Van Gogh’s trib­ute to the night sky could give you an inspired morning

You get out of bed, blink your eyes blearily, make a weak attempt to stretch and loosen up, then head to the shower, where you lean against the wall half-asleep and hope the hot water will tease you awake. After you get cleaned up, you trudge down­stairs, inhale a cup of cof­fee, and grudg­ingly walk out the door.

Sound famil­iar?

Not exactly the pic­ture of pur­pose and moti­va­tion, is it?  Wak­ing up is hard, but espe­cially when you do so by an alarm clock (out of neces­sity of course) and by pack­ing your­self full of a stim­u­lant, namely caffeine.

In frus­tra­tion over the inglo­ri­ous way I used to wake up — i.e. very slowly for a cou­ple of hours with a pre­dictable after­noon crash — I’ve brain­stormed and used sev­eral tools effec­tively to get myself off to an inspired start.

Stim­u­late Your Brain as Soon as Possible

If your cur­rent rou­tine isn’t work­ing, it means you need to do some­thing rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent. The oppo­site of walk­ing around half asleep is to get your neu­rons fir­ing around some­thing that chal­lenges them — namely by spark­ing your curios­ity, your bio­log­i­cally inquis­i­tive nature. I don’t mean doing math prob­lems or pick­ing up a Rubik’s cube (though feel free if that tick­les your fancy), but rather by watch­ing some­one pas­sion­ate speak about what fas­ci­nates them.  A ter­rific resources is TED, an orga­ni­za­tion devoted to broad­cast­ing “ideas worth spread­ing.” Reg­u­lar TED con­fer­ences fea­ture speak­ers on sci­ence, art, tech­nol­ogy, pol­i­tics, and busi­ness.  The whole point of a TED talk is that it is sup­posed to rep­re­sent some­thing bril­liant, or at least striv­ing towards bril­liance.  Nearly every sin­gle video I’ve watched has left me run­ning through the con­cept in my head for hours, and got­ten me com­pletely excited about the things I’m work­ing on. Here’s an example:

Ben Dun­lap telling the story of a pas­sion­ate life:

If you want to prac­ti­cally sprint out the door with excite­ment to start your day, this video should do the trick.  And the great thing is that this is one of the longer TED videos, most are 5–10 min­utes long. Also, I per­son­ally find that the sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy talks get me the most moti­vated, pos­si­bly because I don’t gen­er­ally have a sci­ence back­ground and am not gen­er­ally inter­ested in sci­en­tific top­ics, and these videos cause me to use my brain in a dif­fer­ent way. Here’s a science-themed talk that will melt your brain:

Pranav Mis­try: The thrilling poten­tial of Sixth­Sense technology

A Novel Idea

Another sug­ges­tion is to find an inspir­ing book bro­ken up into small sec­tions.  Exam­ples abound, one being  Think on These Things, tran­scrip­tions of speeches from Indian thinker Krish­na­murti.  Each sec­tion is about 5–10 pages and fea­tures the man’s take on var­i­ous top­ics, and his style is Pla­tonic, fea­tur­ing ques­tions and answers about var­i­ous top­ics, from reli­gion to edu­ca­tion to careers.  One of the most inspired men I’ve ever met, my col­lege run­ning teacher, swore by the book.

Another ter­rific book is Wher­ever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Mass­a­chu­setts Med­ical School. The text fea­tures a series of brief (3–5 pages) medi­a­tions done in a vaguely Bud­dhist style.  Some focus on cul­ti­vat­ing con­cen­tra­tion, some on relax­ation, and some on moti­va­tion. It has to be some of the most ethe­real writ­ing in print, and a ter­rific start to a day.

Make a Whole-Hearted Attempt at Stretching

Recent stud­ies have shown that the con­ven­tional wis­dom say­ing stretch­ing with­out warm­ing up increases your risk for injury isn’t true.  For more back­ground, check out this arti­cle from Men’s Health that dispel’s myths about stretch­ing and cov­ers proper stretch­ing tech­nique.  Climb­ing out of bed and doing some full-body stretch­ing for five to ten min­utes is a fan­tas­tic way to wake your­self up and get your blood flowing.

And more­over, it’s some­thing you would never nor­mally do first thing, and there­fore a good option to break your old routine.

Finally, stretch­ing has a mul­ti­tude of health ben­e­fits, includ­ing increased flex­i­bil­ity, injury pre­ven­tion, and stress reduc­tion.  Action builds on action, and start­ing your day by mak­ing a con­tri­bu­tion to your over­all phys­i­cal fit­ness can moti­vate you to suc­ceed in other areas.

Stop and Smell the Rembrandts

I’m gen­er­ally not a fol­lower of high cul­ture — I’ve never actu­ally been to the opera, I don’t often lis­ten to clas­si­cal music, and when vis­it­ing art muse­ums I’m embar­rassed by my lack of knowl­edge, but every time I lis­ten to a piece by Mozart or look at a Monet I’m inspired. There’s a rea­son mil­lions flock every year to see the Mona Lisa and the Sis­tine Chapel — it’s because we are drawn to beau­ti­ful things that test the lim­its of our human­ity. Rolling out of bed and enjoy­ing one of Shakespeare’s son­nets or read­ing the Wikipedia page for the Colos­seum can acti­vate your sense of won­der and allow you to notice the com­plex­ity and beauty of the usu­ally mun­dane, per­func­tory parts of your day.

Throw Out What’s Not Working

Whether or not any of these tips work for you is imma­te­r­ial — the impor­tant thing is to do some­thing. If you’re not happy with the way you feel at the start of your day, then the only option is to change what you’re doing, or you’ll resign your­self to accept­ing monot­ony and even­tu­ally con­vince your­self that your state of mind is out of your hands.