I need to walk you through my actual morning routine, and I need you to know upfront that it is deeply unimpressive. There are no ice baths, nobody is waking up at 4am to “attack the day” (we are, however, waking to feed the baby for the 10th time). I don’t have a supplement stack or a red light panel woven into my routine, or whatever else the internet is telling you to buy this week. What I have is five kids, a nursing baby who has made a personal decision to never sleep again (she’s committed, I’ll give her that), and about forty-five minutes before my house turns into a small, loud country that I am somehow expected to govern.
But this boring little routine is the reason I’m sane, or at least, the reason I’m sane-adjacent, which is the best I can offer right now.
First, though, I need to tell you about the routine I quit, because that one was actually making me worse and I was too proud to see it for a really long time.
So here’s my Kitchen Table confession…
I used to have THE morning routine. Capital T, capital M, capital E. I’m talking two hours, 5am alarm, hard workout, journaling, the whole elaborate performance. I looked like I had my life together pre-8am. I had the routine of someone who was Extremely Disciplined and Very Serious About Personal Development and also probably a little insufferable at dinner parties.
And I was failing my own system before the sun came up, which kinda sucked.
I’d set the alarm for 5, whoever the baby was in that season of life would have me up at 2, 3, and 4:30 (because apparently they all have a personal vendetta against REM sleep), and by the time that alarm went off I was already wrecked. And then I was supposed to crush a 45-minute workout and emerge glowing and centered and ready to homeschool the masses before jumping into a 50 hour work week scaling the dream. WOOF.
Despite feeling inadequate, I kept doing it because I’d read all the books and listened to all the podcasts and every high-performing person I admired was telling me that the morning routine was the non-negotiable foundation of a successful life. So clearly the problem was me, not the routine. Right?
As Dwight K. Schrute would say confidently, “FALSE”.
If you feel twinges of that, too, herein lies the potential rub…
Your morning routine might be making you worse. Why? Because it's borrowed.
You copied someone else’s morning and you’re wondering why it doesn’t fit your life. You grabbed the routine of a 35-year-old male CEO with no kids and a personal chef and tried to cram it into the life of a nursing mother or busy father of five who homeschools and hasn’t slept through the night in roughly fourteen months and you’re genuinely confused about why you feel like a failure by 6:30am.
That’s a math problem, my friend, and I struggled from the same bad arithmetic.
The moment everything shifted for me was when I realized this: I was using my only solo hours - the only minutes in my entire day where no one needed me - on the one thing my kids could do with me (exercise, movement, going for a walk), and I was completely skipping the things I can only do alone. Thinking, writing, praying, hearing my own thoughts without someone asking me for a snack or telling me their brother is “boddering” them.
So like I tend to do when I figure something out, instead of easing into it like a normal human, I burned the old routine to the ground and rebuilt something that actually fits the life I’m living overnight.
Here’s what I actually do now, and I’m telling you, if you saw it from the outside you would not be impressed. You would not screenshot this and post it on your stories. It is aggressively ordinary, but it is the single most aligned part of my entire day and everything else flows from it, so I’m going to share it and you can take what works and leave the rest.
Nothing comes in first.
This is the big one and it’s non-negotiable for me. Before I do anything else in the morning, nothing comes IN. No phone, no email, no texts, no social media, no news, not even a podcast. My phone stays on the charger and it can sit there and think about what it’s done.
Most people start their day consuming. Input, input, input - other people’s thoughts, other people’s emergencies, other people’s opinions and requests and drama pouring into your brain. And then we wonder why we feel reactive by 9am? You just mainlined the entire internet into your nervous system before you brushed your teeth, of course you feel chaotic.
I start my morning deciding, not consuming.
What do I think? What do I feel? What is God saying to me before the noise starts? Our nervous systems are very honest and if we’re flooding it with noise before we’ve even asked ourselves what we need today, we’re not starting our morning, we’ve already handed it over.
I pray before I plan.
I have a prayer journal that I created specifically for this process. I’m pretty ADHD and usually wake up foggy - the combo really slaps. So I have a prayer journal that guides me through a process of prayer, reflection, the right versus, questions, etc. Some mornings I am so sleep-deprived that I cannot form a coherent thought, let alone a prayer. The journal gives me rails when my brain has gone rogue. I have prompts I come back to, prayers I’ve written out on good days that carry me on the bad ones, a running list of people I’m praying for by name, things I’m asking God for specifically, versus I need, things I’m surrendering (that list gets longer every week, by the way, because apparently I have control issues... developing story, stay tuned).
I know this might not sound like a “morning routine hack” but I’m going to say something that the productivity world probably doesn’t want to hear: this prayer journal trumps alllll the productivity and optimization tools I’ve ever used. Can’t recommend something like that enough.
Also, something I’ve learned about discipline… it doesn’t mean doing hard things every day as much as it means having a system for the days you can’t. Not sure about you, but those days happen a lot more frequently when you have a baby who treats sleep like an arch nemesis.
I write before I work.
After prayer, I write, but not strategic writing - not emails, not content, not anything with a deadline attached to it. This is what I’d call visionary writing, or more honestly, it’s just me asking: what am I being called to right now? What came up in prayer? What do I need to say before I look at what I need to do?
This is where my best ideas for Substack posts come from or the deepest chapters in my book. The things I say to clients that actually shift something for them. All the best stuff comes from this quiet window before anyone is awake, when my brain is still soft enough to hear things that the to-do list would overwrite.
Which brings me to a tangible tip that sounds so simple and has been so game-changing: write before you open your to-do list. The to-do list will hijack your best thinking every single time. The moment you see “respond to that email” and “schedule that call” and “order more diapers” (because we are always out of diapers, we like to live on the edge), your brain shifts from creative mode to task mode and you don’t get it back.
I read for who I’m becoming, not what I’m doing.
I read in the morning, but not business books, productivity books, or scaling books. I read whatever keeps my mind aimed at the person I’m becoming, not the tasks I’m managing. Scripture, obviously, but also theology, or a biography of someone whose life challenges me, or something on parenting or marriage or calling that makes me think bigger than my to-do list.
You become what you consume before 8am, at least, that’s been true for me. And for years I was consuming business strategy and hustle content first thing in the morning and then wondering why I felt like a CEO more than a mom. You have to guard what gets in before the day starts.
I envision the day before I live it.
Before the kids are up, I write out what an intentional day would look like. How do I want to feel? What do I want to be present for? What matters most today? Then I cross-check that with what came up in prayer and then my actual calendar and plan.
Most people audit their day at the end when it’s too late to change anything, but I audit mine at 6am when I still have the power to shape it.
I regulate before I lead.
I can know who I want to be all day long, but if I don’t do something to ground myself in that version of me, I’ll short-circuit by breakfast. So I spend a few minutes in our sauna if I can, or at minimum I do some deep breathing. Something to get my body calm before it goes to freaking war.
Here’s the reality of my morning - I’m about to walk into a house of seven people who all need something from me, simultaneously, with great urgency and questionable timing. If my nervous system isn’t regulated before that happens, I’m not leading my family, I’m just reacting to them. And there is such a massive difference between a regulated mother and a reactive one, and my kids can feel it. I can feel it. Calm is not a luxury or a wellness trend in my life, it’s a leadership tool.
The old routine was about adding, the new routine is about pruning.
The old routine failed and this one works because the old routine was about adding. More habits, discipline, optimization. More things to do before the sun comes up to prove I was a serious, committed, high-performing human being.
This routine is about pruning. What do I need to remove from my mental space before I lead today? What needs to come out before anything else goes in? The old routine was impressive, maybe, but this one works for the season I’m in. .
Sometimes it feels like productivity culture is a scam for mothers. You do not need to optimize your morning as much as you need to protect it. From your phone, from other people’s expectations, from the lie that says you need to earn your worth before you start the day. Your morning is not a performance, it’s the foundation for everything that comes after, and it should be built for your life in your season.
Your morning routine should change when your life changes, so if you’re still white-knuckling the same routine you had before the baby, before the move, before the career shift, before the season changed, this is worth considering.
If your routine makes you feel like you’re losing before the day even starts, the routine ain’t for you right now.
Love + prayers,
Liz
So many great thoughts and wisdom. I've always struggled with a morning routine and now I'm excited to implement some of your ideas. Thank u!