15 May According to research, doing these 3 things is the best way to start your day!
Imagine if the first 3 things you did increased your chances of enjoying happiness and success!
Imagine if you could create a better and happier life just by staring your day with these 3 activities!
Will they do and you can! And accordingly, you can set yourself up for happiness and so much more…
via Barking up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker
A morning ritual sure sounds nice (if it didn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this) but what’s the point of one? What’s it even supposed to accomplish?
No, you don’t have to eat kale or mechanistically begin planning your day according to some odd formula. You’re human. The first thing you need to do is get your head on straight. Get your feelings sorted. Your mood.
Research shows your mood in the morning affects your productivity all day:
Researchers found that employees’ moods when they clocked in tended to affect how they felt the rest of the day. Early mood was linked to their perceptions of customers and to how they reacted to customers’ moods. And most important to managers, employee mood had a clear impact on performance, including both how much work employees did and how well they did it.
Seriously, your mood is numero uno. Think you can ignore your feelings or fight them? Think again, Spock.
From The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking:
…when experimental subjects are told of an unhappy event, but then instructed to try not to feel sad about it, they end up feeling worse than people who are informed of the event, but given no instructions about how to feel. In another study, when patients who were suffering from panic disorders listened to relaxation tapes, their hearts beat faster than patients who listened to audiobooks with no explicitly ‘relaxing’ content. Bereaved people who make the most effort to avoid feeling grief, research suggests, take the longest to recover from their loss.
In fact, one of the biggest reasons you procrastinate is because of negative feelings.
From Temptation: Finding Self-Control in an Age of Excess:
…far and away the most procrastination occurred among the bad-mood students who believed their mood could be changed and who had access to fun distractions. This group spent nearly 14 of their 15 minutes of prep time goofing off!
So what does a morning ritual need to contain to put you in the right frame of mind to be productive? And happy? (Yeah, happy is important. This is a “morning ritual”, not a “mourning ritual.”) Just remember PCO:
- Purpose
- Control
- Optimism
Why these three? What do they do? How do you turn these three nouns into a Tyrannosaur of a morning ritual that will make the Earth tremble at your approach?
I’m so glad you asked…
1) Feel A Sense Of Purpose
You know what’s great first thing in the morning? To feel you’re on a mission. You have a destiny. Your life has meaning. You’re beginning an epic quest, Frodo.
And as motivation master and bestselling author Dan Pink explains, feeling a sense of purpose is one of the most motivating things in the known universe. Here’s Dan:
Purpose is, “Am I doing something in service of a cause larger than myself, or, at the very least, am I making a contribution in my own world?”
And feeling your life has purpose and meaning not only makes you feel alive, it also keeps you alive.
Researchers at Tohoku University in Japan did a 7 year study of over 43,000 adults age 40 to 79 asking if they had ikigai (a Japanese term for meaning in life) and then tracked their health. People with ikigai were much more likely to be alive 7 years later.
Via Pursuing the Good Life: 100 Reflections on Positive Psychology:
Even when likely confounds were taken into account, ikigai predicted who was still alive after 7 years. Said another way, 95% of respondents who reported a sense of meaning in their lives were alive 7 years after the initial survey versus about 83% of those who reported no sense of meaning in their lives.
Feeling motivated and living longer isn’t enough for you? Seriously? Okay, how about this? It’ll make you sexy:
Study 2 also found an interaction between physical attractiveness and meaning in life, with more meaning in life contributing to greater interpersonal appeal for those of low and average physical attractiveness.
So how do you find purpose without getting a new job working for a charity?
Duke professor Dan Ariely suggests “reframing your experience.” You might not be able to change what you have to do but you can change how you see it. And when you look at it through the lens of how it can help others, you’ll often find more motivation.
From Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations:
…if we are feeling bored and unmotivated, we can ask ourselves: “How is the work I’m doing helping someone down the road? What meaning can I find here?” With this type of mind-set, chances are that we will be able to find a positive answer.
The work won’t change. Your perspective can. You’re not “filling out boring paperwork.” You’re “helping people get insurance that could save their lives.” Focus on how you already help others.
(To learn more tips on living an awesome life, check out my book here.)
Okay, you’re filled with purpose. But “it’s the thought that counts” only applies to gifts. How do you get yourself in the mood to do something about it?
…keep reading the full & original article HERE