The Morning Brain
I can’t be the only one whose brain wakes up before their eyes open. I mean, the brain is the power source. It’s what gets everything started.
When my brain wakes up, there’s usually an immediate thought that gets the cogs going. Some days, that alone makes a daily routine hard to even step into. And now that I’m writing this out, I realize it’s not thousands of thoughts fighting for attention. Not really. They’re just different. Different categories. Different weights.
Some mornings I wake up already emotional, reeling from something that recently happened. Other mornings I wake up feeling guilty, like I’m already behind on life, and that’s when the mental to-do list starts writing itself.
For the most part, I don’t let the activity in my head keep me in bed. And I say for the most part intentionally. There have been mornings where I got so caught up in my thoughts that I froze. The only action I wanted to take that day was to do nothing.
My saving grace is that I’ve always been a doer. That part of me hasn’t gone anywhere. But the older I get, the more challenging it’s become to get in gear. Mentally. Physically. Sometimes both at the same time.
Noticing Without Fixing
There was a time when I tried to tame my thoughts. All that did was send me down a rabbit hole, replaying them over and over. What I ended up doing was thinking things to death.
The thoughts felt as if they’d never end. Overlapping each other. Pulling me every which way mentally. Honestly, it was overwhelming and exhausting. It took doing this over and over and getting nowhere before I finally realized something.
It doesn’t work.
They don’t go away.
Had to laugh at myself because of course they don’t.
That was the ah moment. I didn’t need to fix the thoughts. I needed to do something different.
Acknowledge them instead of trying to control them.
Not needing an immediate answer.
Being in my feelings without trying to fix them.
Letting my brain overthink if it wants to.
And remembering I have the choice not to react because a thought shows up.
That’s when I knew I needed a place to put them.
Putting It All In One Place, A Daily Routine
I’m not sure when exactly it started, but I can remember how it came together.
Throughout my 20s and 30s, I woke up with a racing mind and lived very reactively. Reflecting wasn’t really part of how I moved through those days.
When I entered my 40s, I started jotting thoughts down on whatever was nearby. Sticky notes, journals, notebook pages, whatever happened to be in front of me in the moment.
Writing things down wasn’t the problem. I actually wrote things down a lot.
The problem was that everything lived in different places. A reminder on a sticky note. A thought buried in a notebook. A list started in one journal and another one somewhere else. Because nothing had a real home, most of it never got revisited.
The day would move on, the note would disappear into the pile, and the same thoughts would circle back later like they were brand new.
It felt like I was moving in circles mentally. My body was changing over the years, but not so much my mental starting point. I started noticing the gap. That feeling of wanting more, without knowing what that more was supposed to look like, kept growing.
I can be the kind of person who lets things pile up until I’m completely fed up with nothing being different. Eventually, that’s what happened.
So I changed things.
I started creating routines for moving my body and fueling it, but also for my mind. I’m not someone who follows rules to the letter, but I realized I needed structure. A baseline. Something I could return to when days got wonky for whatever reason.
At first, that looked like a written schedule broken into morning, day, and night. But even then, life does what it does and adds more layers, and I still had things everywhere. Affirmations in one place, meditation in an app, reflections in a journal.
Call me late to the party, but that’s when it clicked.
I didn’t need a traditional planner.
I needed something that worked for me.
So I took the parts I was already using and brought them together in one place. One place for everything that had been living in my head. Not everything goes the way I want it to. It never does. I just needed a place to come back to.
Moving Through the Day
At the end of it all, I’m not solving anything to the point where it’s gone. My overthinking brain isn’t resolved.
The difference is that I can map out what I need so I’m not constantly reacting. It gives me a calm place to move from, and permission to stop forcing myself to build Rome in a day.
And to not feel guilty when it isn’t.
So I turned it into something I could use whenever I need it.
It helps me move through the day without feeling all over the place.
That became the Daily Routine Planner.
