Kieran contacted me after reading How to Be a Morning Person, and offered to write this guest post about how to kick start your morning in 2017. A big thanks to Kieran, and may we all have very productive mornings in 2017!

2017 is fast approaching and it’s the perfect time to kick start your mornings and get a head start on 2017! I know loads of people who wish they could embrace the morning instead of groan through it. And I fully understand why! Many successful people are always talking about the things they achieve before 9 am has even rolled around!

But the turn side to that is that becoming a morning person can be hard. Luckily I’m going to share with you 5 easy steps that can transform you into a morning person! I’ve put them together into the infographic you can see below.

These steps might not seem major enough to really have an impact, but trust me they will. Let’s start with hydration, possibly the most important step on the list. Being dehydrated in the morning is the most common cause of morning fatigue. Even if you’re getting a full 8 hours of comfortable sleep dehydration will still make you wake up groggy and tired.

5 easy steps that can transform you into a morning person! Click To Tweet

That’s why having a drink of water before bed is so important. A glass of water before bed will keep you hydrated through the night letting you wake up refreshed after a good sleep. Just make sure to get the balance right. Too much water and you’ll be spending half the night running to the bathroom!

But now you’ve made it awake without a feeling of regret you need to keep the momentum going. So have your damn breakfast! Seriously, it makes a huge difference to keeping your energy levels up, you haven’t eaten anything for up to 12 hours so your body definitely needs an energy boost! Way more than it needs a caffeine hit. So make sure you have your breakfast as soon as you get up so the fatigue doesn’t catch up to you.

Next the alarm clock. It may seem an obsolete item of the past since the rise of the smartphone but I’m an advocate that some of the old ways are the best. Smartphones are great as an alarm clock if you can resist the temptation to play on them when you go to bed. Otherwise, you can easily while away an hour scrolling through Facebook that would have been much better spent sleeping.

Besides mobile phones completely ruin how you fall asleep and stay asleep. As well as other things they stop melatonin being produced which is the hormone that helps you fall asleep. 

So if you get an alarm clock you can easily leave your phone out of reach and out of mind.

Finally, you need to be getting a consistent 7-8 hours of sleep at night. This is the optimum amount you need to function properly as an effective human being. Some people have different sleep cycles but on the whole 7-8 hours is what you need to be getting no matter what. Go to bed earlier or get up later whatever it takes.

This goes hand in hand with the bedtime routine. Now it has probably been many years since you had a bedtime, let alone one you wanted to stick too, but it’s an important part of becoming an effective sleeper and starting your mornings properly. Your bedtime routine should consist of enough time away from screens as well as an activity to wind down, my favorite is reading, and it should get you to bed in good time to get your 8 hours of beauty sleep.

And there you have it! 5 simple steps that will kickstart your morning in 2017. Please give them a try and let me know how you get on in the comments below!

Kickstart Your Morning in 2017! Click To Tweet

Kieran MacRae Blogs all about sleeping in the UK at The Dozy Owl and would love for you to come visit and say hello on Twitter!