This Is The Best Morning Ritual: 3 Secrets From Research

bakadesuyo.com /2017/05/best-morning-ritual/

14/5/2017

Before we commence with the festivities, just a quick reminder: my first book will be coming out on the
16th and if you preorder before Tuesday, you get awesome bonuses. For more info, click here.

***
A morning ritual sure sounds nice (if it didn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this) but what’s the point of one? What’s it
even supposed to accomplish?

No, you don’t have to eat kale or mechanistically begin planning your day according to some odd formula. You’re
human. The first thing you need to do is get your head on straight. Get your feelings sorted. Your mood.

Research shows your mood in the morning affects your productivity all day:

Researchers found that employees’ moods when they clocked in tended to affect how they felt the
rest of the day. Early mood was linked to their perceptions of customers and to how they reacted
to customers’ moods. And most important to managers, employee mood had a clear impact on
performance, including both how much work employees did and how well they did it.

Seriously, your mood is numero uno. Think you can ignore your feelings or fight them? Think again, Spock.

From The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking :

…when experimental subjects are told of an unhappy event, but then instructed to try not to feel
sad about it, they end up feeling worse than people who are informed of the event, but given no

1/6
 instructions about how to feel. In another study, when patients who were suffering from panic
disorders listened to relaxation tapes, their hearts beat faster than patients who listened to
audiobooks with no explicitly ‘relaxing’ content. Bereaved people who make the most effort to
avoid feeling grief, research suggests, take the longest to recover from their loss.

In fact, one of the biggest reasons you procrastinate is because of negative feelings.

From Temptation: Finding Self-Control in an Age of Excess :

…far and away the most procrastination occurred among the bad-mood students who believed
their mood could be changed and who had access to fun distractions. This group spent nearly 14
of their 15 minutes of prep time goofing off!

So what does a morning ritual need to contain to put you in the right frame of mind to be productive? And happy?
(Yeah, happy is important. This is a “morning ritual”, not a “mourning ritual.”) Just remember PCO:

Purpose
Control
Optimism

Why these three? What do they do? How do you turn these three nouns into a Tyrannosaur of a morning ritual
that will make the Earth tremble at your approach?

I’m so glad you asked…

1) Feel A Sense Of Purpose

You know what’s great first thing in the morning? To feel you’re on a mission. You have a destiny. Your life has
meaning. You’re beginning an epic quest, Frodo.

And as motivation master and bestselling author Dan Pink explains, feeling a sense of purpose is one of the
most motivating things in the known universe. Here’s Dan:

Purpose is, “Am I doing something in service of a cause larger than myself, or, at the very least,
am I making a contribution in my own world?”

And feeling your life has purpose and meaning not only makes you feel alive, it also keeps you alive.

Researchers at Tohoku University in Japan did a 7 year study of over 43,000 adults age 40 to 79 asking if they
had ikigai (a Japanese term for meaning in life) and then tracked their health. People with ikigai were much more
likely to be alive 7 years later.

Via Pursuing the Good Life: 100 Reflections on Positive Psychology:

Even when likely confounds were taken into account, ikigai predicted who was still alive after 7
years. Said another way, 95% of respondents who reported a sense of meaning in their lives were
alive 7 years after the initial survey versus about 83% of those who reported no sense of meaning
in their lives.
2/6
Feeling motivated and living longer isn’t enough for you? Seriously? Okay, how about this? It’ll make you sexy:

Study 2 also found an interaction between physical attractiveness and meaning in life, with more
meaning in life contributing to greater interpersonal appeal for those of low and average physical
attractiveness.

So how do you find purpose without getting a new job working for a charity?

Duke professor Dan Ariely suggests “reframing your experience.” You might not be able to change what you
have to do but you can change how you see it. And when you look at it through the lens of how it can help others,
you’ll often find more motivation.

From Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations:

…if we are feeling bored and unmotivated, we can ask ourselves: “How is the work I’m doing
helping someone down the road? What meaning can I find here?” With this type of mind-set,
chances are that we will be able to find a positive answer.

The work won’t change. Your perspective can. You’re not “filling out boring paperwork.” You’re “helping people
get insurance that could save their lives.” Focus on how you already help others.

(To learn more tips on living an awesome life, check out my book here.)

Okay, you’re filled with purpose. But “it’s the thought that counts” only applies to gifts. How do you get yourself in
the mood to do something about it?

2) Feel In Control
Feeling out of control gets celebrated in pop songs but doesn’t fare as well in performance reviews or happiness
research. (College is over. Sorry.) You want to be happy? Feeling in control is key.

From The Simple Secrets for Becoming Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise:

People with a sense of control in their lives, in both career and relationship, were 66 percent more
likely to report feeling happy and satisfied. (Chou and Chi 2001)

It has this other wonderful side effect I like to call “not dying”:

Limited perceived control over life circumstances is associated with an increased risk of CVD
mortality, independently of classical cardiovascular risk factors, and particularly among those at
apparently low risk.

It helps you get stuff accomplished too.

From The Simple Secrets for Becoming Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise:

3/6
 Research comparing students of similar ability found that the feature that distinguishes those who
maintain a strong work ethic in their studies from those who give up is a sense of control. Those
who expressed a sense of control received significantly higher grades than those who do not.
(Mendoza 1999)

Okay, you get it. Feeling in control in the morning beats eating your Wheaties. But how do you do it?

Set goals for the day ahead. Having concrete goals was correlated with huge increases in confidence and
feelings of control.

From The 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People:

People who construct their goals in concrete terms are 50 percent more likely to feel confident
they will attain their goals and 32 percent more likely to feel in control of their lives. – Howatt 1999

And this isn’t some random connection; it’s working at the neuroscience level. Your brain chills out when you
make decisions and set goals. Start the day calm, not crazed.

From The Upward Spiral:

Making decisions includes creating intentions and setting goals — all three are part of the same
neural circuitry and engage the prefrontal cortex in a positive way, reducing worry and anxiety.
Making decisions also helps overcome striatum activity, which usually pulls you toward negative
impulses and routines. Finally, making decisions changes your perception of the world — finding
solutions to your problems and calming the limbic system.

(To learn the four rituals neuroscience says will make you happy, click here.)

Alright, you’ve set your goals and you feel in control. But it’s still early and you’re gonna need more than a
feeling of calm. You need some energy. Where’s that going to come from?

3) Feel Optimistic
Researchers tested soldiers on endurance. Turns out it had a lot more to do with their head than their legs. The
researchers put it like this: “Both hope and despair are self-fulfilling prophecies.”

From Maximum Brainpower: Challenging the Brain for Health and Wisdom:

…the brain does not want the body to expend its resources unless we have a reasonable chance
of success. Our physical strength is not accessible to us if the brain does not believe in the
outcome, because the worst possible thing for humans to do is to expend all of our resources and
fail. If we do not believe we can make it, we will not get the resources we need to make it. The
moment we believe, the gates are opened, and a flood of energy is unleashed. Both hope and
despair are self-fulfilling prophecies.

Scientific research has come up with a very long list of benefits to being optimistic. Here are just a few:

4/6
So you might think you should take a few minutes in the morning to look in the bathroom mirror and say positive
things to yourself. Too bad that doesn’t work at all.

From Learned Optimism:

Pessimists can in fact learn to be optimists, and not through mindless devices like whistling a
happy tune or mouthing platitudes (“Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”), but by
learning a new set of cognitive skills… We have found that merely repeating positive statements
to yourself does not raise mood or achievement very much, if at all.

So what does? Mental contrasting and implementation intentions.

In English: think about your goal, consider the obstacles, and then figure out how you might be able to overcome
them. You’re more hopeful and persistent when you’ve considered the problems ahead and made a plan.

Via Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined:

A recent study by Duckworth, Heidi Grant Halvorson, Benjamin Loew, Oettingen, and Gollwitzer
asked a group of high school students preparing for the high-stakes, standardized Preliminary
SAT (PSAT) to complete a thirty-minute written intervention that involved mental contrasting
(vividly imagining the goal and writing down possible obstacles) with implementation intentions
(coming up with two if-then contingency plans if an obstacle presents itself). They found that
students undergoing the intervention completed more than 60 percent more practice questions on
the PSAT compared to a placebo control group who were instead asked to write about an
influential person or event in their life.

(To learn the 4 scientific secrets that will make you lucky, click here.)

So you know how to PCO your way to a great morning. Let’s round up what we’ve learned and discover a simple
ritual to do with someone you love that provides big, big benefits in the morning…

Sum Up
Here’s the best morning ritual:

Feel A Sense Of Purpose : Ask, “How does what I do benefit others?” (Selfish people are doomed to
lousy mornings.)
Feel In Control: Set goals for the day. (Your brain will thank you.)
Feel Optimistic: Consider the obstacles to your goals and plan ahead. (I am optimistic that one day I will
find a funny joke to put in these parentheses.)

So what’s a wonderful ritual with big benefits that you can do with someone special? Well, you may already be
doing it…

A hug and a kiss.

Hardly groundbreaking, I know, but you may be skipping this vital ritual and that is an affront to science. And to
your happiness.

Hugs are powerful. Sometimes they tell someone you love them even when you’re not ready to say the words.
5/6
And they have impressive effects on stress — for both hugger and huggee.

From The Simple Secrets for Becoming Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise:

A brief hug with a loved one reduced the effects of stress on blood pressure and heart rate by
half. (University of North Carolina 2003)

And a morning kiss goodbye can extend your life and boost your salary by 30%. (Click here to learn how to be a
better kisser.)

Via The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us :

A ten-year psychology study undertaken in Germany during the 1980s found that men who kissed
their wives before leaving for work lived, on average, five years longer, earning 20 to 30 percent
more than peers who left without a peck good-bye. The researchers also reported that not kissing
one’s wife before leaving in the morning increased the possibility of a car accident by 50
percent. Psychologists do not believe it’s the kiss itself that accounts for the difference but rather
that kissers were likely to begin the day with a positive attitude, leading to a healthier lifestyle.

So some PCO in the morning can lead you to a happy, productive day.

Or just give somebody a big hug and a kiss. It always makes me optimistic about the future. And love is a pretty
good purpose in life. That said, too much hugging and kissing can get out of control…

But that’s a good thing.

Join over 290,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

Related posts:

New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy

New Harvard Research Reveals A Fun Way To Be More Successful

How To Get People To Like You: 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior Expert

6/6