To gear up for faster living, wake up early for a slow but busy morning

If a cold dip is too hard, you can stretch, bounce or meditate – or go for the trifecta.

A meditation session is a great way to kick off your day. Picture: Luis Enrique Ascui

Dolly Parton once laid out a morning routine that was followed by millions. “Tumble out of bed / And stumble to the kitchen,” she sang in 9 to 5. “Pour myself a cup of ambition / And yawn and stretch and try to come to life.”

The singer’s great anthem for the rat race now would require several more verses to reflect the morning regimes being adopted by many of her fellow Americans.

As the pace of life has quickened, a “slow living” movement has gained ground, encouraging quiet meditation and time-consuming rituals. And to have time for all this, practitioners must get up extremely early.

Chris Danuser, 51, is married with two children and juggles two jobs, as an estate agent and filmmaker. He rises at 5.30am at his home in New Jersey and spends 20 minutes ­meditating.

Then he makes himself Japanese tea “in an ancient and ritualistic way”.

“It takes a lot of time. It’s a very meditative type of preparation,” he says.

Then he does some stretching or bounces on a trampoline.

At 7am his wife and children wake up, and his life speeds up.

“It’s a slow morning so that you can put up with faster living,” he says.

Danuser says the co-director of the film he is making, which is called Mayflower and tells the story of a domestic terrorist, is also a subscriber to the slow morning movement, though his routine involves waking up and “jumping into a freezing cold pond on Cape Cod, where he lives”.

As he hits the water, “he does breathing exercises that keep your mind off the intense pain”.

Matt D’Amour, 37, a nut oil entrepreneur in Wisconsin, practises the same “cold water therapy” each morning in a lake near his home.

The breathing exercises carried him through equally “uncomfortable situations” at work, he told The Wall Street Journal.

A major influence among the slow morning adherents is The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod, a self-help book that gives readers a list of tasks to be completed before 8am. These are to observe a period of silence, prayer, meditation or calm thoughts, voice “affirmations” — words of encouragement to themselves — practise “visualisation”, imagining the steps to take to accomplish goals, and exercise. Followers also need to read, to fill their brains with positive thoughts and ideas, and write.

In a foreword to the book, Robert Kiyosaki, a fellow author, says many people were already doing one of these things daily, but until Elrod wrote his book “no one was doing all six ancient ‘best practices’ every morning”.

Beyond Elrod’s busy slow mornings lies a broader slow living agenda. In Vermont, Orly Munzen, 65, who works in education, organises an annual Slow Living Summit, as well as a farming and food festival in Brattleboro called the Strolling of the Heifers.

Past speakers have included Geir Berthelsen, founder of the World Institute of Slowness in Norway.

“Slow living is all about balance: time for silence, time for planning, time for observing, time for reflection,” he says on his website.

He did not respond in a timely fashion to a request for comment.

The Times