Why I Stopped Trying to Optimise My Mornings

My wife pointed out something a few years ago that I haven’t been able to shake.

We were on holidays – one of those trips where you actually decompress, sleep properly, and remember what it feels like to not be running on fumes. One day we were laughing about something that didn’t really matter and out came: “you’re a completely different person when you’re on holidays.” More relaxed, more present (maybe even funnier) – her words, not mine. It completely caught me off-guard. What? I thought I was the same person everywhere.

Turns out, exhaustion had slowly but surely eaten away at my baseline, everyday personality. That’s how it felt, anyway.

That observation was one of the things that eventually led me to resign from a job that was slowly consuming everything. But it also planted a quieter question that took years to properly answer: if the holiday version of me was closer to who I actually was, what was I doing with the other forty-eight weeks of the year?

Some part of the answer, I’ve come to realise, is my morning routine.

Not in the optimised, high-performance, cold-shower-at-5am way you might expect. Honestly, I’ve tried that. Almost the opposite. What I’ve learned about morning routines – slowly, mostly by getting them wrong first – is that the goal isn’t to produce more before 9am. It’s to arrive at the day feeling like yourself.

How I used to start my days

For most of my twenties the morning routine was simple: auto pilot and survive.

I was working twelve-hour days at a company that had quietly stopped replacing roles. The two went hand in hand. The work kept coming, the hours kept growing, and the mornings were just the runway before another long flight. Wake up, coffee on an empty stomach because I’d skip breakfast, commute, repeat. I even had a client who would want meetings by 7am. (I know, boundaries – for another time)

And then there was a phase – I shudder to think of it now – where I’d check work emails before I’d even gotten out of bed. I told myself I was being responsible, staying on top of things. What I was actually doing was handing the first moments of my day to whoever had landed in my inbox overnight. By the way, nothing good comes from that. I’ve never once opened a work email at 6am and felt better for it.

The optimisation trap

A few years after the burnout and the reset that followed, I went the other direction. I’d been reading about morning routines – there’s no shortage of content on this, most of it promising something close to transcendence – and I built one. It had all the components you’re supposed to have. Up early, no phone, journal, meditation, exercise, water. The full production.

The problem was it felt like a second job.

I’d wake up sometimes already running through the checklist. If something ran over – the baby was up, I’d slept badly, life had other ideas – I’d feel like I’d failed before the day had properly started. The routine that was supposed to make me calmer, or happier, or more grounded, was actually stressing me out. Some of it was genuinely good and helped, but the pressure to deliver was getting to me. I just don’t think I’m ‘that guy’.

The content I’d been consuming was written by people whose entire lives are structured around performance. Their two-hour morning protocols make sense for their lives. They don’t necessarily make sense for me, with a five-month-old and a full day of meetings. I still listen to some of them. They just run a different race.

So I stopped. Or more precisely, I stopped optimising and started paying attention to what actually helped.

What a bad morning looks like now

Before I tell you what a good morning looks like, let me tell you about a bad one. Because they still happen, regularly, and how I relate to them has changed more than the mornings themselves.

The baby has been awake overnight. You wake up earlier than you wanted, broken sleep from your subconscious worrying about a presentation or deadline that doesn’t really matter – that specific burning feeling behind the eyes that tells you the account is still overdrawn. It’s cold. You have a big day ahead, the kind that requires you to be present and sharp and dialled in. And the morning you needed – the walk, the quiet coffee, the few minutes to yourself, isn’t going to happen the way you planned.

Years ago this would have derailed me. The tiredness would have become a story about the whole day being uphill. I’d have been half-present in every meeting, drunk too much coffee, and felt increasingly hollow for it. I’d almost let it beat me.

Now it’s just a bad morning. I do what I can. I make the coffee. I sit with it for five minutes even if five minutes is all there is. And I remind myself that tomorrow is another morning.

That shift, from bad morning as catastrophe to bad morning as just a morning, is probably the most useful thing I’ve figured out in this space.

What I actually do when mornings go well

Let me be honest: with a five-month-old, a good morning is not a given. What follows is what I aim for and return to when life allows, not a polished ideal.

Getting outside. This one started during COVID lockdown, which sounds counterintuitive but makes sense when you remember how small our apartment felt after week three. My wife was studying, I was working from home, and our tiny place was, let’s just say, very cramped. We started going out during lunch, a walk around the neighbourhood, nothing fancy, and discovered to our genuine surprise, just how nice our neighbourhood actually was. Once COVID ended I kept going. Still do.

There’s something about being outside before the world fully wakes up that nothing else quite replicates. The light is different and constantly changing. The noise is different. Sometimes I have a podcast in. Increasingly, and maybe because I’ve gone too far with podcasts, I go noise-free, just me and the neighbourhood and whatever I happen to be thinking about. That hour has a quality I haven’t found anywhere else in the day.

Not checking my phone first. I don’t do anything dramatic here. No phone locked in another room, no elaborate system. I just don’t look at it before I’ve had my shower. That’s the rule. Simple and sustainable. It means the first part of my day belongs to me rather than to whoever landed in my inbox overnight.

A drink of water. Supposedly it helps kick-start the metabolism, which is why I started it, but what I notice more is that it feels like a clean start. Nothing too strong straight away. Nothing too complicated. A base to build on.

A few minutes of quiet. Sometimes this is meditation. Sometimes it’s just sitting without an agenda. Not productive, not useful, just present. It took me a long time to stop feeling like this was wasted time. I don’t feel that way anymore.

On meditation – an honest account

I started trying to meditate during COVID. And I use the word trying deliberately.

My first attempts were not peaceful. My brain, accustomed to twelve-hour days and constant noise, was not interested in sitting quietly. Thoughts arrived in an endless stream. I’d open one eye after what felt like ten minutes and discover it had been only a few.

I was convinced I was doing it wrong.

Turns out that’s what meditation is at the beginning, and from what I know now, it’s kind of normal. The wandering mind isn’t a failure of meditation. It is meditation. The practice is noticing that your mind has wandered and bringing it back. Over and over. That’s the whole thing. You’re not trying to achieve silence. You’re practising returning.

The other mistake I made was thinking it needed to be thirty minutes. Thirty minutes is a lot to ask of a beginner. I’d regularly skip it because it felt like too much. What actually worked was starting with five minutes – guided, using an app, and building from there. Five minutes is nothing. Anyone can find five minutes. And five minutes of actual practice beats thirty minutes of good intentions every time.

James Clear makes this point in Atomic Habits – the goal at the beginning isn’t the habit itself, it’s showing up. Your mind is no different. Start small enough that you won’t talk yourself out of it.

The app I use is called Healthy Minds. It’s free. You choose the length – anywhere from five minutes up, so there’s no excuse around time. What I particularly like is that it mixes actual guided meditations with short educational clips explaining the why behind the practice. Understanding why something is helping you makes you more likely to keep doing it.

I’m not going to promise meditation will change your life. I’ll just tell you it’s changed mine in small, cumulative ways that are hard to pin down and easy to notice when I’ve skipped it for a week. A little less reactive. A little more able to pause before responding. A little better at noticing when I’m in my head and choosing to come back.

That’s enough for me.

Mindfulness beyond the morning

Meditation gets a lot of the attention but the broader practice of mindfulness – just paying attention to what’s actually happening, is available all day long.

Before a big presentation, when I can feel the nerves building, I try – emphasis on try – to pause and just breathe. Not a production. Just a moment.

When things get busy in the office, I’ve learned to notice when I’m feeling what I’d describe as crowded – too many inputs, too much noise, the open plan hum becoming a kind of pressure. When that happens I remove myself. I move away from the bustle, find a window, anchor my gaze on something in the distance, and breathe slowly for about ten seconds. The team know I do this. Nobody really thinks anything of it. It looks completely normal to anyone walking past. But it resets something internally that would otherwise just keep accumulating.

None of this requires a special room or a meditation cushion or a thirty-minute block. Just attention, directed on purpose, for ten seconds at a time.

What a good morning actually gives you

The best mornings I have aren’t the ones where I complete a list. They’re the ones where I arrive at the working day feeling like I’ve already had a life before it began.

A walk, a coffee, a few quiet minutes. That’s often all there is time for. With a five-month-old and a full-time job, some days that is the achievement.

The goal isn’t optimisation. It’s ownership. Feeling like the morning belongs to you, even briefly, before the demands of the day take over.

You don’t need a two-hour routine. You don’t need an ice bath and a gratitude list before breakfast. You need a few things that are genuinely yours and that make you feel like yourself before the world starts asking things of you.

Start small. One thing. Be consistent. Adjust as you go.

And when the baby wakes up early and the burning eyes are back and the big day looms and none of it goes to plan, that’s just a bad morning. Make the coffee anyway. Sit with it for five minutes. Tomorrow is another one.

– Dave

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