FIVE EVENING RITUALS TO BRING SUCCESS INTO THE NEXT DAY
We often come home from a long day of work feeling exhausted and stressed out. We have compiled a combination of balance rituals and planning rituals that will help you to feel less stressed and more productive the next day.
E.T. Facetime home…
Young people especially need to invest time in nurturing close emotional ties, as communication with loved ones can temporarily relieve outer stresses. Heart-to-heart relationships are harder to find in today’s digital world, so quality time spent talking with loved ones should be looked forward to and valued. Use the technology we have to your advantage by using Facetime to chat to your loved ones about their days over dinner.
Create your own bedtime story
Music can have a stimulating effect on positivity. Music’s greatest benefit is that it provides a stimulus for our emotions and our imagination.
Music has the ability to trigger our imaginative frame of mind and open us up to energies we could never achieve through our own free thought. Tapping into our own creativity through music can help produce new ideas. Just remember to make sure you choose songs filled with chilled out and mellow vibes. One study found if you listen to music with the intent to increase feelings of happiness you are more likely to improve your mood after listening.
Give your head space a massage
The gifts that mindfulness can bring to your life are endless: increased awareness, greater self regulation, willingness to embrace new experiences, a broader perspective on wisdom in day to day life. Although, fundamentally, it needs to be put into practice (Howells, A., Ivtxan, I., & Eiroa-Orosa, F.J. 2016). One way of tapping into mindfulness is through meditation. Meditation has a significant impact on what we focus our attention on by bringing us back to our senses and our present situation, thus it aids the development of mindfulness.
Mindfulness has been shown (Howells, A., Ivtxan, I., & Eiroa-Orosa, F.J., 2016) to improve an individual’s health and general well being. If you are new to meditation, you can always use a smartphone to download a mindfulness app. Take a look at some of the best ones out there.
Headspace is known as one of the best apps, receiving the highest average score (4.0). It offers a free 10-day trial that allows you to experience daily 10 minute meditation sessions. Calm, is another fantastic app that provides a generous variety of meditation options, including a deep sleep program to quieten your mind and help you drift to sleep peacefully.
Tomorrow’s to-do list
Success simply cannot be achieved if one does not have a to-do list.
Forbes gives five great tips to help master the perfect one:
- Keep to-do lists to a maximum of three things and complete the hardest one first
- Write your to-do list the night before so you can begin the next day with a good idea of the tasks ahead
- Keep your mind focused on the important things by dumping the negative stuff out of your mind. Writing a weekly dump list can help you declutter the worries from your life
- TURN ALL DISTRACTIONS OFF!
- Avoid to-do lists that give you a timestamp for each task. This way, unpredicted tasks or changing events can be easier to add into your schedule once your appointments and prior commitments are confirmed.
Reflect and be grateful
How do you want to see yourself in one week? One month? Tomorrow? They’re questions we should all be reflecting upon from time to time. One journal writing technique for success is to narrate how your next day will ideally unfold.
That can involve writing out a step-by-step account, e.g, “Mary Jane will wake up get ready and go for a run, come home…” The next day see how it impacted on your actions because it should push you to charge through difficult tasks and fight off any distractions getting in your way.
BONUS: Tim Ferriss’ Evening Routine
As we did with our post on morning rituals, we have added the night routine of author, entrepreneur and public speaker, Tim Ferriss:
- Drink tea that contains apple-cider vinegar and a tablespoon of unfiltered honey--to help with sleep
- Read fiction while waiting for hot tub to fill
- Fill a hydro flask with water and lots of ice
- Have a bath with epsom salts
- Sauna session
Successful people have a commonality in that they each have concrete rituals that work for them. Every morning and night spend 30 minutes working on a few of these new rituals to push yourself forward on your journey!
Which night rituals will you choose to implement into your today?
WORDS BY LAUREN TIZZONE
References:
Howells, A., Ivtzan, I., & Eiroa-Orosa, F. J. (2016). Putting the ‘app’in happiness: a randomised controlled trial of a smartphone-based mindfulness intervention to enhance wellbeing. Journal of Happiness Studies, 17(1), 163-185.
Ferguson, Y. L., & Sheldon, K. M. (2013). Trying to be happier really can work: Two experimental studies. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 8(1), 23-33.
