2022 has brought us many interesting viral trends, one of them being “that girl” – a trope we tend to be highly critical of, especially when considering its place in the wellness space. A heavy critique around “that girl” is that she’s both inaccessible and unnecessary (one of our favorite That Girl critiques can be found here). For example, a common thing you’ll see with any “that girl” content is that they all seem to have a morning routine, usually consisting of some sort of expensive wellness embellishment, and aesthetically pleasing practices.
While we’ve got a lot of thoughts about the accessibility of That Girl, we’ve decided to focus on a more niche question that keeps us up at night – is it necessary to have a That Girl Morning Routine? We’ve turned to some data to help us answer these questions.
The science behind a morning routine
We’ve combed through several studies on the necessity of a morning routine and found that the most effective morning routines revolve around decreasing something called “sleep inertia”. Sleep inertia is a phenomenon that involves decreased performance, reduced alertness, or significant disorientation upon waking up that ultimately impairs function throughout the day. This suggests that, at a high level, when you wake up, a successful morning routine is more likely to focus on decreasing sleep inertia, and increasing energy reserves throughout the day.
How morning routines affect you long term
In a 2014 study, researchers disrupted two employed people’s morning routines to understand how this impacted their day in the long term. First, the researchers interrogated the meaning of routine, and conceptualized morning routines as a fundamental series of neurological processes where each activity automatically cues the next in order to maintain calmness and order. The hypothesis was that when this initial series of someone’s day is disrupted, so is a sense of calmness and order. Therefore, the researchers measured calmness, work engagement, tension, and sleep as a result of these morning disruptions.
The results showed that maintaining a daily morning routine upholds work engagement and calmness, lowers tension throughout the day, and ultimately, an adequate sleep schedule. However, the results also display that due to everyone having such a varied morning routine, the magic isn’t in the embellishment and glamour of a morning routine, but rather in just having one.
This drives home an overarching theme that fuels our take on wellness at MULTI – that wellness is about feeling good inside AND out. Taking care of your mind, affects everything thereafter. What does that looks like? That’s where you have to find what works for YOU.
Sources:
McClean, ST, Koopman, J, Yim, J, Klotz, AC. Stumbling out of the gate: The energy-based implications of morning routine disruption. Personnel Psychology. 2021; 74: 411– 448. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12419
Rise and shine: A treatment experiment testing a morning routine to decrease subjective sleep inertia in insomnia and bipolar disorder, Behaviour Research and Therapy, Volume 111, 2018, Pages 106-112, ISSN 0005-7967, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2018.10.009.
DISCLAIMER: THIS POST DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AS MEDICAL ADVICE. THIS POST IS NOT MEANT TO TREAT, CURE, PREVENT, OR DIAGNOSE CONDITIONS OR DISEASES; AND IS MEANT FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. AS ALWAYS, PLEASE CONSULT YOUR DOCTOR BEFORE TRYING ANY NEW TREATMENTS OR SUPPLEMENTS.