This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/Kernel_49Pulse on 2026-04-03 10:34:41+00:00.
This happened three Sundays ago and I am still living with the consequences. Some context: my morning routine before this was about 25 minutes. Wake up, make coffee, shower, get dressed, leave. It was fine. Nothing was wrong with it. I don't know why I felt the need to improve something that was working.
I had seen a few videos about morning routines and productivity and I made the mistake of watching them on a Saturday night when I had nothing to do and was in a receptive mood. The videos were very convincing. The basic argument was that your morning sets the tone for your whole day and that most people are leaving significant potential on the table by not being intentional about the first hour. I found this plausible. I should not have found this plausible.
I spent the following Sunday building my optimized morning routine. I added journaling, which I had never done before. I added a ten minute meditation. I added a specific sequence of stretches I found online that were supposed to activate something. I added reading for twenty minutes. I added a cold water face rinse at a specific point in the sequence because apparently this does something to your cortisol. I wrote all of this out in order and timed each component and the total came to one hour and forty minutes, which meant I would need to wake up at 5:15am to complete it before work.
I did this for four days. On the fifth day I woke up at 5:15, stared at my journal for a few minutes, wrote the word "tired" and a small drawing of a frowning face, skipped the meditation, did half the stretches, and went to make coffee. My original routine was twenty five minutes and nothing was wrong with it. I now wake up at 5:15 out of habit and just sit in the kitchen in the dark for a while before my actual routine starts. This is somehow worse than where i began. TL;DR watched productivity videos, built a 100 minute morning routine to replace my 25 minute one, lasted four days, now just sit in the dark at 5am for no reason.