Hey there. Welcome back to the Crank It Up podcast. And this is a little pod snack, if you will.
Just a quick bite sized reminder of something you probably already know and just might need to be reminded of today. And that is, drum roll please, the importance of a morning routine, but, specifically, the importance of a morning routine throughout the different seasons of your life.
Encouragement to Establish a Morning Routine
Now, as you know, I’m in the full on empty nester season. I’m in midlife, full-on empty nester. My girls are grown. They’re out of the house. They are making their own money and their own decisions, and it might be common to think that, well, I could get up whenever I wanted to. I could have whatever kind of schedule I wanted.
Why would I possibly need a morning routine? You need a morning routine when you are a midlife/empty nester even more to give yourself that purpose in the morning. And I’m going to take this one step further, because my children don’t live at home, when I go visit them and then I come back to a house that has a different energy, right?
I hesitate to use the word empty because that feels almost lonely and that’s not what it is. It’s just that the energy is different. Right? Because there are less humans in the house.
There are more dogs and less humans and the energy is different and you go away and you spend time with your family and you come back and you need that morning routine even more the next day.
Let’s say you are a parent of little ones, toddlers, middle grade, high schooler, whatever it might be, really, truly, any season, that morning routine, that time that you set aside for you is so important during every parenting season and the parenting season that is the season of parenting grown ups.
So, your morning routine, you already know I’m passionate about it. I talk about it all the time, and while one might think that when your kids get older and your schedule feels a little more loose, you might not need a morning routine. I’m here to tell you, you need it more than ever.
When your children are very young and you feel like you’re not sleeping or you’re in middle grade or high school and you think you were just so busy I can hardly, you know, keep my head above water.
Emphasizing the significance of morning routines in any parenting season
You might not think you need a morning routine. I am telling you from my lived experience having been through every season of life and now firmly planted with 2 feet in the empty nest season, that every season of parenting life, every season of life needs a morning routine.
Every season needs a morning routine, and the empty nest season needs it more than ever. I believe it’s the season that you might think you don’t.
In other seasons, I think the morning routine might go out the window due to busyness. Right? I think when you get to empty nest and the kids are gone, you stop thinking you need one. So it’s less about being busy and more about you just don’t think you need.
I am telling you, you need it more than ever, because you need that structure and you need that purpose when you wake up in the morning. And, again, if your kids are out of the house and you go to visit them for a weekend like I just recently did, coming back to a house that might feel different than it did for a lot of years, you need that morning routine more than ever.
Because it’s really easy to get sad as an empty nester. It can be easy to feel a little lost. It can be easy to get weighed down by the shift in identity. Everything’s changing. Yes.
Your hormones are changing physically but your whole identity is shifting and changing too.
And it can get easy to be weighed down by all of that. But when you have a morning routine and you wake up in the morning and you know exactly what you’re doing for the first few hours of your day, I guarantee you it will help you navigate the rest of your day with more calm, with more confidence, with more energy.
Morning routine as a critical tool to manage emotions and identity shifts
When you wake up with that purpose and that structure already in place and step right into your operating system, especially when the house is empty. And, to reference other parenting seasons, especially when you’re so busy you can hardly keep your head above water, especially when you have little babies in the house and you need to take care of you.
If you wake up in the morning and step right into an operating system that is a set of habits designed specifically to help you feel and function your best, you can navigate the rest of the day.
So to my midlifers and to specifically my empty nesters, if you don’t have a morning routine, this is your homework. Alright? This is your homework after listening to this podcast, if you need one. It’s just too easy to get bogged down in the sadness and the loss and the identity shift without a morning routine.
Significance for parents in the thick of parenting to find time for self-care
If you’re in the thick of parenting, you’re like you’re in the weeds of it and you’re like, girl, I’ll have time. You need a morning routine, because you’ve got to take care of yourself to take care of others.
If you’ve got little babies and you’re like, I haven’t slept in 6 days, you still need a teeny tiny little morning routine because that morning routine is just a tiny set of habits that sets aside time to take care of you.
And when you take care of yourself, then you can take care of others. And those tiny little sets of habits, those are designed to help you feel and function your best.
When you set yourself up in the morning, you set yourself up for a better day.
And if we can string together some mornings and string together some days and string together some weeks, pretty soon we find that we’re stringing together a life that has purpose and structure and direction and we’re making some movement.
We’re moving the needle a little bit on those goals and dreams that we have for this one precious life, this one shot that we have on this planet.
So, again, if you don’t have a morning routine, whatever season of life that you’re in, but especially to my empty nesters, today is your day. Today is the day that you are configuring and designing a morning routine that helps you feel and function your best.
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