The Mindful Morning

I love free printables. The only thing I love more, is free mental health related printables.

The Mindful Morning blog offers a weekly planner to help you prioritise self care every day. By signing up to the newsletter, you get this free sheet sent to your email.

The sheet allows you to select three areas of your life you want to work on that week. Centering your week around personal growth goals is not something I've ever done - and as a result I often find it difficult to see the bigger picture.

Last week, I gave the to-do list a try to see if it helped me to bring mindfulness into my daily routine.

At first it was motivating. I selected the three areas I wanted to work on. Monday and Tuesday got off to a good self care start.
But I found the things I wanted to work on too broad. And I was afraid of repetition in the lists of what I wanted to do for myself each day. I wanted to make the extra effort to read, but writing 'read' every day seemed silly.

I ran out of time on Friday morning to fill in the sheet and as a result the planner was forgotten during the last three days of the week. BUT, I do love the inspiration behind the idea, even if I wasn't able to stick with it. I do need to put more focus on larger personal goals and on practicing acts of self care every day.

Tips on creating your own Mindful Morning can be found here.

Here are my Mindful Morning tips:

- Drink Water as soon as you get up. I never used to do this, but the past few weeks I've gotten into the habit and feel more awake in the mornings.

- Have your outfits sitting out from the night before. I very rarely pick out an outfit first thing in the morning (except in exceptional circumstances like it's starting to rain so I can't wear my suede boots). It saves so much time in the morning, and means you can take your time getting dressed.

- Take the time for a sit-down breakfast. Last year, there were days when I didn't have time to even have breakfast. It left me groggy, hungry and
Now I always make sure I get up the extra 15mins earlier so that I have time to sit down and eat.

- Check your to-do list before you leave.

- Ditch the phone. Do you really need to wake up to your notifications and all you missed while you were asleep? No. Save it for your commute on public transport. Or at least until you're completely ready to head out the door.

- Listen to Music. I walk 10 minutes down to the Luas every morning with my iPod on shuffle. You find some real gems (like Justin Bieber's 'Baby' which you never knew you had and is still ridiculously catchy after all these years), some classics like Fleetwood Mac, or some totally skip worthy songs (like ). It's a great way to up your energy levels, and distract yourself from any negative thoughts.

xoxo