It’s been about a month into the school year.
Your schedule is packed-in like a bad Tetris player with only tiny holes here and there.
Any white space left on the calendar is apportioned to bathroom breaks, eating lunch and dinner comprised of snack bars, and telephone networking calls.
There are far too many awesome things to do. You had no idea you’d have to decide between five things today.
All of a sudden the club you wanted to take a leadership position in schedules a meeting during another club’s you had RSVP’d for which turns out is also…
during a company’s presentation you were interested in…
during your learning team’s group project meeting time to get that project done that’s due within the hour…
during the time in which you have to study for that midterm tomorrow…
during the time in which you’re supposed to email that one alumnus you met for coffee yesterday…
AND during the time you’re supposed to scarf down lunch before another set of 4 hours of class.
It’s a lot. But don’t feel sorry for us. This is a top business school program, of course it should be like that. Plus, it’s not even the real life, it’s school!
The point is not to evoke pity. The point is:
“Welcome to Overwhelm. Get used to it.” -A wise second year MBA student
Things aren’t going to stop. Nor will life. You’ve chosen and applied for this. THIS is the CBS experience. THIS is why it’s a top program attracting the top leaders from around the world.THIS is why not everyone gets in.
So how do you get ready for something like THIS, be it school, your career, your days?
At this point in time, you should have:
Each day brings a new start. A new opportunity to put in place all that you have setup. But unlike a line of code, you aren’t an automatic program. You have to play out each day. These steps you’ve taken help guide you. They help reduce the mental effort required, but there’s still effort. There’s still waking up.
Most likely you’ve set an alarm. It goes off in the morning. You have a choice:
You can hit the snooze. -OR- You can wake up and get started.
Answer: simply start the day off then and there, wake up and go
Okay genius, next you’ll say the secret to financial success is just picking the right stocks….
Let me explain. I hit snooze far more than I’d like. I’m right there with you in delaying the start of my day.
Often, it takes on another form: I sit there in bed trying not to go to sleep but not wanting to get up and get started, so I simply sit there and stare, racing through thoughts in my mind.
Here’s the truth:
Unless you get 20 minutes of sleep, you won’t feel rested, as you won’t get into stage 2 sleep. So those 7 minutes actually make you MORE tired.
Unless you get 90 minutes of sleep, you won’t get a standard REM cycle in, removing the benefit of consolidating your memories through long term potentiation.
Further, hitting snooze signals to your mind that there’s no urgency to get up, that the day can just pass by whenever, however. Forget discipline, routines, timeliness, just chill bro, just chill for 7 more minutes, come on…
Wait, what happened to all the talk of THIS happening. CBS, Career, Life…oh right, it’s still going on.
So as soon as you get up, and join the rest of the world, you realize there has been no change in the intensity of that pace, Rise and Shine.
So, you have to match that level of intensity and bring yourself up from a more laissez faire intensity. And it is this difference that causes stress.
You speed through the morning shower, rush through breakfast, run over people on the sidewalk/switch lanes on the highway to get there faster, check your phone to see 47 new unread emails that came in that morning.
Welcome back to THIS.
When Snooze meets THIS, overwhelm evolves into stress.
An extra seven minutes could have allowed you to enjoy a longer time in the shower, to take a few extra deep, slow breaths.
An extra seven minutes could have allowed you to pause and sip your coffee, to get gracefully to your destination, to mentally prepare yourself for the crazy day ahead.
An extra seven minutes could have made overwhelm manageable.
So how do you get up?
Create a morning routine. (#RoutineMeBro …yes 2 bro references stemming from a ridiculous shared cab ride this past weekend)
Dan Elrod in Miracle Morning highlights a few great steps in motivating yourself to get up and ready at the first alarm:
- Set intentions night before
- Often what you think last before you go to bed is first thing you will think in morning
- Decide to actively and mindfully create positive expectation for the next morning, that you will wake up ready to go (not that you will wake up tired)
- Move your alarm clock across the room
- When it goes, you have to get out of bed to turn it off
- After it’s off, brush your teeth
- Then drink a full glass of water
- Then change into gym clothes or jump in the shower
- Then begin the SAVERS program
- Silent meditation
- Affirmations
- Visualization
- Exercise
- Read
- Scribe
Tim Ferris of the Four Hour Work Week and human guinea pig offers his routine:
- Make bed
- Meditate with app like Headspace #TheresAnApp4That
- Hang on a bar or upside down
- Make tea
- Journal
See any common threads between the two?
I’ve been working on owning my own morning routine that has gone through many iterations. Here’s my morning routine:
- Make bed
- Open blinds
- Spin my singing bowl
- Say my affirmations
- Change out of pjs into gym shorts
- Start and make bulletproof coffee
- Trigger point stretch
- Read
- Journal
- Shower
Do I get through all of these? Sometimes.
Do I ever hit the snooze? Yes.
Why do I have these?
Each one of these wakes up a different part of me: physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, biologically.
At a given point in time, one of these things is what needs to be woken up the most, that part of me which is so asleep it holds up the rest from waking up.
So, by waking up all parts of me in the morning, I find all those things which excites me, which motivates me to get out of bed. To not hit snooze.
What excites you to jump out of bed in the morning?