Morning Blues
I wake up and straight away I’m running.
I’ve got a choice – either I let my mind go wild and imagine all the terrible things I’ve got to do today or I try to go back to sleep and calm my mind down which means I feel guilty about wasting the day. Sound familiar?
Caught then between the devil and the deep blue sea, but just what is going on?
What’s actually happening is that your body is going into wakeup mode with it’s own version of a double shot of expresso, it’s producing a hormone called Cortisol and you’re now in the Cortisol Awakening Response (CAR). Cortisol has a nickname and that is the stress hormone.
So now you’re starting to see how the pieces are starting to fit together. Your body’s woken you up with a shot of stress and this peaks around 30-45 minutes after you’ve woken. If you try to go back to sleep you won’t be able to and now your brain is looking for the things that might be causing you stress, going into fight or flight mode and naturally you’ll be thinking of your day ahead so all those items will be filled with disaster!
This may well be caused by high Cortisol levels and the natural thing to do is to go to something that’ll occupy your mind and cheer you up – enter your smartphone. There’ll be something exciting there and after all there are things to be dealt with, probably people have been in touch and need responding to? Not the best idea though!
What you’re effectively doing if you use this approach is getting out of the Cortisol issue by using another hormone, Dopamine, the pleasure hormone. The trouble is your brain is like an empty sponge following your night’s sleep and the Dopamine will give you a powerful high which you will go through the day trying to recreate.
You’re teaching yourself to become addicted to the phone – anytime you feel stressed you’ll reach for it, possibly leading to anxiety, poor concentration, lack of focus, confusion and poor sleep as you overload your attention receptors.
My approach is to go natural instead, the first thing is to empty the mind and the second thing is recognise this is effectively going into fight or flight mode so your body wants action so physical activity helps; we’re talking here a bit of yoga, housework or a short walk. Just keep telling yourself it’s going to pass soon.
I’ve also prepared a short hypnosis (17minutes) for Morning Blues, and this will actually help to reduce the anxiety in the morning, by encouraging a clear mind state in the morning with deep breathing and relaxation. It’s important as well to generally say to yourself that you are capable of being good and cheerful in the morning, the more you tell yourself how horrible mornings are the less chance you’ll be able to get away from that concept.
So just listen to the hypnosis a few times and if you find your blues returning give it another listen:
