Morning Routines & Creative Self-Regard
Towards a morning routine
My morning routine began to seriously take shape during the Covid-19 pandemic. I was beginning my first career as a journalist and had just finished a long stint at my local NPR member station as an intern. I was about a year out of college, feeling lost about my professional goals and creative desires, unemployed and desperate to get hired somewhere full time. Here I was, faced with the reality of having to start from scratch yet again. During this time, I was also an extremely burned-out poet who hadn’t written a poem since graduating college. I was feeling a lot of guilt and insecurity at the time around my creative identity. Was I a poet if I didn’t write poems? Had I peaked in high school and college? Was this it for me creatively? And the added stress of having to be a “good worker” and find a job under capitalism made this creative guilt thing even worse.
Working in radio and news gave me a brief and false sense of relief. It was a creative kind of job where I was writing and telling stories. I could be happy doing this for the rest of my life, I told myself. My writing shined in this medium. I got easy praise and my stories were published often during my internship. I was good at reporting, and I could be excellent at it. But writing news stories didn’t require the same kinds of commitments, risks, and creative leaps my poetry asked of me. To be completely real, I was afraid of my creative potential. Who was I to be a writer? Who was I to think I had something worth saying , let alone worth reading? And even if I did muster up the courage to write something, would it even be good?
Trust and creative self-regard
Would it even be good? That question underlined the years without writing that I experienced after college. In other words, it crippled me. Some might call this a creative block. But as I look back, I realize I didn’t lack ideas, actually I had a lot of ideas back then, beautiful and lush ideas I didn’t let get enough sun. What I didn’t have was trust. I didn’t trust myself to make something worth making. I didn’t trust myself to make anything at all.
As my internship ended, newsrooms were shutting down their in-person operations and journalists were turning to remote work. All of a sudden I had a flexible schedule and didn’t have to physically be anywhere. I was still recovering from years of sleep debt and skipping breakfast, my diet was out of balance, and I didn’t move my body nearly enough as I should have been.
A Ugandan-British youtuber I was really into had just started this step challenge where she encouraged her subscribers to walk everyday for a month and get in at least five thousand steps. The goal was to start small and add 1000 steps more each week. It felt like an easy commitment compared to the crazy workout fads I would start and then abandon a week later after running my body into the ground. I needed a physical outlet that was sustainable and would make me feel like I was making some progress towards my health goals. So I got to steppin!
Over the next few months of the pandemic, five thousand steps became ten thousand a day, and then soon I was averaging fifteen thousand to twenty thousand steps per day. I looked forward to starting my day with this walking ritual. I started a series of music playlists for these walks. I listened to a lot of hip hop albums by Black women. Sometimes I didn’t listen to anything at all but the sounds of my neighborhood, the rush of wind through trees, the laugh of small children playing in the local park, the tap tap of my sneakers touching the pavement.
And my body felt the benefits almost immediately. Inflammation in my body lessened. I had more energy in the mornings. And my anxiety felt more manageable. I could focus my thoughts more – not just during the walks but this small ritual changed the entire tenor of my day. I felt momentum and pleasure for the day ahead. I felt like I was regaining control of my body, and by extension my life.
That’s what trust felt like inside of me then. I could trust myself to walk everyday. I could trust myself to show up for my body. And soon that feeling of trust began to slowly flow into the other corners of my life.
What morning routines do for our creative self-worth
It turns out, a lot of creative people who feel blocked are not blocked because they don’t have anything to say. We all have marvelous offerings to share with the world. Everyone is fundamentally a creative being. But sometimes the blocks we feel as creatives are actually about a lack of trust within ourselves to do the thing.
Walking everyday taught me that doing a small activity, daily, over a long period of time builds that confidence we all need to feel like all of our dreams are possible.
Small commitments, when honored daily, can engender an abundance of trust in our creative process, and our creative self-worth. And that trust in our creativity does not just include the explicit art we make. Creativity, to me, is not just about output, but rather a commitment to move creative energy through us. Walking can be a creative act if you let it. And walking everyday didn’t just make me feel more healthy — it helped me generate and feel close to the creative life force within myself.
Being a freelance journalist and then later a remote, full time employee at a national newsroom took a lot of creative energy from me.
But slowly, I began to build a morning routine that protected my creative energy and self-worth outside of the 9 to 5 structure, helped me feel excited about my day and my longterm creative goals, and built my sense of confidence in myself to continually show up for my creative practice.
The more I showed up, I slowly chipped away at creative projects and brought finished work into the world. And the more I showed up each morning for my rituals, that fear of not creating or not being a trustworthy creative started to fade.
What even is a morning routine? And do you need one?
A morning routine is a collection of rituals you commit to doing before anything else each day that guides you towards your voice and creates the container in which you see your creative visions through.
It's a way to care for yourself and your creative wellbeing. In other words, a morning routine is the gift you can give yourself each day.
There are some important signs from your body and mind that may indicate you are craving a morning routine:
You find it hard to get out of bed in the morning, and seldom feel excited about the day ahead.
You feel overwhelmed by your creative goals and feel stuck in a cycle of ideation and inaction.
You’re jumping straight into your work day when you rise, and have poor boundaries between your waking morning time to yourself and your job.
You feel a lot of anxiety, dread, or lethargy upon waking and don’t feel like you have a consistent outlet for release.
You're immediately binging social media and spending time on your phone checking emails and notifications in the morning.
You feel disoriented or on autopilot in the mornings and don’t feel like you’re making any headway on your personal or creative goals.
Your morning time doesn’t feel like your own.
You feel like the morning is happening to you instead of a pleasureful process you get to make happen.
If any or many of these resonate with you, you may want to try a morning routine!
It takes time to build the routine that works for you. And for many creatives, your morning routine will change as your priorities, needs, and desires change.
I’ve had a lot of practice over the last five years building my own, and it’s still a work in progress. I’d love to write about what my specific routine is looking like these days, and share some approaches to building your own. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with the glimmers I touched on in this post:
Creative blocks are not caused by a lack of ideas, but rather a belief that we can’t trust ourselves to make our creative dreams a reality.
Small, repeated, routines we show up for each day quiets the pressure of creative perfectionism and engenders trust within ourselves.
Morning routines are one container to hold our creative rituals and make tiny, daily progress towards our dreams.
As we show up for our routines and bring projects into completion, our creative self-regard blossoms and we trust ourselves to do it again, and again, and again.
Soon, creativity isn’t an enemy that eludes us but rather a steady stream that we trust to move through us and water our self-worth and our magic.