#Morning journal how to#
#Morning journal full#

It feels great crossing them off and satisfying to close the day on a high. I use the daily focus to write down three small goals I want to achieve (and importantly can achieve) that day.

It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue- you’re not consciously aware of being tired-but you’re low on mental energy.” No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price.

As Florida State Professor of Psychology Roy Baumeister and New York Times journalist John Tierney say in Willpower: Rediscovering The Greatest Human Strength “Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rust-proof their new car. See, decision making energy uses a particularly complex part of the brain and we’re wasting energy anytime we’re unfocused.

Why? Because if you don’t you will mentally revisit your could-do list all day. The goal of the daily focus is to strip away the endless list of things you could do into a bite-sized list of things you will do. Try things like: “When Trooper learned to shake a paw”, “The moment I saw Ana bringing me a coffee”, or “How Antonio finally put the toilet seat down,” etc. Our minds don’t re live any specific experience. We know if people write down “family, food, job” or something similarly vague over and over it really doesn’t cause any happiness increase. Research shows the more specific the better. Research by Emmons and McCullough (2003) shows if you write down five gratitudes a week you’re measurably happier over a ten week period. This written exercise crystallizes that effect and allows them to pass through your mind instead of sizzling your emotions all day. The most healthy and happy people notice mistakes in their lives and then choose to let them go. The research also shows that holding regrets causes us to take more aggressive and risky behaviors in the future. Research titled “Don’t look back in anger!” by Brassen, Gamer, Peters, Gluth, and Bluch (2012) reported in Science magazine shows that minimizing our regrets as we age creates greater contentment and happiness. Two Minute Mornings is by far the best two minutes of my day, every day. No wonder research shows a positive mindset results in 31% higher productivity, 37% higher sales, and 3x more creativity.Īll from taking a few moments to let go of something, feel grateful, and bring some focus to your day. It’s a quick therapeutic intervention from our future focused society to both feel better and get more done. It’s the simple journal to help you rig the game so you can win it. If you’re not already sold, scientific research supports the positive effect of all of these actions, too. And focusing my attention on a few small commitments – a project to finish, a tough conversation I’d been waiting to have, and a twenty-minute run, for example – actually sealed the deal. The gratitude list helped me prime my brain for positivity. Letting go of a stress helped me crystallize a worry to avoid mentally revisiting it over and over throughout the day. The two minutes helped me suddenly “win the morning” which helped start momentum towards me “winning the day.” The difference in my life was both immediate and incredible. Well, it turns out the solution was right in front of me the whole time.īased on positive psychology research, I began developing a simple little system for myself called “Two Minute Mornings.”Īfter I woke up I spent the first two minutes of my day filling in my answers to three simple sentences:

#Morning journal how to#

I was writing books like The Happiness Equation and The Book of Awesome to teach people how to find mindfulness while running Leadership Development inside the world’s largest company. That was a freeze frame capture of me every day for the past few years.

#Morning journal full#

Have you ever found yourself with so many browser tabs open you can’t see the titles anymore? Or discovered your pockets full with little scrap-paper notes you wrote to yourself throughout the day? Or felt anxious about your jammed schedule for tomorrow because you have no time to focus on what matters?