A Good Morning Routine if you Suffer with CFS/ME
Gosh, how many things have you read and seen telling you about the best morning routine on the internet these days? I imagine quite a few and most tend to be inaccurate, or unrealistic to your needs. It’s when we are exposed to celebrities waking at 03:30 to start their day and have exercised twice before 09:00 that we move into completely ridiculous.
The first thing you should know is that this is an example of a good routine to use in the morning, a template if you will, to perhaps build one more unique to you. I’ve suggested this hundreds of times to various people with various illnesses and conditions, and on most occasions it helps.
As you know, chronic illnesses are complex and genuinely change on a weekly basis, or even daily. Routines become very difficult to put in place when the key element, you, has different circumstances so often. Your routine, whatever it may end up being, will likely form from a combination of routines and then whammed together in an order that helps you, but with enough wiggle room to adapt. Hopefully, this one gives you a good starting place.
A consistent sleep cycle
Straight off the bat, this will be the hardest part of your routine to nail down. The only things you can reasonably control here are when you go to bed, and when you wake up. Of course, with CFS/ME it’s rarely that simple. Sleep quality is one of the things most affected by the fatigue issues that CFS/ME brings, as well as surrounding symptoms within your case. You can lie there all night long and not sleep a wink, or end up sleeping and feel worse, or wake up multiple times in the night and never getting deep sleep!
Picking a regular time to go to bed (preferably after a night routine) and a time to wake up at will at least give your body some consistency to fall back on. It is something that, along with everything else in this routine, will only really be felt a couple of weeks after it has been happening regularly. We’ve all slept well one night and woke up worse. And we’ve also slept like shit and woke up randomly fine. Sleep is a fickle thing, but it is essential.
This area of the routine though isn’t about getting you better sleep. That will occur naturally as multiple factors align. The consistent bedtime and wake time is simply programming your body and brain into a daily life cycle. With CFS/ME this is abnormally hard, but it will aid you in the mornings and it will aid you as you move through the day. One serious factor of high fatigue levels is having irregular cycles, and the body is full of them. Getting a half-decent rhythm with your night times will help, slowly, and you’ll feel it in the mornings.
Hydration
Here there are two elements to what I mean by hydration for when you wake up in the morning. Firstly, the water intake in the morning. Get yourself some water in within the first 15 minutes of waking. This helps a few things, but mainly your brain and your morning gastric processes (assuming there are no real issues in this area). I’d recommend everyone do this quite frankly, it’s just something you should do when we’re mostly water anyway.
The second element to this is hydrating your cells more than just drinking water – salts. What are salts? Salts are lost naturally during the night as you sleep, and so you wake up integrally hydrated and this is much more than being thirsty. Electrolytes will replenish these lost salts because that’s exactly what’s in them. Substances like potassium, magnesium and sodium are all the well-known variety, but there are many variants your body requires. Getting some electrolytes into your body first thing when you wake up means your body can hit top efficiency quicker. If you have CFS/ME, this means your fatigue threshold will be raised, you will just feel better, more alert, and less wobbly.
Trust me on this, you will notice a difference within a week. Get yourself some electrolyte dissolvable tablets and knock one into that wake-up water I told you to get, and hit two birds with one stone. A single glass will do, and honestly half an electrolyte tablet is enough for what you need too (they will last longer).
Natural Light
This one is fundamentally underrated by most. We need sunlight or natural light, it’s absolute fact. You should try and get this within an hour of waking up because it switches your brain on. With CFS/ME this is important as it means less energy will be used to wake you up across the entire morning. The light will jumpstart you, and the various morning processes that occur.
The key process is that the light triggers your natural melatonin release to occur 15-16 hours later, which will make going to sleep later slightly easier. Melatonin is a key tiredness hormone, and having this naturally release when you’re winding down to bed will hopefully mean an easier time dropping off to sleep. This light can also begin to trigger our normal gastric processes from food the day before, and having that happen earlier will also save you some energy, vital for CFS/ME. You can get fatigued from an irregular gastric cycle.
Replace your alarm clock with a natural light emitter alarm clock. It will wake you up with a gradually increasing orange light, rather than scaring the shit out of you with noise. If it’s light outside, get those curtains open as soon as possible too. Other nuggets of advice include NOT looking at your phone as soon as you wake up, as the blue light (even if it’s reduced) will absolutely reduce your waking up power. Also try not to be on your phone 30-60 minutes before sleep either.
OPTIONAL - Delay eating and delay your caffeine
The next two parts to this routine are optional, but I recommend trying both of these to see if they help. The first is to play with the timings of your breakfast and caffeine consumption in the morning. Rather than consuming these things straight away, delay them by an hour for two weeks and see how you feel. Delay for two hours and try again.
Delaying breakfast until after your normal morning bowel movements will potentially help you feel less fatigued in the later morning. If your body must digest one lot of food with breakfast, and pass another from the previous day, it tends to tire out quicker with CFS/ME.
With caffeine, delaying it can mean you avoid an afternoon crash. Caffeine blocks adenosine production (produced through the day and creates tiredness) and delays it. When the caffeine wears off, it spikes, and this spike creates a very quick sense of tiredness. Avoiding this could help CFS/ME but like all of this routine, requires a little bit of time to kick in.
OPTIONAL - Early achievement
The second optional element is this, do something on your to-do list within the first hour of waking up (if you’re physically able). It doesn’t have to be a major thing, just something that means that even if the day goes to shit, you’ve still accomplished something. That alone can make a potential afternoon flare much easier to deal with mentally.
In a lot of cases when folks with CFS/ME speak to me about their mental struggles of the condition, one thing that always crops up is being mid-flare and regretting how little was achieved. Sometimes our standards are too high and that doesn’t help, but doing something in the first hour of waking up actually does help wake you up too, particularly problem solving.
So, your routine should look like this:
1. Consistent wake-up time and bedtime.
2. Hydrate first thing, ideally with electrolyte involvement.
3. Get 10-20 minutes of natural lights in first hour of waking up.
4. Potentially delay breakfast and caffeine by up to two hours.
5. Do one thing on to-do list for the day as early as possible.
Give it a go and let me know how it goes!
Mark