The Miracle Morning
The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed To Transform Your Life Before 8am
The premise of this book is that by waking up a bit earlier than you normally would, and spending that time on your own personal success ritual consisting of a few key activities, you will dramatically enhance how you feel and improve the quality of your day, and hence your life.
How you wake up and what you do first thing in the morning sets you up for the rest of the day. If you wake up and hit the snooze button, you are subconciously saying that you do not want to rise and experience life. If you wake up with energy and purpose, your day will turn out better.
Hal has some useful tips about sleep and how to get yourself to wake up:
- How you feel in the morning is largely a function of how you think you are going to feel, more than anything else. When you go to sleep thinking "I am not going to get enough sleep, I will be tired tomorrow", you probably will.
- The last thing you think about before going to sleep is probably going to be the first you think about when you wake up. He recommends affirming to yourself that you will wake up feeling refreshed.
- Place you alarm clock on the other side of the room so that you need to get out of bed to turn it off.
- Brush your teeth to help wake up.
- Feeling tired in the morning is often due to dehydration, so he recommends immediately drinking a large glass of water.
Hal explains how and why to set up a daily ritual consisting of the following key activities:
- Silence - this can mean just sitting there and reflecting, or it can mean meditation, or prayer. The idea is to be present in the moment, calm yourself, relax your body, clear your mind, and let stress melt away.
- Affirmations - positive phrases or self talk that you use to reprogram your brain and remind yourself of what is important.
- Visualisation - think about what you want to achieve in each areas of your life, how it would feel, why you want it, who you are committed to becoming, and what steps you will need to take on a regular basis.
- Scribing - write down what you are grateful for, what you're proud of, and what you want to achieve today.
- Reading - read a good book, get inspired, learn a new idea.
- Exercise - get your heart rate up, get energized, improve your mood and alertness.
He describes each of these activities in detail and gives practical advice, including how to order them most effectively. He also describes how to boil each activity down to its essence, so that you can go through the entire process in less than 10 minutes if you are really rushed.
The tone of the book is salesy and hyped, which can be off-putting. Hal also promotes his own website a lot, and encourages you to sign up (and join his mailing list) to get access to someĀ useful content that could've easily been included within the book itself. However it is worth looking past these minor annoyances as the content is great.
Since reading this book I have been following the routine daily, with some small variations. I love it. Starting your day with this routine will give you the energy and focus as a platform upon which to make positive changes and build other good habits.