Why Your Morning Routine Is Making You More Anxious

If you wake up and immediately start running through a 12-step morning routine — cold plunge, journal, gratitude list, supplements, workout — and somehow still feel anxious before you've even made coffee, this episode is for you.

I'm a meditation teacher and I'll tell you something honestly: there are still mornings I wake up anxious before my feet hit the floor. After decades of practice. So if that's you too — if you've worked at a morning routine and you're still waking up tense — please hear that you're not failing. Something else is going on.

In this episode, I unpack why so many of us are quietly performing wellness instead of actually feeling well. The 5 AM club. The perfect morning routine. The optimisation stack. None of it is making us calmer. In a lot of cases it's making us more anxious, more self-critical, and more disconnected from what our bodies actually need.

I'll share my own honest morning — the dog, the kettle, the small thing I've settled into after years of trying everything. The one question I ask myself before the day starts running me. And what a real, embodied morning practice can look like (it's much smaller than you've been told).

If you've been feeling exhausted by your own self-improvement, take this as your permission to do less.