The Worst Morning Routine by Dr Huberman
“All I want to know is where I’m going to die so i’ll never go there” - Munger
Let’s invert the question “What is the perfect morning routine?”.
Here are the 5 things to do in the morning if you want to disrupt your body clock, get poor sleep quality and set your day in motion in the worst possible way.
Hit snooze and stay in bed
Grab the phone and start scrolling
Keep the curtains and blinds drawn
Drink caffeine immediately
Don’t do anything challenging in the morning
Hit snooze and stay in bed
Now you know we love to hit that snooze button at No More Snooze, there’s no greater feeling than saying ‘no’ to the world first thing in the morning. Those extra 10 minutes keep us warm, comfortable and protect us from the real world.
After hitting snooze 2 or 3 times, the next best thing to do is stay under the covers and milk every last second in bed before you literally have to get up. Start work at 9am and work from home, get out of bed at 8.59am. Need to catch the train to work, get out of bed at the last second so that you inevitably have to run to catch the train. Recently unemployed, stay in bed all day!
There are so many other advantages to starting your day like this and it compounds when you couple this with scrolling on social media first thing in the morning.
Grab the phone and start scrolling
You 100% missed something important whilst you slept. Grab your phone and check out what your second cousin said about her child’s school on Facebook. Quick, it’s popping off on Twitter, Elon musk tweeted ‘Doge lol’.
Now you’re caught up on last night’s news, make sure to browse Instagram and TikTok before getting out of bed. You need to stay on top of the latest viral dance trends.
Bonus points if you keep the curtains drawn and light off whilst you do this for maximum effectiveness.
Keep the curtains and blinds drawn
Avoid sunlight in the morning. It triggers a spike in healthy cortisol which anchors your body clock and metabolism making it easier to fall asleep at night.
Keep the curtains drawn in your house and don’t go outside before midday. The darkness shields you from the outside world… if you can’t see it then it doesn’t exist.
And in turn, this keeps your circadian rhythm second guessing when the day begins and ends. This leads to poor sleep quality - really important if you want to start the day hitting snooze and staying in bed again.
Dr Huberman says that avoiding sunlight in the morning is guaranteed to get your neurochemicals out of whack and start your day in the worst possible way, so make sure to take this seriously.
Combine staying in the dark with the first two morning actions and the rest of the day will follow.
Drink caffeine immediately
Once you finally haul yourself out of bed, grab some coffee or drink an energy drink immediately.
Caffeine, says Dr Huberman, completely blocks our Adenosine receptors and once it wears off we get a huge crash and fatigue kicks in in the afternoon.
His advice for making sure you get that afternoon crash is to get caffeine into your system within the first 90 minutes of waking up, but the earlier the better!
My personal favourite is two cups of black coffee within 30 minutes of waking up and then total unproductivity around 2pm until the fatigue passes (if it does).
Don’t do anything challenging in the morning
The morning is the time for you to reject any hard work. You are still in the process of waking up goddammit.
Don’t do anything too physical, you might pull a muscle and don’t even think about getting a full workout in.
And give your brain a rest, no need to jump into a hard cognitive task early in the morning. It's still trying to kick into gear after your morning routine.
Go after the easy tasks on your list first, but to be honest if you have a list at all then you’re doing it all wrong.
Bonus: Don’t have a plan
Just go about your morning without any structure or plan. Tackle tasks as they pop into your head and don’t even think about writing a to-do-list. For optimal results, do multiple tasks at once. Watch Youtube whilst you brush your teeth. If you need to iron a shirt for work then watch 4 or 5 more TikTok videos whilst the iron heats up.
This really helps to keep the brain engaged and you can carry this organisation throughout the day until your mid-afternoon crash.
Let’s be serious for a second
That was quite a fun exercise. Inverting the question makes it easier to understand how to improve our morning routine.
The question ‘What is the perfect morning routine?’ is challenging to answer. Perfection is subjective and there is no need for us to try and be perfect. But we can try to avoid the things that would make the morning disastrous.
Take the question ‘How to get rich?’. That’s a damn bloody hard question to answer and there are hundreds of possible ways to get rich yet not all of them are perfect for you as an individual.
Now flip the question ‘How do I stay poor?’. That sets out the things to avoid and we can lean into our experiences, for example:
Buy expensive coffee every day
Buy branded clothes
Buy the latest gadgets and games.
Go for the fillet steak instead of the pasta dish.
Now will those things make us rich? No of course not, but it will help us to build better financial habits, spend less money and perhaps we are left with some surplus cash at the end of the month to put into savings or buy a few shares in a company.
Now that’s how to start getting rich.
The fundamentals matter.
The basics matter.
I’ve been guilty of searching for the perfect morning routine. All that ends up happening is that I try too many things at once and ultimately end up failing.
Try avoiding one thing at a time.
For example, stop grabbing your phone and mindlessly scrolling through social media as soon as you wake up, but don’t get out of bed, keep the curtains drawn. Just lay there. Soon you’ll feel bored and get up anyway. Do that every day for a month and then try avoiding something else.
My list here is not exhaustive, but it’s a starting point, and the words are from the horse's mouth in Dr Huberman, a very well respected Neuroscientist and podcaster at the Huberman Lab.
For me, my one habit is to use the Alarmy app (check out my review post) to get out of bed immediately. But I’ll still scroll through social media as soon as I'm up. I’ll phase this out eventually but in my own time.
We have no chance of going from lazy slob with bad morning habits to waking up at 4am, getting in a David Goggin’s style workout and becoming a super disciplined individual.
Discipline is muscle. Let’s train it, get in the repetitions, layer in healthy habits and avoid unhealthy habits over time and let’s check our progress in 6 to 12 months.