Believe it or not, everybody has morning and evening routines already, without even thinking about it. 

Taking a shower, brushing your teeth, making your bed, getting a coffee or even lying in bed scrolling through Instagram – all these are parts of a routine. 

Quality of it is another thing – surely not everybody has an effective and well-established schedule for every morning and evening.

So, why exactly do you need it?

It’s one of the best ways to keep calm.

First of all, it’s a ritual and having a few daily rituals can help you stay calm and collected, it can make you relaxed. 

Your body going through familiar motions that became a habit already, will put your mind to ease and implementing several of those habits will positively affect your mood and the level of anxiety.

Our brains are incredibly comfortable with patterns and while I recommend breaking as many of them as possible during the day, the time you wake up and go to bed should be filled with patterns because it is the time of vulnerability, and comfort is a must have.

You’re having quality me-time. 

Taking proper care of yourself is a great thing for your mental health because the way your body feels and the way your mind feels are intertwined more than it can seem. 

People tend to think it’s not that important and if it works for them as it is, it must mean that they’re doing everything right. 

See, it might work for some time and seem to not affect anything at all. But over time of consistently slacking in that department, things start to build up. You begin feeling even more exhausted, you get tired easier, the mood is in the permanent meh state; a lot of mental health issues can sprout from not taking proper care of yourself. 

Obviously, this care is not only the routines, but they are a great place to start, in my opinion – easy to incorporate and don’t take much time.

It makes falling asleep easier.

Your body gets used to falling asleep after a certain combination of actions. 

Doing same things every night before going to bed over and over again will imprint the pattern into your brain and you will have much easier time falling asleep (of course there are some other factors at play, you can read about them here). 

The calming effect of the nighttime routine can also potentially improve the quality of your sleep throughout the night.

It makes mornings way better.

It’s easier to wake up and get up if you have something to look forward to and if you will make that thing a part of your everyday morning routine, your mornings are going to become so much more enjoyable. 

A carefully constructed combination of things/tasks you do after getting up will actually wake you up efficiently and set the mood for the whole day. 

Even if maybe you will have to get up slightly earlier to go through with your routine, it’s definitely worth it. Nothing feels better than an accomplishment first thing in the morning. 

It may sound weird and even ridiculous, surely, I would rather sleep in than lose an extra half an hour with my pillow, you may be thinking, and of course you could be right, it’s your choice to make after all. 

Only when you actually give it a try and implement some of your favorite things into the morning hours you will understand why it is great and worth doing.

What exactly should be in a routine?

There are so many things that you potentially can do as a part of your morning and evening routines – you just have to choose what exactly you personally would enjoy doing every day. 

The most important part is that you must never force anything on yourself – if you clearly are not a type of person who gets up and immediately heads to the gym to do some heavy lifting and you know you won’t like it, don’t try it only because everybody and their mother on the internet does it. 

Daily routines are supposed to be kind of a comfort zone for you. Surely, you can try a new thing or two occasionally, but don’t ever push it or beat yourself up about not liking it.

The absolute best way to go is adding elements one by one, without rushing anything. It’s not a race. 

You don’t have to create a schedule and stick to it from day one. 

Experiment, figure out what works for you and what doesn’t, what you enjoy and what only irritates you. It’s all about trying and adjusting. 

Don’t copy what other people do blindly – get inspired and do your own twists on everything. The goal is making YOU satisfied, improving your mood and general flow of the day. 

Not every day has to be the same. 

Obviously, your weekends will be different from your work days, but not only that – you don’t have to do identical things over the week either. 

Some tasks are bound to repeat, like brushing your teeth, taking a shower, walking your dog, etc. It’s a skeleton of the routine and the meat on it can be changed daily, weekly, monthly – whatever works for you. 

A lot depends on whether you are a morning person or not. 

If you are, you can cram a lot more stuff in your morning routine, and if you aren’t you can pretty much skip it altogether – except the bare necessities, of course. I would still recommend getting one or two of the things you enjoy first thing in the morning, even if you don’t consider yourself to be a morning person whatsoever.

It’s a good idea to avoid having social media as a part of your routines. 

At night it’ll make falling asleep afterwards harder and will most likely affect the sleeping itself; before bed you need to get calm and have some quiet time and social media is agitating at best. 

In the morning it just wastes precious time, when you only have an hour to get ready, it’s definitely not a great idea to throw twenty minutes of it away scrolling Instagram. You can fit a ton of stuff in that time, it’s just counterproductive to be on your phone instead. 

I can’t count how many times someone told me they didn’t have time for a routine and then proceeded to admit spending the most part of the morning on social media.

With all that being said, I think morning and evening routines are the best thing and are totally worthy of putting time and thought into them. Do you have a routine? Share it in the comments!