Daily Dose of English 5
Morning Routines
Daily Dose of English 5
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about morning routines. Morning routines, that thing that you do every single morning, or rather, those things that you do every single morning, because that's what generally makes something a routine, as if it's several things that come one after another. I'm of the opinion, I think, that everyone should have some sort of morning routine, because in the morning, you're typically still a little bit tired, and having something that you do every single morning is very helpful for resetting yourself and making sure that you're waking up on the right side of the bed, as we say. That's an idiomatic phrase, an expression, an idiom, if you will, that we use to say when somebody is happy and they feel good in the morning. If you wake up on the right side of the bed, or the correct side of the bed, you're feeling good. The opposite is if somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed today, if they're grumpy and not feeling very helpful or very good, you can say, oh wow, somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed today, huh? That means that they're in a bad mood or something, and you can tell. I think that a morning routine is very important, and I like to have my morning routine. I've actually been changing it a little bit recently. I've actually been tweaking with my wake-up time, because I want to feel healthier in the morning. I did a whole week of trying to wake up at 5.30, which is a half hour earlier than I usually do, and it was not great. I felt really tired every single day, so I've been trying a few things here and there. My wake-up time doesn't necessarily affect my wake-up morning routine, because when I wake up, I typically go to the bathroom, I brush my teeth, wash my face, that sort of thing. I typically have to blow my nose, because you don't even know why, but I think you can figure it out. I brush my teeth, wash my face with cold water to help wake myself up, and then I go and put on my clothes and choose what I'm going to wear for the day and get ready. From there, I like to go out into the kitchen and make myself my morning coffee. I much prefer making my coffee in the morning than getting it from somewhere, especially because I like to do it pretty early, at 6.15 or 6 o'clock even, so it's pretty early in the morning. I think it tastes better, it's cheaper, and it's easier because I don't have to go outside. I make my own coffee in the morning. I either use an AeroPress or just a standard V60 drip coffee, and then I like to have my coffee while I read, sort of just a quick morning lesson, sort of what it is. There's a book that I like, it's a daily stoic lessons, I forget exactly what it's called, but it's pretty easy to find online, but it's sort of a daily exercise in thinking about mindfulness and how you appreciate the world. I read that, there's only five minutes of reading every single morning, so I do that, I have my coffee, and then I like to do a quick journal entry. I have this journal which is called One Line a Day, and it's a journal with one page for every single day of the year, so 365 pages, plus I guess there's a couple other things in there for equity pages, but there's a page for each day, but it's divided into five different sections, and so each year you actually do the journal a whole other time. This is only my first year doing it, so I don't have the year number two yet, but next year on January 1st, I will see my response from the year before, and it's sort of like a year reflection on what you were thinking of or what was happening, and so I like to just write. It's very short. It takes me a minute, two minutes to do that entry, and so writing in the journal every day is a very quick way just to do something to put thoughts onto the paper, because I think that writing is a great way to solidify a thought that you're having, and so I typically reflect on the reading that I did, but it can kind of be on anything. Sometimes the reading isn't that interesting or important, so I write about my mood or if I'm not feeling well or whatever it might be, and so I'm excited to go back next year eventually and see what I wrote, because I already don't really remember, and so I think it's a really fun way to start the morning, and then after that is when I turn on my computer. I'd like to do just some quick jumping jacks and push-ups just to wallow my computer starting up to get my blood flowing a little bit, get my body moving, and then I will check some messages that come up, but then is when I start doing my check. My language learning every single morning is one of the first things that I do. It doesn't always happen. Occasionally, there's something else that I do before that, like if I check some messages for too long or something, then I might do that until for like 15, 20 minutes or whatever it is, but I try as quickly as I can to start my check learning so that I can get it all totally finished before work, and so I do about an hour-ish of check, and then I get up, I take a quick break, I make sure I have water, I have a little quick breakfast, and then I come back to finish my check with my longer activities, and that's how I'm able to do two and a half hours per day every single day of check because it's that first thing that I do. I start my day with that, and then the rest of the day, I can do whatever, and so, yeah, that's my morning routine. After that, I start working, and that becomes more of an afternoon routine than at that point it's not really a routine because everything's a little bit different, but I think that everybody should at least try to have some kind of morning routine even if it's very simple. There's a lot of power to routines in general in that they help you to do things consistently because consistency really is key to becoming good at a lot of things in life, focusing on something and doing it every single day for a long time is how you, in a sense, become a master of that thing. It's been really helpful for me to think of everything that I want to be good at or do a lot of as a habit, including this podcast. I have a bit of a routine, a way that I do this. I set up a process, and I follow a process so that I'm able to make these episodes and release one every single day. We'll see how long that lasts. Obviously, I called it the daily dose of English, so I hope that it lasts for a little while, but we'll see exactly how long. However, the fact that I have a routine and a habit that I'm building to do this every single day is what's going to make it last a lot longer than if I just, on a whim, if just one day I decided that I wanted to do a daily English podcast and I started that day, it would probably take me too long. It would be too slow, and I would really get quickly tired of doing it. I'd burn out. When I was coming up with the idea for this, I was really careful to think about that and keep that in mind so that it wouldn't happen. From my experience of habits and routines, habits and routines are very important for that sort of thing because when you can turn something that you do want to do, that you're excited about doing, that you're interested in, into a habit or a routine, then it stops becoming just a desire or a wish and actually starts to become reality. If you can hold yourself to that routine, you can do something pretty incredible. There's a lot of power to these habits and to these abilities. I want to give you a bit of a challenge. It's not a true challenge. I'm not going to check your homework or anything like that, but if you're struggling to do daily language learning, daily English practice, this podcast, the fact that it comes out every day is a great way to try that. I specifically think that it's best to start things in the morning because that's when you definitely have energy, unless you slept terribly, but I hope you get pretty good sleep. You typically have energy in the morning and you can usually slot in or you can fit in, you can do 10 minutes of language learning somewhere in there, or maybe it's 20 minutes. I know for my Czech podcast that I listen to, I like to go through the transcript. I like to go through the words as well because I'm still learning, very much so. I like to do that as well, so it takes me about more like 15 to 20 minutes to actually go through the entire Czech podcast. But if you can fit that in before you start working in the morning, that's a fantastic way to build language learning into your morning routine and guarantee that every single day you get practice with English. I hope that you try to do something like that and see how it goes. Let me know down in the comments how your morning routine shapes up. That is everything for today, for this episode. I appreciate you stopping by and listening today, and I hope that you have a fantastic rest of your day, and I'll see you tomorrow. See you.
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