I tried 3 morning routines, and they worked so well I’m still waking up at 4:45 a.m.

February 06, 2020 at 11:18PM by CWC

Swatch a thousand foundations? Set your alarm for 2:30 a.m. in the name of nailing the morning routine? Sleep with a robot? Testing the latest and greatest that wellness has to offer is just another day on the job for Zoë Weiner, Well+Good beauty and fitness editor. In our latest YouTube show Zoë Tries It All, we’re taking you along for the ride to see firsthand how we try and test the buzziest things wellness has to offer, so you can have nice things without having to try it all yourself.

The morning routine is pretty much wellness 101, and no one has a better mastery of waking up early and having a day before their day actually begins than celebs. Some “greet the sun,” others meditate in the wee-hours of the morn (so chill of you, Jennifer Aniston), and the most extreme set their alarms for 2:30 a.m. to pray, eat two breakfasts, go to cryotherapy, and have a round of golf all before the sun’s rays stretch above the horizon (you know what you did, Marky Mark). In the inaugural episode of Zoë Tries It All, I set out to test the most extensive celebrity morning routines to give you the definitive ranking of them in order of the most-to-least painful ways to start your day.

Before we get to that, a confession: I am decidedly not a morning person. Most days, I try to make it to the gym before work. Sometimes I shower. Sometimes I listen to music. This “routine,” however, was put to shame when I did as the celebs do. I was up before dawn meditating (I fell asleep and had to sprint to my spin class), “greeting the sun” (the view from my window is the back of another building, so I’ll let you gather how that went), and taking ice-cold showers when I was used to getting my REM sleep on (gotta say, didn’t love this, fam). It wasn’t just out of my comfort zone, it really did leave me feeling like I’d had a day before my day ever even began.

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So now feels like the right time to apologize to everyone in my life who had to listen to me complain throughout the course of this experiment (and to my coworkers, who watched me struggle to stay awake at my desk the first few days). By the end of the ordeal, I realized that morning people really might be onto something. Not only did early-morning, at-home yoga and meditation prove to be some of the best-ever ways to deal with daily anxiety, but carving out extra hours in my day to get my sh*t together became the ultimate self-care hack. And also? Those cold showers made my hair shiny as hell.

To find out why my alarm is still going off at 4:45 a.m., press play on the video above. And if there’s anything else you want to see me try? Subscribe to our YouTube Channel, and give us a shout in the comments.

I’m not the only one over at Well+Good who’s willing to test out all sorts of wellness-y stuff (so that you don’t have to): Here’s what happened when video producer Ella Dove tried her hand a horseback yoga, and what she learned by wearing a heart rate monitor every day for a week. 

Author Zoe Weiner | Well and Good
Selected by CWC