Kickstart your day with a morning routine

Boost your most creative and productive hours

One of the reasons why we’re so passionate about cacao is its effect on our body and mind. Living a healthy lifestyle with focus on our goals and at the same time spiritual curiosity and development is important to us. There are many elements involved like good food, learning, self-care/love, quality time with friends and spending time in nature. One important element is our work-life balance to get the things done that we want to do and create time for recovery and relaxing which is again new input for creativity and long term vision. This is also where a morning routine comes in.

Working in cycles of high peaks and high recovery is most productive and saves time (compared to just putting more hours into a job). Most people have their creative and productive peak in the morning. When your mind and body have recovered during sleep, your brain is most ‘fresh’. This allows you to put most quality into your work compared to quantity time spending on a same task. So block the first part of your day for what you want to do most.

How starting your day with cacao helps

Cacao is a healthy food source with antioxidants, proteins and minerals like magnesium that your body and brain need to function well. The positive effect on our mood, reducing stress while increasing creativity and a ‘flow’ make it a great combination in the morning to do the things that you want to do. After quitting coffee, cacao was a great alternative with a softer and more sustained energy. After trying it for a few times we understood its effects much better.

Example of a morning routine

Finding a morning routine that works best for you depends on your situation and interests. Hopefully this provides some inspiration.

1. Start with 10~20min yoga, breathing or five Tibetans exercise or something else that you like.

2. Followed by a 10min meditation.

3. Cold shower with deep breathing through an open mouth for at least 30 sec or 10 breaths.

4. Prepare a cacao drink and/or light breakfast.

5. Journal for 5 min about your dreams or what you want to achieve.

6. Do your most important work and take a break after ±2 hours.

There is not always the time in our schedule. But it can also be as simple as meditating for 5 minutes and journaling with a cacao drink. So now you have no reason not to do anything anymore ;-).

General rules:

• Get enough sleep, important for a good recovery process.

• No screen time 1 hour before going to bed.

• Don’t snooze your alarm.

• Save the phone/message/social media distractions for after your work.

• Connect to your family, kids, loved ones with your full attention and presence.

• Don’t be too hard on yourself when it’s not working exactly the way you want to. Be grateful if you can implement some of these things regularly in you life.

There are many flavors of how to start your day, find something that works for you. It’s more important to start and try than to create something perfect.

Extra tip: whenever your thoughts get distracted you can always bring your focus back through your breath. Or meditate for 5 minutes to bring your attention back to your body and the bigger picture on what you’re working on.

Let us know how you like to start your day, we love to learn from you.

Illustrations from Leonie

Many people inspire us for morning routines like Benjamin Hardy. Leonie made illustrations of his book Willpower Doesn’t Work that you can click to enlarge. We hope they inspire you to design your environment, find peak states and structure your life the way you want.