Why Are We Obsessed With Morning Routines?

A look at the why’s and my personal experience

Photo by Íris Juana on Unsplash

I may be in some algorithm-based content echo chamber, but is it just me or does everyone seemed to be obsessed with the idea of ‘the perfect morning routine’?

It’s like everywhere I go across the internet there’s someone telling me how amazing it is to have an established morning routine; in particular, a ridiculously early one. As I type into YouTube now there are all kinds of different morning routine rituals for various types of people, or even seasons, like “morning routines for school,” “men,” “summer,” “couples,” “productive,” “2020,”… the list goes on.

And the kicker? These videos get hundreds of thousands of views. That’s not even including the thousands of pages of Google results from articles and books written on the subject.

So when did we start taking this stuff seriously?

The earliest study I could find on Google Scholar that mentioned changing morning routines to become more beneficial was written in 1985 and was written explicitly about trying to get troublesome children ready for school on time. After that, during the 1990s there was a growing interest in sleep habits and morning routines of those who suffered from various types of disabilities…