The Perfect Morning Routine (Backed by Science)

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. I put out episodes four times a week so that you can improve yourself because if you can improve yourself, you will improve your life. So if that's what you wanna do, hit that subscribe button. Today, I'm gonna talk about the perfect morning routine that is backed by science because everyone talks about morning routines. Cold showers, journaling, working out, all of that stuff, but almost nobody talks about what's actually happening inside of your brain the first hour that you wake up and how to actually optimize your brain, your body, and then your mood for the rest of the day based on neuroscience. Because what you do in that window, that first hour determines your motivation, your action, your stress levels, your cognitive performance for the next twelve to sixteen hours, and most people waste it. But today, I'm gonna show you how to program yourself like a neuroscience from the moment you wake up in the morning. I'm gonna go through eight different habits in your morning routine that you should have, and I guarantee most of these you've never heard of before. As a bonus, I also created a free worksheet and morning checklist for all eight of these that you can download and print out to make sure that you're staying on track. If you wanna get it for free, you can go to theperfectmorning.com, download it for free, print it out, and use that checklist. Alright. So let's dive into it. Number one, you want to delay dopamine for at least sixty minutes. The first hour of your day sets your dopamine baseline. Dopamine is not just the pleasure chemical. It's the molecule of your drive, your motivation, and your future pursuit. And so Doctor. Anna Lembke, who's a Stanford psychiatrist, explains that early high dopamine spikes, like looking at explains that early high dopamine spikes, like looking at social media or email stress or even sugar, actually lower your baseline dopamine over time, so you feel worse throughout the day. And so if you spike dopamine immediately after waking up through Instagram or through scrolling or through sugar or through the news, your brain down regulates your dopamine receptors for the rest of the day. And that's why if you do this, the rest of the day can actually feel flat. So that's why for the first sixty minutes of your day, you want no phone, you want no sugar, no heavy input of stimulation watching the news or you've seen your text messages from your mom where she's talking about fearful stuff happening in the world. What you're trying to do in those first sixty minutes is you're protecting your dopamine baseline for the day. You're telling your brain, we earn dopamine. We don't just inject dopamine by doing …