Your morning makes or breaks your day.
Often, those first few waking moments set the tone for how you’ll act and behave for the rest of the day. If you have a great start, you’ll unlock your full potential; but if you have a poor start, you’ll feel like you’re falling behind all day long.
One of the single worst things you can do in the morning is to check your cell phone, yet 76% of people check their phone within 30 minutes of waking up (and 43% even do it within 5 minutes). It might seem like an innocent little peek, but it actually hurts your focus, productivity, creativity, and motivation.
Here’s why checking your phone can sabotage your day—and a whole lot more—and how to finally break the habit once and for all:
It Harms Your Mental Health
Looking at social media, news apps, emails, or messages after you wake up might not seem like much, but it actually impacts your mental health more than you think.
First, research shows that the more time you spend on your phone, the more you suffer from stress, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and even self-esteem issues. (And if you grab your phone first thing in the morning, how much more time can you spend than that?)
Second, using your phone to check the news is actually a huge source of stress—56% of Americans say the news causes stress and can even lead to anxiety.
Finally, checking for work-related things so early in your day can worsen workaholism symptoms and lead to less detachment from work, less relaxation, and more exhaustion.
It Harms Your Mental Performance
Your morning is when your mental, emotional, and physical energy is at its highest. According to Ron Friedman, Ph.D., author of The Best Place to Work, you only have three hours of peak mental performance each day—that time is best spent on achieving your goals and priorities.
But if someone starts their morning responding to messages, checking notifications, or consuming useless information, it throws them off and leaves them scatterbrained. In fact, just having your phone near you actually drains your brainpower, even if your phone is off.
Yet you cannot achieve deep, focused work if you feel distracted or try to multitask. Each distraction takes away your attention and wastes a lot of time to get back on track afterward. Also, humans are bad at multitasking so if you try to do several things at once, you’ll end up doing a worse job on everything.
It Makes You React, Not Act
55% of Americans check their email before they go to work. But the problem with responding to a bunch of tasks first thing in the day is that it puts them in a state of reaction. Now, they have a bunch of things to deal with before they even had a chance to focus on their goals and priorities (or put on pants).
…if we end up squandering those first three hours reacting to other people’s priorities for us… that ends up using up our best hours and we’re not quite as effective as we could be… it puts you in a reactive mindset. So you’re looking outward for direction, rather than looking inward. And switching from a proactive to a reactive mindset is easy, but doing the reverse is much, much harder.
—Ron Friedman, Ph.D., “Your Brain’s Ideal Schedule”
Worse, since they’re seeing all these tasks before they’re at work, they can’t even do anything about them yet — so it clogs up their mind and they can’t be fully present with their morning routine, their family, and more.
It Worsens Your Addiction
Take cigarette smoking for example. Studies reveal a strong link between the severity of the addiction and how early someone smokes—the sooner they reach for a cigarette after they wake up, the worse their addiction.
Your phone is a bit similar.
If you reach for your phone right after you wake up, you subconsciously let it take control of you and give it all the power. Before you even had a chance to think for yourself, you got sucked into your device and its instant gratification.
The average American checks their phone 96 times per day—each time you check, however, your brain releases dopamine, a chemical that makes us “feel good.” Over time, your body gets addicted to it and the only way to satisfy that craving is to reach for your phone.
If you’re like most people, technology operates you more than you operate it. Within the first few seconds of being awake, your technology taskmaster has you enslaved. Then, throughout your workday, you can’t seem to focus for more than a few minutes without tapping into another dopamine hit via email, social media, or some other juicy Web distraction… This lack of consciousness is reflected in all other areas of most people’s lives — as we are holistic systems. No one component of your life can be viewed in isolation. If you spend several hours unconsciously using technology, how could you expect to be fully engaged in your work and relationships?
— Benjamin Hardy, Ph.D.
How to Break The Habit
If you want to stop using your phone in the morning, don’t just “try harder” — using willpower to break a habit or addiction is a recipe for failure:
…when you hear people say that change is hard because people are lazy or resistant, that’s just flat wrong. In fact, the opposite is true: Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.
— Chip Heath and Dan Heath, “Switch”
Instead, design an environment where it’s impossible to check your phone early in the morning. Some ideas: Stop using your phone as an alarm clock and keep your phone outside your bedroom, set your phone on Airplane Mode at night and leave it on until you start working, or set a Do Not Disturb mode so you block any notifications for the first hour of your day.
Then, after you reset your environment, replace your old habit with a new one. If you previously got a dopamine hit from your phone, find something else to help you feel great first thing in the morning.
Read a book, walk your dog, journal, play with your kids, meditate — some activity to help you feel energized without your phone so you can seize the day.
Once you do, you’ll never go back to your old habit.
And your days will be a lot more successful and meaningful.
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