Issue #169: My Mood-Supportive Winter Morning Routine

And how I maintain it while traveling.

The past two winters were among the most difficult of my life. I had to learn, for the first time, how to live alone and then faced a number of challenges, both personal and professional, that sent me into survival mode. I felt battered by waves of grief, before being plunged into chaos, that I’ve only recently been able to swim out from under. I’ve never felt more solid and happy in my personal life but this year, we’re heading into winter with a collective heaviness, reckoning with a country that voted to uphold cruelty, oppression, and misogyny. And yet, we need to go to work, buy groceries, take care of each other, and find the energy to continue to organize.

If I’ve learned anything in the past few years, it’s that few things are as vital for my mental health than a morning routine that attends to my spiritual, physical, and emotional needs. While it feels a little trite to follow up such a devastating political referendum with something as ubiquitous in lifestyle media as a morning routine, there are two reasons why I think this is important:

1. Adding ritual and routine to our day can help us to return a sense of control and predictability to our lives while we process this grief.

2. Resistance is a marathon, not a sprint. We need to take care of ourselves—not burn out through doomscrolling. We live in a media ecosystem designed to exploit our emotions for short-term social media engagement, as opposed to long-term political engagement (a big reason I made space for a complete tech and media detox this weekend). If we hope to make change, this anger and sadness needs to be harnessed into productive outlets, and that starts with regulating our nervous systems.

It took me a long time to understand that protecting my mornings is not selfish—it is what allows me to hold myself and others with more compassion. As Audre Lorde wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” And where a summer morning routine may be as quick as a tally of “glimmers” or a ten-minute meditation before heading on a walk, winter requires a much longer start for me that takes into account the slower, darker energy of the season. Read on for:

• intentional morning rituals, built around winter (with photos)

• the breakfast I eat every single day

• the ten-minute pause that is the single most important part of my morning

• six essential products in my morning routine

• an abbreviated, travel-friendly routine

Wake up with light. I wake up at the same time every day, be it weekend or weekday, which helps train my body to sleep through the night—something I’ve always struggled with. Because it’s still pitch-black out when my alarm goes off at 6:30 AM, I use a Hatch alarm clock*, which I’ve set to illuminate ten minutes before the alarm goes off, with a calming sound. I’m hyper-sensitive to light, so even though I sleep with an eye mask, the light is often enough to wake me up. *As a reminder to new readers (welcome!), there are never any affiliate links or sponsors here—just genuine recs!