Wake Up Routine: How to Feel Fresh in The Morning in Just 3 Simple Steps

This wake up routine will teach you how to feel fresh in the morning, and the best thing about it is that it takes only 3 easy steps. So, let me help you get rid of slow and groggy mornings by showing you my 3 steps to wake up fresh! The first step is to stay away from your smartphone for the first 30 minutes of the morning, pretty easy, right? Postponing staring into your smartphone first thing in the morning helps your body finalize the processes connected to the night of sleep you just had. The second step is to drink some water. This step helps you not only rehydrate after waking up, but it also kickstarts your metabolism. Finally, postpone ingesting caffeine (fancy for drinking coffee) for at least 90 minutes after waking up. To keep it short, this helps you avoid the afternoon ‘crash’, thus also making you not need another coffee in the afternoon, which in turn will decrease the quality of your sleep the following night. Let’s get started on what is probably the best wake up routine you will find.

Introduction: What My Wake Up Routine Is and Why It’s Important

I used to envy people who can just get up in the morning and be a fountain of energy and motivation. Some of these people can do that because that is how god / nature / (or just INSERT whatever you believe in) made them (lucky bastards), but some of them were able to become that way by working on themselves. Well, I was neither of those two groups. I was the one who had a hard and miserable time being awake until about midday. So, if you are like I used to be, then this is for you.

If waking up is agony for you, then this piece will hopefully help you, like it helped me. After loads of trials and loads of errors, I was able to pin down a couple of things that you can do with almost zero effort and that take almost zero time to do (because I tell you mostly what not to do). These steps will help you wake up fresh and not have such a miserable time staying up through the first part of the day like you used to.

Enough beating around the bush, It’s pretty simple, there are 3 steps to follow for the best wake up routine:

• Don’t. Use. Your. Smartphone. At least for the first 30 min after waking.
• Drink water.
• Postpone drinking coffee or ingesting caffeine in any way (just in case you want to cheat).

Since I started doing these three simple things in the morning, I was able to set the stage for getting the most out of my mornings. It is literally the very first part of my morning routine that lays the foundation for me to build myself a great morning on top of. Because I am very picky about what I spend my time on, I love these steps. The only time needed to take to do them is the total amount of time you need to get up from bed and pour yourself a glass of water. The rest is just being disciplined, which after time becomes a habit, which in turn means zero time used.

Now let’s take a look at each of the three points listed above. I will explain each one and why they are important, what my experience is with each one, and how I implemented them into my morning routine. Beware if you read this, and you don’t follow the steps, then it’s on you because now you know. 🙂

Why You Shouldn’t use your Smartphone The First 30 Minutes after Waking

Smartphones are great inventions, they allow us to stay up to date with what is happening in the world around us, to stay connected with our loved ones and to capture nice moments and save them for later. You can feel the ‘but’ coming, right? Well, you’re right, there is a ‘but’. For most of our 200,000-300,000 years of existence, smartphones did not exist, so they are still sort of new to us, especially to our brain circuitry. Before the onset of sleep and after waking are two very significant times every day for every human being. Smartphones can drastically affect the quality of sleep, if we use them right before going to sleep, but they can also alter the state of our mind at the beginning of the day.

Why Is It Important to Not Use Your Smartphone Right after Waking

As cool as smartphones can be, they can trigger anxiety and stress in the morning. While our body and mind are trying to finalize the processes at the end of a night of sleep, we are bombarding it with a massive inflow of information and dopamine triggering stimuli from our smartphones. These stimuli may include bright and vibrant colors that are a giant contrast to the dark room we wake up in or the natural light coming from our window. A message or E-Mail containing bad news can also prevent you from having a peaceful morning where you can gather your thoughts and start the day smoothly. All these things above contribute to a heightened level of stress and anxiety in the morning. Needless to say, interrupting our process of waking with smartphone exposure can lead to emotional instability, a lack in creativity and problem-solving abilities throughout the day.

By waiting at least 30 minutes before taking a look at your smartphone in the morning, you allow your brain and body to successfully complete the processes related to the night of sleep you just had. This includes the processing of emotions, consolidation of memory, refilling creativity juices and much, much more. These processes can get cut short by using your phone too early after waking. To find out more about this, you can listen to Dr. Andrew Huberman’s Podcast Episode ‘Master Your Sleep & Be More Alert When Awake’.

My Experience with The 30-Minute Rule

Since I respect this self-imposed rule, my mornings have been much more peaceful, my mind much more flexible after starting the day and, for me, most importantly, I am more emotionally stable. At first, it was difficult to stick to not picking up my phone and quickly checking what’s new. But I realized that by allowing myself to have those peaceful 30 minutes without it after waking, whatever waits for me when turning on the screen for the first time has a much lower impact on my well-being. I think of it like this: if bad news wait for me inside a message or in a notification, in which case will it be easier for me to deal with the news? After waking up properly without touching my smartphone, or right after I open my eyes while my mind is much more vulnerable to stimulation?

Believe it or not, waiting these 30 minutes after waking before picking up my smartphone really made a difference for me. I can say that for sure because on the days I find myself to be more irritable and anxious are usually days that I don’t respect this rule (I am not perfect, I know). The benefit I appreciate the most is that when problems or challenges come my way, it is much easier for me to take a reason-based approach to finding a solution without getting affected emotionally.

As this article is about the Dos and Don’ts after waking, I will not delve into smartphone usage before going to sleep at night.

Action Step

There are a bunch of things you can do to avoid your phone in the morning, but I will go through a couple low-effort methods. The best method is basically to just have the willpower to stay away and to understand that the benefit of doing so is greater than that of picking it up and getting high on that hit of cheap dopamine. These are my suggestions:

• Keep it off—Turning your phone on takes time, so it’s a hurdle to overcome which will discourage you from using it.
• You are afraid that friends or family might call or text during the night for help with something? No problem, no need to turn the phone off, you can put it on silent or focus-mode and just add exceptions for notifications coming from certain apps or messages and calls from certain contacts. Like that, you can be sure you can be contacted only in case of an emergency. Otherwise, you can enjoy our chill morning.
• Keep it in a room you don’t have business in until later in the morning.
• If you can’t hold back, and you live with someone, give it to that person and ask them to only give it back to you half an hour after you wake up. Even better, if you live with someone, and they want to reap the benefits of not using their phone first thing in the morning also, then just swap phones before going to sleep at night. Don’t swap back until both of you completed the 30-Minute rule.

The whole point is that you should remove the smartphone from yourself, if you can’t do that, then you should remove yourself from it. If you can’t control yourself, then don’t expose yourself to it. There are things like lockboxes for this, but I won’t go into that.

For me, turning it off is what works best because as lazy as I am in the morning, I am too lazy to wait for the thing to turn on, so I just leave it and start my morning routine.

How Drinking Water after Waking Benefits Helps You Wake Up Fresh

This section is rather short and, for most of you, pretty self-explanatory. Drinking a glass or two of water right after waking is beneficial in many ways, but I will cover only the most significant here. These benefits being, rehydration after sleep, eliminating toxins and activating your metabolism after sleep. If you want to find out more claims about how drinking water first thing in the morning might help you, you can read more about it here.

How to Feel Fresh in The Morning: Rehydration after Sleep

During sleep, we don’t drink water… obviously. So, if we are decent human beings who actually give their best to get the impossible 8 hours of sleep every night, that means our body goes for 8 hours without hydrating. This can lead to mild dehydration by the time you wake up, which, even if apparently not scientifically proven, explains why your pee might be darker colored first thing in the morning.

As recommended by Dr. Andrew Huberman in this episode of his podcast, drinking 0.5 — 1L of water will rehydrate your body after waking. This will give you an energy boost, as your body will have an easier time moving nutrients through the blood that has just been refreshed by the intake of water. These nutrients help fuel your organs and get them going so you can start your day, especially your brain. Getting hydrated first thing in your morning routine will also help transport toxins through your body to the place they get dumped out of your body eventually.

Hot Tip: Add a pinch of sea salt to your water. This basically makes the water an electrolyte drink containing minerals and nutrients that hydrate your body even better than plain tap water or bottled water.

Kickstarting Your Metabolism

The way you feel sleepy after waking is not only your perception of how waking up feels, your whole body feels like that more or less. This includes digestion, metabolism, and many other body functions.

Drinking the above-mentioned 0.5 — 1L of water will get your digestion going. This will help in case you took some dinner with you to bed the night before, or you are preparing for a royal breakfast. Having some water after waking helps get your stomach to wake up and get to work.

As mentioned above in the rehydration section, the transport of nutrients around your body and the absorption of newly ingested nutrients gets kickstarted by drinking water after waking. This is important because the faster your body can metabolize nutrients, the quicker these nutrients reach your brain and all your other organs. This boosts energy levels.

Action Step

There is not much one can do or not do to screw this up, you basically just need to get up and go drink water. The only problem I experienced with this was forgetting to do it and jumping to the next thing in my morning routine. This is what I did to solve it.

I prepare myself a 0.5—1L bottle filled with water and the tip of a teaspoon of sea salt mixed into it the night before, and I leave it in a place I know I will drink it the next morning before doing anything else. I suggest the following places:

• Bathroom sink next to your toothbrush
• Bedside
• In the bedroom doorway (best when you live alone)
• Kitchen counter
• Even the toilet is a good place as you eventually end up there in the morning
• Sticky note in one of the above places—in case you store the bottle in the fridge overnight

This will help you not forget to drink water the following morning.

Why It’s Important to Postpone Caffeine Intake Until at Least 90 Minutes after Waking

Don’t get discouraged, this is not me trying to put in a bad word for good ol’ caffeine. Caffeine is great, I love it and I consume it every day. There is a catch with caffeine, though, consuming it too early in the day might be counter-productive. For the ‘I drink coffee right after getting out of bed’ crowd, I am happy you read this far, hate to see you go, but I understand why you will leave this page and never return again.

All jokes aside, I will now briefly explain what I mean. There is this molecule in our bodies called Adenosine, which is a neuromodulator. I will keep away from all the scientific jargon, so this is straightforward to understand. Our body produces adenosine while we are awake. This buildup of adenosine when processed by the body causes feelings of sleepiness. To sum this up, the longer we are awake, the more adenosine builds up in our body, which leads to sleepiness in the evening. During the deep stages of sleep, adenosine levels drop as the body clears it. This means that when you wake up in the morning after a good night of sleep, your adenosine levels should be zero, and you should be ready to rock, right? That would be nice, but things are not so simple. Even after a good night’s sleep, we have leftover adenosine that needs to get cleared by the body. That leftover adenosine is partly what causes us to feel sleepy or groggy after we slam our alarm clock against the wall.

Now to finally get to the point. Caffeine is an adenosine receptor antagonist, which basically means that ingesting caffeine too early can interrupt the process of clearing leftover adenosine from your body in the morning. At first, this sounds good, right? Isn’t that the point, to not feel sleepy anymore? You might ask. Well, again, it’s not that simple. When the effect of caffeine wears off, the process of adenosine clearance resumes, a process during which you again feel sleepy and groggy. If consumed too early, caffeine is basically the reason you get the afternoon ‘crash’ that leads to you grabbing another coffee. This then puts you in a vicious spiral because the afternoon coffee messes with your sleep during the coming night, which in turn results in potentially having less deep sleep. Less deep sleep means less adenosine clearance, which leads to increased leftover adenosine levels in the morning, putting you in an even worse place than the previous morning. You get the point. A more in-depth explanation about the adenosine mechanism you can find in this Huberman Lab episode.

Lack of energy, difficulty to concentrate and irritability can all be symptoms of consuming caffeine too early in the morning. The worst thing about this, is that once this trend starts it can throw you into a spiral, but worry not. If you have the willpower to read the whole explanation around adenosine and what it does, you have all it takes to break the bad habit of drinking your coffee too early.

Benefits of Having Coffee at Least 90 Minutes after Waking

This section speaks for itself when put into contrast with the one above. The entire thing is pretty straightforward, wait an hour and a half at least before having the first cup of coffee. Doing so will:

• Spare you of the afternoon crash and craving caffeine later in the day
• It will improve your sleep that day
• It will prevent you from entering a vicious spiral of bad sleep, low energy and lack of concentration

My Experience with Waiting at Least 90 Minutes before Ingesting Caffeine

I must be honest, my first coffee ever was when I was 22 years old. Don’t ask me if that was the night before an important exam during college, I admit nothing. So even though I started drinking coffee quite late, I did have the bad habit of drinking it too early and drinking too much of it throughout the day. No wonder my sleep was bad during college and I never felt rested in the morning. This also resulted in sleepiness in the afternoon, especially after eating lunch.

Once, I made a rule for myself to drink coffee after completing my morning routine, everything clicked. The alertness coming from the coffee lasts longer, and I don’t experience a crash in the afternoon. The need for a second or even a third cup of coffee later in the day slowly faded. Now I drink one coffee every morning after breakfast along with a cup of Yerba maté. This keeps me going all day, and my sleep doesn’t suffer.

Action Step

Thinking of stopping to drink coffee right out of bed as you might be used to sounds frightening, even terrifying for some. Getting rid of a bad habit is very hard, especially if you expect to do it immediately. Trust me, it’s not that bad. Instead, try this:

• Try to postpone drinking coffee first thing in the morning by doing something else you need to do anyway instead. For example, instead of drinking coffee at home before work, drink it at work, or take it to go on the way to work and drink it there. Just make sure this happens at least one and a half hours after you wake up.
• Do something else that helps wake you up, like a cold shower. This helps jumpstart your energy and alertness levels naturally by activating your nervous system, boosting mood and circulation, plus the effect is immediate. This builds you a bridge until you get to drink your first coffee later in the morning. You can find more about cold showers and their effects here.
• If you live with someone, just ask them to hold you accountable for following the rule. Nobody likes to get told they were too chicken to follow something as simple as this.

The way I implemented this rule into my morning routine was by following the cold shower habit replacement. I like cold showers, and it helped me cross both things off my morning routine list.

Don’t worry if it takes some time to break this habit, if you miss a day or two, don’t stop, It’s completely fine, it’s part of the journey of getting better.

Conclusion: Wake Up Routine to Teach You How to Feel Fresh in The Morning

If you are someone who is slow and groggy in the morning and want to make waking up easier, then just follow the steps above. These steps not only help you wake up, but they lay the foundation on which you can build yourself a great morning routine on. I use them every single day and can say they work wonders in helping set the stage for other things that help build my alertness, boost my cognitive performance and give me loads of energy.

The Best Wake Up Routine In A Nutshell

• Drink 0.5-1L of water first thing in the morning (add sea salt for electrolytes). Benefits:
  • Rehydration after sleep and eliminating toxins
  • Kickstarting your metabolism and getting nutrients to your brain and all the other organs
• Don’t use your smartphone for the first 30 minutes of being awake. Benefits:
  • Let your body finalize all sleep-related processes from the night of sleep you just had
  • Better creativity
  • Better problem-solving
  • Emotional stability
  • Less stress and anxiety
• Postpone coffee at least 90 minutes after waking up
  • No afternoon crash
  • Boosts alertness throughout the day
  • Enhances sleep

To implement these steps at the beginning of your morning routine, you just need to follow the action steps in every section. I did and they work, I promise.

Other Relevant Articles

• Hack Your Metabolism in 14 Days: How to Lose Weight by Fasting Without Starving Yourself
• 40-Minute (Short) Wim Hof Morning Routine Template: Get Cold & Get Breathing
• 6 Benefits of Cold Shower in a Morning Routine & a How-To Guide
• For Busy Individuals: 75-Minute Morning Routine Template to Wake Up Energized and Crush Sleepiness
• Cardio Exercises for Weight Loss You Can Do NOW: The Aerobic Zone

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