself
Questions to ask yourself when designing a morning routine that fits your life
How to shift your mindset so your routine supports you instead of feeling like a chore

Episode Resources:

Click here for a raw, unedited episode transcript

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (00:01.304)
Hey, and welcome to Calmer Conversations. I’m Cecilia, your host. Today we’re gonna talk all about morning routines. And before you get your hopes up, I’m not gonna tell you exactly what morning routine to have, but I am gonna talk about my morning routines that I have had and do have right now, and perhaps how a morning routine can start to work for you.

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (00:29.71)
Okay, first a comment about morning routines. Morning routines, almost more than anything else, get this sort of magical fairy dust belief stuck into them. Like if we do the perfect things in the perfect order, then all problems will be solved in our life. And that your morning routine is honestly gonna save you and that you need to do everything the exact perfect way. And if you don’t, then

your life will be ruined and you’re destined to die early, but if you do, then you’re gonna reach enlightenment. Something like that, right? And I’m being a little bit sarcastic and I’m being, I’m kind of going to the extremes, but it’s also to illustrate how much faith we often put into morning routines. I wanna say that I have had many morning routines since starting to do this work. And I also once believed that I needed a perfect morning routine, that if I had a perfect one, that it would save me.

I remember writing out I don’t know how many variations of the perfect morning routine on Sunday that I was magically going to start on Monday and then I would be fixed. I would be a perfect person after that. Everything would be good in my life and it would be done and dusted. Everything else would take care of itself. I will also say that I have had very intense morning routines over the course of this time.

but that you don’t have to have an intense morning routine. And in fact, if you’re not a morning person, your morning routine does not have to look like waking up at 4 a.m. Okay, so first, if you wanna do this work along with me, you might pause, well, in just a second, I want you to pause and kind of think through something or write it out, whatever works for you. I want you to get clear on your own thoughts around a morning routine.

Like the beliefs you have around it, which might be something like I just said, right? Like if I have the perfect morning routine, then I’ll be a healthier person or I’ll be a better person or everything else will fall into place. After you’ve done that, I want you to look at what your current morning routine is and just get clear on it because whether you admit it or not, you have a morning routine. Right now, your morning routine might include hitting snooze three times, rolling out of bed, grabbing a cup of coffee and like rushing to work, feeling behind.

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (02:45.492)
It might mean rolling over, waking up and telling yourself, I have so much to do today. It might be waking up and meditating, right? It might be something else. So getting clear on what your current morning routine is, and then what you think your morning routine needs to be to kind of quote unquote, fix you, right? What you think you’re supposed to do. And the reason I want you to get these all out of your head is because this work is so much.

So much of it is about bringing the unconscious or subconscious into the forefront. So understanding your own thoughts about a morning routine. And then let’s just bust the myth. So do that work, right? Like really, you wanna make changes in your life, you need to engage with this, right? So actually answer those questions for yourself. And know that there isn’t a perfect morning routine. And how we know that there isn’t a perfect morning routine is if you look across time.

And across people there is no one morning routine that all successful or rich or famous or beautiful people do right? There’s not like they know all exactly do the same thing and that’s really important because while morning routine can be powerful and transformative in your life It’s not that you need to have one set of activities or there is one set of activities that you need to do

In fact, I’d say the purpose of a morning routine is to help set you up for success within your day, and that can look different at different parts of your life. So to illustrate this, I’m going to tell you what my most intense morning routine looked like. At this point, I was in grad school, getting a master’s in counseling. I had been doing yoga for a number of years, quite seriously. I had a meditation practice, it was quite serious. I had a part-time job at the office of voter registration, which I could walk to and started at 11 a.m.

So I had time in the morning to kind of do what I wanted to do. And so this, if you had any doubts about Cecilia and her craziness, this is going to confirm it for you. Okay, so this morning routine looked like me waking up at 4 a.m. And I woke up at 4 a.m. not because I felt like I had to, but because I really loved it. 4 a.m. is kind of a special time in the day. I felt like I was most connected to myself and like the universe or God at that.

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (05:00.3)
period in the day and so I woke up at 4 a.m. So after I woke up, I would take a shower and have some warm lemon water, right? Those are like check boxes in the morning routine. Then I did somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours of yoga. So that brings us somewhere to around 6.15 to 6.30 in the morning, right? So that’s what I did. Then I would meditate for about 20 to 30 minutes. So with the transitions in there were probably around seven to 7.15.

Then I would do loving kindness meditation. So the first kind of meditation that I did was transcendental meditation, which is how I was originally taught meditation. So I did transcendental meditation, which is usually advised to do about 20 minutes twice a day. So I would do that for 20 to 30 minutes. I never set a timer, but that’s usually kind of where it ended up. Then I would do loving kindness meditation, which is like meta meditation reciting phrases like, maybe filled with loving kindness, maybe free from danger, maybe happy, maybe peaceful and at ease.

You get to pick them out, but there’s something kind of around those that you repeat to yourself. And so that kind of rounded out my sitting. Oh no, that’s not true. Before I would, I’m sorry, we need to back up because I totally forgot to add in there that I would do 20 minutes of breath work. So I do an hour and a half to two hours of yoga. I would do about 20 minutes of coherent breathing. Then I would meditate. Then I would do more meditation.

And at this point, we’re like around eight, 8.30, right? And remember, I need to be at work at 11. So I’ve already spent four hours in the morning on my morning routine. Then I would often do some journaling or some reflection. Sometimes that meant talking out loud to myself. And then at that point, I would often give myself an oil massage, have another shower. Usually my showers are like rinse offs rather than like big soapy affairs. But anyway, do a little bit of.

of a bjongga, if you’re familiar with that term. Take a shower, and then I would make myself breakfast. And that could be, you know, however long it was. You could tell that I was also single and had no children at this point, right? And so I would often wrap up my morning with a walk and then walking to work, meaning that I didn’t struggle to get to work by 11 a.m., but it wasn’t like I had a lot of extra time in the morning. So that was my morning routine, guys.

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (07:18.222)
I just want you to reflect on that. And I want to compare that with the morning routine I have right now. So right now I have three kids. One of them is four months old. You can kind of see her head if you’re watching this on YouTube. I co-sleep or bed share, which means that we all sleep in two twin mattresses together. So that means that I sleep with a four month old, a two and a half year old, and a five year old, and a husband, and not a dog right now, thankfully. So we…

So that’s what it looks like. And my baby likes to sleep with me.

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (07:59.202)
That means that if I get up or leave the bed, she generally wakes up. So what my morning routine looks like now is waking up at about 6.30. And that’s because that’s when my two and a half year old gets up. That’s when we’re often getting out of bed to kind of make the school routine in the morning work. I then snuggle with the two and a half year old and the baby for a little while. Then I wake up the five year old because she can sleep through anything. So I wake up the five year old. So you can already see how this looks so much different, right? I then.

I will then engage the five-year-old in a getting ready challenge where we both get to do it at the same time. So she gets out of bed and gets her clothes on for the day. I get out of bed and take a shower. So I sometimes will use oil before I shower, usually to scrape my tongue. I didn’t include that before, but that’s always been kind of something that I’ve done. And I will shower and I’ll shower kind of quickly. And then, and then I get some time to do…

to do some yoga, to do some movement. And that can be somewhere between three minutes and 15 minutes right now. And I know that this will change as the baby gets older, but right now that’s where I am in our morning routine. So I have three to 15 minutes of yoga, not 90 to 120 minutes of yoga. And yet the yoga feels, it feels just as impactful for me. And I forgot to mention that oftentimes I’ll wake up before everybody and kind of meditate in bed. I’m not like sitting on a cushion, I’m not getting out of bed, but because I’m awake,

I’ll spend some time reciting, doing the transcendental meditation or loving kindness for some period of time. And sometimes it’s five minutes, sometimes it’s 20 minutes, sometimes it’s 40 minutes. So it kind of depends on when I wake up, but very often I’m awake at kind of like 5.45 or six. So I have some time before other people get up. If I don’t have that time in the morning, I will meditate after everyone else goes to school, but I do that. And then, so we’ve taken the shower, we’ve done a little bit of yoga, I get dressed, I go upstairs, I have usually warm nettle tea or warm

Lemon water because I love them and I think they taste really good early in the morning. Right now I’m on a nettle tea kick. I make it the night before usually and then add hot water so that it’s warmer. And then I see everyone off to school and then I will go on a little walk, usually about 10 minutes. During the 10 minutes, I’ll kind of like collect myself with how I want the day to go, what kind of mind space I want to be in. And then I’ll come back and then I help the baby get to her first nap. And then I will meditate if I haven’t meditated before and then I’ll do some journaling.

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (10:28.172)
So my morning routine, those are the two extremes, right? Right now I’m doing kind of what I would say is my bare minimum amount of yoga each day. And the meditation practice feels pretty good, but I’m not doing a lot of other things. Oftentimes I’ll find time to do a breathing practice later in the day, but my morning routine is a far cry from what it used to be. And yet this morning routine supports me just as much, if not more, as that other morning routine. And that means that at different phases of your life,

and different times, different morning routines will work for you. So you wrote down what you think morning routines are gonna give you, maybe even writing down how you want to feel after your morning routine, which for me, it’s connected with my body, it’s connected with an energy and intention for the day, and it’s the capacity to be present for my day, and it sets me up for that. And I know that I can do many different things to get me there. So now you know what you.

how you want to feel maybe at the end of your morning routine and now you can ask yourself at this phase of my life and knowing what my current morning routine is what is one change I might make that will help get me to where I want to go? What is one belief that I can let go of or create that will help me make this change and how am going to support myself in doing this? Who will I become if I do snooze only two times instead of three or if I don’t snooze at all and instead I wake up and get out of bed to go for a walk?

or to have my cup of coffee, right? Even without the snoozes. So asking yourself those things and knowing that it’s not the actual actions that you do in your morning routine, it’s the intention that you’re using. It’s the spirit that you’re creating within them. It’s the beliefs you have around it, right? I have this belief that this morning routine supports me and gives me everything that I need. Okay.

If you have a morning routine, come over to social media, tell me about what it is, how it supports you, how maybe it’s changed, because now you have my two extremes of my morning routines and how they’ve looked in my life. And I will say that this current morning routine is sort of where I’ve been at about four months postpartum with my other kids as well. So I know that this will shift and change and I will have more time again in the future. And at some point down the line, maybe I will have my like glorious four to five hour morning routine again. But right now it’s about

Cecelia Baum Mandryk (12:45.004)
I don’t know, 15 to 20 minutes, depending on what I’m doing. And if you include the meditation, maybe it’s closer to an hour. but know that I’ve, I’ve shifted and changed and made it work for me and not because I think they’re these rules, but because I’ve picked out the things that help me connect with myself and feel most like me, so that I can have the day that I want to have. All right. Your morning routine is supposed to support you. It’s not supposed to feel like a prison. It’s not something that’s going to save you, but it is something that you can use, to help you have the day that you want to have. Okay.

Go forth, create a more new routine that supports you. Let me know what it is and I will see you next time. Bye.

About Your Host

I’m Cecelia, and I am passionate about helping people live the life they want to live and feel how they want to feel in their life. We do this together using mindset tools, nervous system regulation, and curious inquiry. I know that enjoying your life, feeling calm and even joyful is available to you.

If you’re ready to start right now, grab a recent workshop replay here on creating momentum.

Personally, I manifest in many ways- partner, mother, coach, sister, friend, daughter, citizen, feminist. I live with my husband and children way downeast Maine on a little bridge-connected island (after spending my first 35 years in cities). It’s beautiful here with the ocean and the wind.

I help my clients make big and small changes in life one step at a time.

No matter what’s happening in your life right now, I know you can feel different. I know that by working with your brain and nervous system, you can feel calm, content, joyful, AND you can still go after the big and small goals in your life (getting there will just feel different).

This process is simple and approachable.

You’re probably thinking- but it won’t work for me. I’ve tried it all or I was recently diagnosed with ADHD or I’m too old. But I promise, if you’re open to it, this work is not only transformative but suited for so many different kinds of people and brains.