You’re Starting and Ending Your Day All Wrong

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up? What’s the last thing you see before you sleep? If your answer is 'check my phone' — you’re not alone, but you are setting yourself up for stress, poor sleep, and lost time.

In this world of more and more chaos, insecurity, disruption, and change, we need more than ever to be calm, clear-headed, and focused.  If you start and end with your phone, you are losing this game.

When I was visiting Europe, I immediately (and unintentionally) lost my morning routine, and instead would check my phone after waking up and before going to bed. I also continued those habits into the next week, back in New York.  From personal experience, I immediately noticed increased anxiety, reduced focus, and lower productivity.

I’m here to convince you that you should consider the loss of your attention and peace of mind mental health emergencies.  I strongly recommend that you prioritize this, as your life is basically...the sum of what you pay attention to.  

I know we all know that our phone use is generally bad, so toward the end we'll discuss best practices to catalyze change.

📚 Part 1: Summary of Research — Why You Should Stop Checking Your Phone First and Last Thing Each Day

I’m going to be a bit checklist-y so that I can quickly get you through the science here.  What I want you to reflect on is - why does this matter?  How will this impact you day by day, AND in the long term?

🧠 Cognitive Overload & Anxiety

Morning phone use immediately puts the brain into reactive mode, rather than a calm, intentional

state.  Studies from the University of Texas and the American Psychological Association show that checking email, news, and social media first thing in the morning increases cortisol levels and anxiety. This can hijack your attention for hours and negatively impact productivity and mood.

Additionally, we spend cognitive energy NOT trying to focus on our smartphone if it’s out - even when the phone is down or on silent! 

Links:

• How Your Morning Phone Routine Can Sabotage Your Day

• The Mere Presence of Your Smartphone Reduces Brain Power, Study Shows

😴 Sleep Disruption & Poor Sleep Quality

The blue light emitted by screens suppresses melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleep.  Exposure to notifications or emotional content before bed triggers the sympathetic nervous system, making it harder to fall or stay asleep.

The Sleep Foundation and other studies link pre-sleep phone use with more sleep disturbances, later sleep onset, and worse sleep quality.

Links:

• E-Readers Foil a Good Night’s Sleep

• Effects of smartphone use with and without blue light at night in healthy adults

• Blue Light:  What It Is How It Affects Your Sleep

📉 Reduced Focus and Well-being

Constant stimulation from phones contributes to decreased focus, attention fatigue, and a shortened attention span. Over time, this pattern can reduce mindfulness, increase FOMO, and create dependency cycles similar to addiction.

Links:

• You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than A Goldfish

• Going Light:  Students Ditch Smartphones In Mental Health Study

📚 Part 2: Getting clear on the real impacts

Let’s review:  reduced attention span/decreased focus, increased anxiety, worse sleep.  These are the first-order effects of your phone - bad already, but let’s keep going. 

Second-order effects from the above: 

• Reduced attention span:  lower productivity; quicker mental exhaustion; less present for family and friends; less enjoyment of books, movies, and performances;  reduced ability to do “hard things”; less patience for mastery

• Increased anxiety:  lower productivity; less present for family and friends; increased stress responses/coping behaviors (stress eating, alcohol, cigarettes, etc.); worse overall health; worse sleep; lower happiness

• Worse Sleep:  Basically everything, including reduced attention/focus and increased anxiety, multiplying the effects of all the other bad things

To say the least, these are really, really bad effects, and we underestimate how serious this is.  So what should you do about it?

📚 Part 3: Let’s Fix This.

There are 2 parts to fixing this - first, what are good habits that you can do instead?  We have to replace something with something else (not nothing).  Secondly, how can you go about breaking a bad habit?  

Morning replacements:

Do anything that does NOT require a lot of thinking, and instead, is slow, low stimulation and good for your body:

• Quick Breath Exercise:  sitting up straight on your bed, do 1 minute worth of deep breathing, eyes closed

• Stretch.

• Tune into your senses:  For 2 minutes, try focusing on different senses, like feeling your feet on the floor, or listening to the farthest sound you can hear

• Drinking water:  Hydrating is a great way to get your body going 

• Take a quick walk:  Get your blood flowing, feel the breeze and sun outside

• Journal:  Take some time to think about how you want the day to go, and some things you are grateful for, to start off on a positive mood

Evening replacements:

Again, the point here is to slow down, to relax, to calm your mind and prepare it for sleep.

• Do Light Stretches

• Read a physical book! 

• Clean dishes (without other stimulation) - this allows you to focus on your physical senses

• Brain dump journal to clear thoughts

• Do a before-sleep meditation

• Light candles or incense

Strategies to Break the Bad Habit

First and foremost, start small - try one little thing at a time.  Start by replacing looking at your phone with drinking water and making coffee (or something equally as simple).  

Secondly, don’t think of this change as forever just yet.  Give yourself a trial period - maybe 1 week or a month if you’ve been successful with habit change before - to show yourself that you are capable, and that making the change is worth it.

Celebrate when you do make the change!  It is so important to log the sense of pride and accomplishment in your brain, and associate this new habit with an incentive (of positive identity).  A personal reward can help with this because you are signaling that this is important. 

Lastly, I highly recommend in general that you find some sort of way to adopt a mindfulness practice, which is any practice to help your mind relax.  I use the app Positive Intelligence, but there are a ton of ways to access mindfulness, not just meditation.

If you want to think through what is best, book a discovery call and we can discuss what might be best for you.

For Learning and With Love,

Chris