3. Make a Morning Wake-up Playlist
“Listening to music you enjoy boosts dopamine levels,” says Alison Hughey, a Spartenburg, South Carolina–based music therapist certified by the Certification Board for Music Therapists (the only certifying board for music therapy). Research backs this up.
Start your day on the right foot by listening to a playlist filled with happy, upbeat songs.
“Aim for songs that make you smile, get you dancing, and have a BPM between 100 and 130,” says Hughey.
The beats per minute (BPM) is a reflection of the tempo of the songs you’re listening to. One study published in 2016 in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience found that as BPM increased from 90 to 150, listeners experienced more positive emotions like “happiness” and “surprise” with decreases in “sadness.”
While these positive emotions largely increased all the way to 150 BPM, rates of “tension” also increased at higher BPMs, leading to a more stressful or unpleasant experience. This is why a good moderate-to-fast BPM is ideal to help you kick off your day right.
Just be aware that music is highly personal, so curate your list carefully and pick the music you truly love, rather than listening to a generic “happy” or “morning” playlist off of an app.
4. Clear the Clutter
That stack of mail you haven’t had time to go through, or the mishmash of kids’ schoolwork, toys, and laundry that keep piling up may be more distracting than you think. “Clutter can make us very tense and distracted and trigger survival instincts that harken back to the earliest days of humankind, similar to the instinct to scan a treeline or forest for potential predators,” says Dunford. A study published in 2018 in Infant Behavior and Development found that toddlers who were provided with fewer toys to play with actually played with their toys for longer periods of time and exhibited greater creativity than those who had more toys. This suggests a less-cluttered environment encourages focus and creativity.
Clearing spaces of clutter is particularly important in those spaces where you want to relax or concentrate (like your bedroom or home office).
Of course, clutter can be tough to keep up with; coming up with and sticking with an organizational strategy to keep it at bay can help. “I recommend limiting the amount of clutter at eye level by using desktop organizers, cabinets that can live under a desk, and adjacent wall storage,” Dunford says. File items away into their organizational stations as soon as they come in, and practice sorting and discarding the build-up regularly.