11 Morning Habits That Will Transform Your Life

In order to prime yourself to think creatively in the day ahead, your morning shouldn’t be a thoughtless drag.

The author Annie Dillard once wrote that “how we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives,” but she might have been being too general. Recent studies show that it’s not how we spend our days that’s most important to our lifelong happiness and creativity but how we spend our mornings.

Our mornings set us up either to be primed for creative insights or to be numbed and mindless, merely trudging through our day. Some of us identify as “morning people” while others are anything but; yet, either way, it matters less what time we wake up at but what we do with that time. Creative people live life differently in a variety of ways, but perhaps none more important than what they do with their morning hours.

So check out a few of the scientifically proven habits that the most creative individuals use each morning and see if it’s not just your mornings that are transformed but your lifelong creativity as well.

1. Make time to be mindful

Making time for mindfulness in the morning is one of the most important habits a person can form for her creative progression. Recent studies show that taking the time to meditate makes people more creative and increases mental clarity.

Specifically, “open-monitoring meditation”—a meditation of clearing your mind, thinking not of a single concept, person, or object, but instead being open to anything that flits through your head—is particularly conducive to creativity.

People in the study who engaged in open-monitoring meditation were significantly better at generating new, creative ideas than those who either did not meditate or meditated differently.

2. Stay disconnected

People only have so much time to focus and stay creative so wasting that time on relatively thoughtless pursuits in the morning is poor management of both your time and your creative juices. Avoid tasks like checking emails or writing out lists or memos as the first thing you do and instead focus that precious time and attention towards more rigorous, creatively trying tasks that require the very best from you.

If, however, emails or similar morning tasks are hyper time-sensitive, it’s probably worth it to get up a touch earlier so you can focus first on creative tasks then get to emails and such later. We’re all granted small windows of time at which we’re most creative—it’s a shame to waste them.

3. Keep drinking coffee