Your Morning Routine: Strengthen Your Relationship with Yourself

How to Strengthen Your Relationship with Yourself with Your Morning Routine

Your morning routine begins with the basics. Take care of your brain, body, and environment. Pay attention to the patterns of critical self-talk you play in your head. Replace these negative phrases with positive affirmations.

You are allowed to care about yourself. It is not selfish to prioritize yourself. It is necessary in order to strengthen your relationship with yourself.

All too often, we ignore and criticize ourselves when what we need most is self-compassion. Self-compassion involves having an accepting and non-judgmental attitude toward ourselves, no matter what. Part of building resilience is building your ability to care for yourself.

Morning Routine Self-Care Basics

The first step in creating a self-compassionate outlook is taking care of the basics. It may seem small but doing intentional things to take care of yourself can alter the way you see yourself.

Start with hygiene. This is where you can make the quickest adjustments and begin to feel feelings of success.

Ensure you brush your teeth each day, for example. Your dentist will be happy, but even more happens. You can spend your time brushing your teeth by thinking of it as dedicated time where you’re taking care of yourself.

When you take a shower, be mindful and notice how the shampoo smells, how clean you feel, and how nice the water feels. Being mindful in this way will increase your ability to care for yourself.

A great step to building small successes is making your bed each day. This has been widely seen as an effective way to start the day because you get to start off your day with a success. Even though this may seem small, the best way to start being successful is by achieving small successes along the way to strengthen your relationship with yourself.

If you’re having an off morning and you make your bed anyway, you’re showing a commitment to yourself and your life. That is resilience in action.

Pay attention to the food you eat. What we eat affects our brains, so it’s important to nourish your brain and body with nutritious food. You don’t have to change your whole diet – you can simply add a few vegetables to your dinner or eat fruit throughout the day.

Get to know what your body needs more of and give that to yourself. This is a great path to self-care.

Schedule a time each day, or even once per week, where you tidy up your home. Clean the countertops, put away the dishes, sweep the floors, and do laundry. If you can keep up with small cleaning times, you’ll find that your living space feels lighter and happier.

It’s important to have the environment you live in reflect your needs and who you are. If you’re having a difficult time, your house may get messy. This clutter will hinder your growth. If it’s hard to get the motivation to clean your house, ask someone in your community to help you get started. Often, having someone there with us when we need to do difficult tasks helps us get the job done, even if they aren’t a huge help.

Just knowing you have that support can make all the difference.

Addressing Critical Self-Talk as Part of Your Morning Routine

How do you talk to yourself? Spend a couple of days noticing what you say. Start by simply observing the phrases you tell yourself. What do you think when you’ve succeeded at something? Are you proud of yourself? What do you think when you’ve made a mistake? Do you beat yourself up?

Some people have critical self-talk regardless of their success. If they gain a success, they think, “I have to be perfect forever,” or “I could have done better.” And when the mistakes happen, that critical talk gets even worse. They might say things like, “I am worthless,” or “I will never get anything right.”

A common misconception is that critical self-talk is a good motivator. No! Instead, reinvent your morning routine in a positive, loving way to strengthen your relationship with yourself.

Sometimes, saying, “I love you” to yourself is seen as something to be embarrassed about. It can even be perceived as conceited.

However, positive self-talk isn’t conceited. Negative self-talk isn’t a good motivator. If you thrive off critical commentary, try changing your thoughts to self-compassionate ones and see what happens in your life.

It may appear difficult to change your thoughts. Thankfully, it isn’t too difficult when you commit to changing your thoughts and have willingness to do so. After you spend time learning the negative things you say to yourself, balance those things out with positive thoughts about yourself.

For example, if one of your phrases is, “I will never reach this goal,” you can turn that phrase around by balancing it out. Instead, you can say, “I am a hard worker and capable of reaching all of my goals.”

Having the feeling that you’ll not be able to do something is a great opportunity for some self-motivation. If you’re struggling to achieve something, that’s also a good time to ask for help from someone who can provide encouragement.

You can give yourself permission to praise yourself.

When you’ve had a long day of hard work, you can look in the mirror and say, “Wow, you really worked hard today. Thank you.” Talking to yourself in the mirror may seem strange or uncomfortable. Try saying nice things to yourself in the mirror once a day for a continuous period of time. When I first started my business in 2006 I was beating myself up during the first fifteen minutes of each day. Then I began looking myself in the mirror and using positive self-talk and everything changed almost immediately in my life.

You’ll notice that your self-talk gets nicer throughout the rest of your day and you begin being kinder to yourself.

Take Time to Care

It’s important to take hold of our thoughts when we’re noticing critical self talk. Thoughts are simply words, they are not facts. You can watch them float by, you can replace them with positive affirmations, and you can ask for help to get over them. Remember that our beliefs are simply thoughts we continue to believe and we must monitor this at all times.

Taking action to love yourself is just as important as changing the way you talk to yourself. You can do this in small ways. These self-care routines go above the basics and encourage you to get a bit more creative with doing things that will nourish you.

Do these activities to practice self-compassion:

• Write yourself a nice note. The note doesn’t have to be long but it can be if you want. Start with just two or three sentences. Write something encouraging like, “I am glad you exist, and I am proud of the work you do.” You can give yourself the words that will help you heal.
• Spend an hour outside. Get some fresh air and mindfulness while you spend time at a local park, in the forest, at the beach, or anywhere else outside. Nature is a natural healer, so being in the open air can offer a new calmness to your brain.
• Turn off your phone and pay attention to you. Take a break from social media, emails, and other notifications that take you out of the present moment. By truly immersing yourself in your own time, you’ll build a stronger connection to yourself. If this time feels uncomfortable, use it to say positive things to yourself.
• Write it out. Keep a journal or notebook for positive, encouraging thoughts about yourself. Write out some critical self-talk phrases and then come up with balancing thoughts that work for you.
• Take yourself out to dinner. It may feel uncomfortable to go to a restaurant by yourself, but it’s a great practice for enjoying the time you spend with yourself. Sometimes spending time alone can feel like loneliness. Go out to eat your favorite meal in order to intentionally do something kind for yourself.

Use your morning routine as the time to take care of yourself. This leads to you being able to strengthen the relationship you have with yourself, you’ll see other parts of your life improving, too. Your relationships will be more authentic, you’ll feel more motivated, and mistakes will not feel like total failures.

These habits will improve resilience by helping you self-motivate when things are difficult. By practicing self-compassion, you’re strengthening yourself to handle everything life throws your way. If you can face difficulty without berating yourself, you’ll stand tall and remain hopeful.

In case you’ve just found this post on creating your morning routine to strengthen your relationship with yourself and need a refresher on the 8 skills you need to live your life with inner strength and mental toughness, here they are:

1. Develop your understanding of resilience and mental toughness
2. Enhance your emotional regulation skills so you are in control
3. Take full responsibility for your situation to grow exponentially
4. Build a solid and supportive community of like-minded individuals
5. Practice gratitude and forgiveness for yourself and others in your life
6. Strengthen your relationship with yourself with your morning routine
7. Move your body throughout each day to keep blood flowing to your brain
8. Challenge yourself regularly with new skills and projects

I’m bestselling author, marketing strategist, and entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and I would love to connect further with you to help you to achieve your goals. If you are interested in learning how to optimize the syndication of your content, please take a look at my popular Syndication Optimization training course and consider coming aboard to increase your visibility, credibility, and profitability. I’m here to serve you!