Your Morning Is Doing More Than You Think
Like almost everyone else I know, my phone is my alarm clock. It’s just so convenient to use that setting to get myself up in the morning. Especially since I learned I could choose a song in my library to wake up to. (Lately it’s been Africa by Toto. Highly recommend).
But the danger of using your phone as an alarm clock is the temptation to immediately look at your notifications the moment you open your eyes.
That was me for years. Before my eyes had fully adjusted to the light, I’m reaching toward the nightstand to open my phone so I can check my messages, my emails, and my notifications. All before I’d even gotten out of bed.
And for a long time I didn't think much about it. Everyone does it. It's just what mornings look like now for most people. This is what being so connected in our digital world looks like.
But then I learned what was actually happening in my body during those first few minutes of the day — and what I was accidentally dismantling before I'd even gotten out of bed.
The window you don't know you have
The moments between sleep and full wakefulness are important moments for your brain..
When you wake up, your brain is still cycling through what's called the hypnopompic state — a liminal space where your brain waves are slow and receptive, hovering in theta and alpha territory. This is a window of unusual access to creativity, clarity, and internal processing that your brain uses before the day's noise takes over. It's the reason some of your best ideas show up while you’re still lying in bed.
The second you reach for your phone, that window closes shut. You're pulled immediately into beta — alert, reactive, processing information — which is not bad… it’s just not necessarily where you want to immediately start your day.
But beyond closing off moments of creative brain activity, it's really what's happening in your body along with this that matters even more.
What your body is already doing for you
In the first 30 to 45 minutes after waking, your body runs something called the Cortisol Awakening Response. Your cortisol — which is naturally low during sleep — surges by as much as 50 to 100 percent above baseline.
And before you panic about that: this is a good thing. This is your body doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Cortisol isn't a villain that we need to eliminate from our body. It’s a necessary part of our biology. In the morning, cortisol is your body's built-in activation system — mobilizing energy reserves, sharpening cognition, regulating inflammation, preparing your immune system for the demands of the day ahead. Think of it as your body's morning briefing. It’s your get up and go that should be there, even without coffee. In fact, there are people with a condition called Addison’s Disease who don’t make enough cortisol, and their energy is so low, they’ll struggle just to walk up a flight of stairs.
Cortisol is something we want in the morning. We just need to know how to best support it, and know what gets in the way of it working the way it’s supposed to.
When you reach for your phone and immediately begin scanning emails, reading news, or mentally cataloguing everything you didn't finish yesterday, your brain often interprets those inputs as threat. It’s not always conscious, but it’s happening behind the curtain neurologically. Your threat-detection system wakes up alongside your body, and suddenly that natural, healthy cortisol spike is being amplified by signals telling you to be hypervigilant, because there must be a threat right around the corner.
This causes that curve that was supposed to arc and return to baseline, to become distorted. And that distortion doesn't stay contained to your morning only. It has a ripple effect — the energy slump at 2pm, the cravings you can't quite explain, and the mind that races when you finally lie down at night. A dysregulated cortisol pattern in the morning often sits at the root of all of it.
There's something else worth understanding here: cortisol and melatonin operate like two sides of a teeter-totter. When one rises, the other falls. Which means what you do in the first hour of the day is already shaping how ready your body will be to wind down tonight. So that habit of immediately jumping onto your phone with all the news and messages and asks of you might be impacting more than you might realize.
What to do instead (and why "just stop checking it" never worked)
But just like with so many other things, knowing all of this didn't automatically fix my habit. I tried my typical all-or-nothing, jump in head first approach of “I won't check my phone for the first hour of the day” and failed at it repeatedly. You'd think understanding the mechanism would be enough motivation. But it wasn't.
What eventually worked at shifting this habit was starting much smaller than that. I set one boundary, one that was so simple and easy it felt almost ridiculous, and then I repeated it until it stopped requiring any effort at all. My first boundary was simply no phone in bed. I had to physically get out of bed before I could check it. It wasn’t about time at first, I was training myself to set a boundary and stick to it. And after adding onto it over time, now I don’t check my phone for the first 60-90 minutes of the day.
The full methodology for how I built this — and how to do it without the all-or-nothing cycle that sets most people up to quit — is something we walk through inside Rise + Reset.
But there's a simpler place to begin — something that takes ten minutes and costs nothing.
The one thing worth starting with
If you're going to do one thing differently in your mornings, I'd suggest this: go outside within the first 20 to 30 minutes of waking up.
It doesn’t need to be a long walk or workout routine. It’s literally just being outside with your eyes open toward the sun. (Not looking at the sun, don’t do that, but facing it).
Your brain has a small structure called the suprachiasmatic nucleus — your body's master clock. It anchors your entire circadian rhythm based on light signals received through your eyes first thing in the morning. When you get natural light in that morning window, you're signaling to your internal clock that the day has officially begun. That sets your cortisol peak, regulates your energy across the day, and — remember the teeter-totter — begins laying the groundwork for melatonin to rise at the right time tonight.
I started making time to go outside in the morning first thing and what I noticed the most was how tired I was at night. I sometimes struggle to shut my brain down before bed. I often put off going to bed because I hate that feeling of just lying there, waiting to fall asleep. But the days that I got just a few minutes of sunlight in the morning, I would fall right to sleep within a couple of minutes of my head hitting the pillow. I was sold.
And it makes sense that this would work. We are diurnal creatures. We live by the sun, or at least we’re meant to. But our modern lives have us so disconnected from the natural world. We don’t need the sun for light because we can flip a switch any time of day. We don’t need to step outside to gather food because the fridge is full. We’ve created a world where we can function without the help of the natural world around us. But we’ve forgotten that we are still creatures that are ruled by natural cues. And I think we’re seeing the effect of neglecting that connection.
When you've spent years lying awake wondering why your brain won't go quiet, the idea that your morning holds part of the answer can feel almost too simple, but simple doesn't mean it isn't real.
You don't have to overhaul your morning
Start with this one thing. Go outside before you look at your phone, even if you can only do 60 seconds at first. Just start the habit. Let the light in before the noise starts. Give your nervous system what it's been quietly asking for — what it needs biologically to function optimally.
Especially if you’re someone who wakes up and immediately feels like you’re behind, or you’re lying in bed making lists, feeling like the day is too heavy before you’ve even started, then it’s time to shift that pattern.
And I know from experience that not only can this pattern be shifted, but it starts with very simple steps.
If you want a step-by-step framework for building a morning that works with your nervous system — one that goes deeper into the science, gives you simple and practical tools, and walks you through how to make these shifts in a way that actually sticks — that's exactly what Rise + Reset was built for. It's available now, plus it's getting a glow up very soon. You get lifetime access and that includes all future course upgrades.
If you're a Rooted + Rising member, this is exactly what we've been digging into together this month — the full cortisol and circadian rhythm deep dive lives inside your June masterclass.
