Being mindful is one of the most beneficial habits you can adopt into your life. And it’s a habit that you can practice at any point throughout your day. But having a mindfulness morning routine? Absolute gold.
Starting your morning with mindfulness grounds you, helps you feel present, and can prepare your brain to tackle whatever comes your way throughout the day. Simply put, it’s setting up a strong foundation for a good day.
There’s a gentleness that comes along with practicing mindfulness, and it’s a gentleness that most of us desperately need in our lives.
So if you want to be more mindful, here are a few simple ways you can have a mindfulness morning routine!
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Be mindful of your body
Taking time to notice how your body feels is a healthy habit that most of us don’t make enough time for. But when we do, we become better connected to our bodies and that gives us an intuition that leads us to making healthier choices.
Here are some ways to have a mindfulness morning routine to help you connect with your body.
Stretch for 5 minutes & focus on how it feels
Our bodies hold a lot of tension, stress, soreness, and pain, and we often just get used to those feelings. Taking a few minutes each morning to stretch and to actually pay attention to how it feels teaches us about our own bodies.
It can show us where tension may be, or even just help us be more mindful of how good it feels to stretch.
How to do it: take a few dedicated minutes to stretch, and really focus on how you feel with each movement. Notice which muscles feel tight, any pain points, and even what feels really good.
Try mindful eating
If you have busy mornings, then probably the last thing you have time to do is sit and eat slowly and focus on each bite. Even if your mornings aren’t busy, this might seem like a weird thing you just don’t want to do.
But trying this out, even for a few days, can teach us a lot about our bodies and our eating habits. For example, most of us eat and eat until we are so full that it feels like eat bite is punching us in the stomach.
But adding mindful eating to your morning routine can teach you things like how much food it actually takes before you start to get full. It can also help us to enjoy the eating process, which most of us don’t really do anymore.
How to do it: Put away distractions and eat your breakfast slowly, focusing on each bite and how it makes you feel. How the food tastes, its texture. Notice when you begin to feel full.
Be mindful of your mind
Depending on what’s going on in that brain of yours, focusing on it too much might feel scary or overwhelming. But paying better attention to your thoughts, feelings, worries, fears, etc. can help you in so many ways.
Learning to accept and feel what’s on your mind is a challenging task, but one worth doing. Here’s how to do that as part of your mindfulness morning routine.
Get your thoughts out without structure.
Journaling is a habit I will recommend over and over because it helps us really get to know our minds well. And while structured journal prompts are amazing, (and I even make journal prompts here for you on this site), this particular exercise focuses on the opposite of prompts.
Instead, it encourages giving your brain free reign to think what it wants to think, and lead you wherever it wants to go.
Most of the time when we journal, we are simply scratching the surface of our minds. And maybe we’re going deeper into certain topics, but it’s still in a mostly controlled environment.
But sometimes being mindful means letting things go wild and just paying attention to what is happening.
How to do this: Lie down with your eyes closed, or grab a notebook if you prefer to write. Set a timer (I recommend at least 10 minutes, and up to 25) and just let your brain go wild.
And here’s the tricky part: don’t control it. Don’t redirect your thoughts, don’t try to shut them down. Just let them be and take notice of what happens.
Doing this may not go well the first time. It can be hard to not redirect our thoughts if they get scary or uncomfortable. But practicing this a few times can help us get really good at letting our brains just be. And doing this sort of ‘brain dump’ can help our minds feel lighter, trust me!
Be mindful of your surroundings
The world around us is beautiful. Our lives are beautiful. In so many ways that most of us don’t acknowledge most of the time.
So taking time in your mindfulness morning routine to really acknowledge your life and your surroundings is important. It can help you feel more connected with yourself, your loved ones, the universe, God, nature.
It can truly ground you and make you feel more grateful. Here’s how to take better notice of your surroundings.
Go for a nature walk
One of the best ways to connect with nature is to get out in it! If you can spare some time in your morning routine, get outside and enjoy some nature.
Or if you normally go to the gym in the mornings, try switching it to an outdoor workout.
As you’re outside, just be an observer. Notice the beauty. Notice the little ways nature is working together. Look at the creatures, the trees, the flowers, the sky, all of it.
And if you want to take it a step further and really learn to be mindful of all of nature’s little details, I can’t recommend this book enough: How to Be an Explorer of the World
How to do it: Get outside for at least 5 minutes and just let yourself be. Take note of the world around you.
Admire 5 things about your home
Of course nature is an amazing thing to be mindful of, but there’s also so much to be grateful for within our own homes.
We often get ‘used to’ our spaces, and may even start to have disdain for them. Have you ever moved out of a house and then started to realize all of the things you miss about that house that you took for granted?
If your mindfulness morning routine includes finding somethings to admire about your home, you will begin to appreciate the home you’ve created more and more each day.
How to do it: Sit down and look around you. Find 5 things that you truly love about your home. It could be as simple as the magnets on the refrigerator, or the feeling of warmth your home carries, or the amount of light you have coming in. It could also be memories that lie within your home. Of family gatherings, or milestone moments, or even just little memories you love looking back on.
Photograph something you find beautiful.
Capturing the beauty that’s around you will help you preserve it. One way to do this is by taking photos of those little things you find stunning.
This could be the way the light is coming through your window and onto your floor. Or a bug on a flower, or even the smallest little obscure thing inside your bathroom.
Just find what makes you feel something, and take photos of it.
How to do it: Each morning, aim to take at least one photo of something you find beautiful. After several days, weeks, months of doing this, you will have a whole album full of small things that brought you joy.
Be mindful of your activities
One of the most powerful ways to practice mindfulness is by really soaking in your activities. From your hobbies, to your time spent with others, to even the simplest day-to-day chores, there is always opportunity to to be more mindful and intentional.
When it comes to a mindfulness morning routine, here’s how you can make this work.
Go distraction-free in your morning routine
Part of being mindful of your activities is simply doing those activities distraction-free.
So throughout your day, if you’re having dinner with your family, or watching a movie with a friend, or even doing your chores, try to be as distraction free as you can.
And in a morning routine, this might just look like keeping your phone on your dresser until it’s time to leave for work. Or it could be simply cutting out the amount of multi-tasking you’re doing so that you’re able to be mindful on a single activity at a time.
Being distracted while life is happening means we’re missing out on a ALOT of important stuff.
How to do it: Commit to going distraction-free each morning for as long as possible. Doing this for at least 30 minutes is a good place to start, but the longer you stretch this distraction-free time, the more you can reap the benefits.
A mindfulness morning routine is one of the best types of morning routines we can give ourselves. Life tends to pass us by unless we make it a point to slow down and fully experience it. That’s what mindfulness is.
No matter what you’re doing throughout your morning, finding ways to ground yourself and be present in the moment is going to keep improving your mind and your life.
If you have a way to practice mindfulness that you didn’t see on this list, let me know in the comments!
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