As our digital noise device projects sound waves into the air on Monday at 6:30 AM, birds can be heard performing their best Whitney Houston impression in their avian lingo. Now that the gloom of the cold Napa winter has subsided, we enter a sunny, warm, and lively May. An astounding gradient of blue, orange, and the rare slash of the pink border of the horizon as the sunset hovers above the Napa Valley mountains.
The community of Napa is privileged to enjoy such splendors. However, to take in these features of the Shangri La we live in, we have to elevate our bodies into a vertical position and mobilize ourselves.. These visions of rapture can come to a screeching halt if we can’t move in an efficient, pain-free manner throughout our everyday lives.
What sounds better at 6:30 AM? A warm and cozy bed? Or the Shangri La? After a restful weekend and the introduction to a week full of rigorous work tasks, this crossroad we meet when getting out of our comfortable bed can put us on a psychological battlefield.
Don’t worry, the bed will still be there at the end of the day. It’s an intimate object lacking a conscious brain. It won’t get up and leave us for another human. So give your bed some TLC. Make your side of the bed so it’s ready to receive you in its magnificent sheltering and soft glory and get on with your day. After a day of getting important tactics accomplished, that bed will be increasingly inviting when it’s time for some shut-eye.
We can all relate that sitting in bed and fiddling with our phones for a few minutes is far easier than getting out of bed and preparing for a day’s work on Monday. However, remaining in bed for that extra five minutes can immediately be turned into fifteen or even twenty minutes. So there goes a period of your morning in which you can make a significant pivot in your productivity and mental mindset for the upcoming day.
It might sound crazy, but having the courage to get out of bed to achieve exercise can transition from letting valuable extra bedtime minutes in the morning transform into a potent ingredient of success for our physical, psychological, and emotional well-being. The benefits of performing the challenging task of getting out of bed to exercise in the morning produce an invaluable impact on surpassing some of the challenges we might experience throughout the day.
The productive stress imposed upon the body elicits adaptions to optimize our sleep-wake cycle. Additionally, the stress hormones produced via exercise assist in mitigating the pressure we might experience from extrinsic stresses of life such as financial, family, and emotional hardships. Lastly, this valuable time to ourselves in the morning can prove an advanced form of meditation where we can focus on our own thoughts and move away from the firehose of news and social media information projected at us during our time in bed looking at our phones on Monday morning.
Exercising first thing in the morning at the beginning of the week might sound nuts, but the bi-product of such a tactic presents an astronomical improvement to human performance.
Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com , or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.
