Zac Perna: Four life-changing habits to add to your morning routine

Take it from influencer Zac Perna – making the time to incorporate these four simple steps into your morning routine will help to improve your mood and set you up for success.

Influencer and trainer Zac Perna shares his tips for success in his new book. Picture: Supplied

Fitness and motivation guru, trainer and social media influencer, Melbourne-based ZAC PERNA has learned a lot of lessons on his journey to success. In this extract from his new book Good Influence, he shares his tips for getting ahead from the moment you wake.

The optimal morning routine

Fewer things are less practical than an influencer giving advice on how the average person should structure their day.

Influencers: technically unemployed, somehow have more than 24 hours in a day with fewer responsibilities than a typical pet owner. So it’s not all that inspiring to squeeze in a hot yoga, sauna, hair appointment, workout and plant-watering session, all before 12pm.

I personally consider myself an entrepreneur and content creator as opposed to an influencer, but most people choose not to distinguish one from the other if the person in question has a social media following. It’s for this reason that I’ve always been very hesitant creating content for the average person about setting up ideal routines. No one can adopt every piece of advice and what’s helped me may not help the next person.

However, one caveat I will always mention is that it is futile to aim for perfection – instead, aim for an improvement in your daily routine.

Influencer and trainer Zac Perna has a new book called Good Influence.

Improving my morning routine changed my life. It improved my mood, I had better days, I felt happier and more motivated and I experienced less anxiety.

I mentioned earlier that my anxiety would often be brought about by ambitious thinking (goal setting, future plans, big ideas – you know, the fun ones). Yet when I focused on improving what I do in the morning, the anxiety subsided and I felt capable and in control. This is why I am compelled to dedicate time to spreading the message to others online. Hearing other people’s stories of life improvement would be fuel to continue helping others with this.

The first person I saw a positive change in after addressing their routine was my brother. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I urged him to begin reading. From someone who was a terrible reader, now Joel’s favourite time of the day is his morning read in bed. It sets him up for the day and makes him feel like he has some time to himself.

Instead of telling you what to do, I’m going to tell you what I do (and have done for years) that has improved my life.

My morning routine typically consists of these things:

Avoid my phone

I realised early on that there was one task that had accidentally become part of my morning routine, for the worse.

Checking my phone was instinctive in the morning. I’d wake up, tired-eyed and with brain half-asleep, and reach for my phone, scrolling through updates I missed overnight. Instead of catching up on anything useful, I’d just expose my mind to everyone else’s highlights and be left feeling useless in bed.

Zac Perna has four tips to include in the morning for a successful day.

Perna says incorporating the steps into a routine will reduce anxiety.

My brain would still be in half-dream/half-awake mode and anything I would see on my phone would cause me to overthink and believe irrational things that I’d carry through my day. So that was the first thing that had to go from my routine. I have a rule to set my phone on ‘do not disturb’ and I CANNOT open it unless I have finished the last step of my morning routine.

Read

I replaced my morning social media scroll with caffeinated reading. They say you shouldn’t ingest caffeine too quickly, but I personally can’t ingest it quickly enough. I love my time waking up, sipping some coffee and reading in silence for 10-30 minutes. As I mentioned in chapter 7, I’ll read a nonfiction book in the morning. Something to get my brain working and thinking positive thoughts. I believe the brain is quite malleable in the morning and whatever you ‘feed it’ will set the tone for the day. In other words – at the risk of sounding like I am holding energy crystals – positivity begets positivity. Once my reading is done, my mind will have had enough time to wake up and come back to Earth. Then, iPad in hand, I’ll begin my next phase.

Day planning

For those fortunate enough to have flexibility in time and structure in their workday, this is huge. I dedicate a few minutes to jotting down the things I would like to get done in that day, in order of priority, whether that’s work, fitness, life admin or anything else. Even just taking the time to figure out what’s important to me that day is very powerful in adding purpose and fulfilment to my day.

I also ensure I do this before someone else tells me in an email or message what I must do. For example, if I wake up and decide on my own terms that I’m going to prioritise working on my fitness clients in the morning, I don’t want anyone else to sway this – for example, if a boss, business partner or friend needs something done that isn’t urgent. Unless it’s essential I will stick to my plan and work other things around it (not the other way around). Obviously there will be things that I’ll need to factor in and change; however it’s important for me to not let anyone else run my day. Waking up and checking your phone does the opposite. It signals that you’re responding to the demands of the world and reacting to stimuli.

I realised that people are always going to ask things of me.

And while it may be my responsibility to complete them, it isn’t my responsibility to complete them at the convenience of others and to the detriment of my own happiness.

Along with not checking your phone, Perna also suggests a cold shower for a kick of morning adrenaline.

Cold shower

As outlined elsewhere, having a cold shower is my favourite way to add a small spike of adrenaline to the morning. It’s painful, but it’s the fastest legal way of adding some mental resilience and immediate wakefulness.

It’s only after this step that I’ll consider looking at my phone because my day has been (roughly) outlined. Most importantly, I’m awake and mentally alert.

I’ll sometimes add additional activities to these steps, such as breathing exercises (Wim Hof method) or an actual workout, but it depends on my morning and how much time I have. A meditation has crept in there before, but I prefer to add that in my evenings to wind down and not draw out my morning routine to over an hour. These four simple steps take me around 40 minutes to complete, so I usually get up an hour earlier than I need to.

Joel did the same thing as a carpenter: he found that he had to get up at 4.30am just to get these steps done, and 3.30am if he wanted to train before work. Unbound by any additional

responsibilities like raising a family or studying, he would just get to bed earlier when possible.

As I said, there’s nothing more aggravating than a stranger who doesn’t know your life telling you how you should structure your day, so I’ve refrained from giving too much advice here and instead just outlined what helped me.

At the risk of contradicting myself, I encourage you to do two things that most people would agree aren’t too much of a stretch. One: identify and remove where possible any toxic or negative habits that you may have accidentally incorporated into your routine. For me it was the morning social media scroll. I can’t see a place for this no matter your circumstances.

Two: find at least one thing that you can add to your morning routine to promote positivity in your life.

If you would like to add any of these steps to your day, I would suggest you start slow and work on building each one as a habit. Don’t commit to 30 minutes of reading and a three-minute cold shower; just do five minutes reading and a 30-second cold shower. Once the habits are in place you can increase the duration of each one relatively easily. The old cliche of small steps leading to big outcomes rears its smug face in discussions like this.

Don’t discount the effect that something as small as leaving your phone alone on the bedside table for 15 minutes can have. Try and improve your morning routine ever so slightly and see the greater impact unfold.

Oh, it’s also imperative that you include an hour-long goat yoga, half an hour of tarot card reading, two hours of positive affirmations and three hours of self-indulgent journalling about how amazing you are.

Good Influence by Zac Perna will be published on November 29 by HarperCollins. It is available to pre-order now.