Hello and welcome to The English Like a Native Podcast, the listening resource for intermediate to advanced-level English learners. My name is Anna. And my name is Nick. And today we're talking about morning routines. Now, I would love to wake up and have a little bit of a lounge to find my energy and slowly wake up. Not that that happens now, but in the past, I would normally not get enough time to sleep and have to be up and out, whether I was going to university or off to work. I'm sure many of you listening can relate to that. So I didn't often get a chance to have a lie-in. So what I did was make sure that my morning routine was as tight as it possibly could be so I could lie in bed for as long as possible, but still get up and have time to do everything I needed to do before having to leave. And so I think I got my morning routine down to about 45 minutes. So I'd wake up, jump out of bed, jump in the shower. I would have already prepared my clothes and have them laid out on the floor ready to throw on in the morning so I didn't have to think about outfits. Breakfast was always something simple, like a bowl of cereal that was quick to prepare. And then I'd be eating that while packing my bag if I hadn't already packed my bag the night before. And then I'd head out the door on time. I'd hate it if ever I overslept. It didn't happen often, but if I would hit the snooze button, but not hit the snooze button, accidentally hit the off button or something like that, and then wake up and it's too late to get your bus or your train, and then you're in a panic. I would hate that. How about you, Nick? Before we got together, your like perfect morning routine, was it short or long? Shorter than mine? Yeah. I mean, I think I got to one point where I would wake up, I'd set my alarm to wake me up about half an hour before I needed to be in the office. Wow. Were you showering? Yeah. Yeah. I realised that really any time you spend in the morning, between waking up and getting into work, you know, Monday to Friday was sort of wasted time. So I'd wake up, shower, put my clothes on, get on my bike because I lived quite close to the office and cycle down to the office. I wouldn't have any breakfast. And once my body had sort of woken up a little bit, then I'd go and get a little bit of food and have a light breakfast an hour or two hours after getting into work. Would you have like a coffee or an orange juice or anything at all at home? No, a glass of water. To kickstart the body and out the door, yeah. And how long was your cycle into work? Yeah, 10-15 minutes. Past Boris Johnson's house. Oh really? Yeah. Yeah, it was nice. And it would be, you know if it rained, I'd just get on the bus and it was about the same. And I'd be into the office a bit early as well. So I wasn't in for like nine o'clock and your shift starts, I'd be in at eight o'clock in the morning or something. And you sort of warm yourself into your day, get things ready, et cetera. And you were working in an office, so you had to wear shirts and like a suit. So surely you didn't cycle in that outfit. So I had my life very efficient. I had different suit jackets in the office and ties and things. I just put on trousers and a shirt and cycle in. Like I said, if it rained, surprisingly, very rarely rains in the mornings in London, very rarely indeed. Yeah. And so I'd just get the bus, if it rained, just walk to the end of the road and get the bus. Very nice. Yeah. And it wasn't sweaty, just a downhill cycle. Yeah. Are you a fan of the snooze button? Yeah, too much so, I think. If you wake up and snooze and wake up and snooze, wake up and snooze until the point where you have to get up, it's a bit of a waste of energy. So I just set my alarm to the point where it'd be... all the snoozes were gone. You had to get up. So you left yourself with no time for snoozing. You're going to be late if you if you don't get up, so. Force yourself to get up. Yeah. I do find actually, if I do hit the snooze button, I just feel worse for it. I don't know if it's like the start of a new sleep cycle and my body starts to get into a deeper sleep and then I'm pulling myself out of that deep sleep. But these days, things are very different. We obviously share a household. And therefore we share a morning routine and we don't have much control over the quality of our night because of our children, it's really hit-and-miss as to whether or not they will sleep all the way through. They are like our little alarm clocks. They like to come and wake us up as soon as they think it's morning, even though they have blackout blinds, there's still a little sunlight that creeps through and we also have little birds nesting in our attic. And so they start chirping as soon as the dawn starts breaking. And now we're getting towards summertime, the dawn starts breaking around 5:30. And so they come in going,"Mummy, I think it's, I think it's morning. Is it morning? Is it time to get up now? Could we go downstairs?" And so we don't have to set an alarm these days, really. And we also don't know if we're going to have a good night's sleep or not. And so it really just is a completely different struggle these days. I feel like the mornings are just, you just have to be disciplined and you just have to drag yourself out of bed at whatever time the children decide you're getting up and regardless of whatever the night has been. But I think I'm better at that than you are. Yeah, I think so. But you know we've had our different roles. I think in the earlier days with the children, you would do more of the nights cause the children would need you at night time in ways that I couldn't really help with. And so I did the mornings and I think I had like one lie-in or two lie-ins in about two years at some point. Yeah. But these days I give you lots of lie-ins. You do now. You're very generous. I get more done in the morning. I think I'm definitely a morning person. I'm more efficient in the morning so I can jump out of bed and have my housekeeper-mum hat on straight away. I can get all the blinds and curtains open, start the breakfast, run a bowl of hot water for washing up and start organising everything. But it's amazing how much the difference is if you compare waking up and out the door in 10 to 15 minutes with what we have nowadays. I think even getting out the door when you're ready to go takes us 10 or 15 minutes now. I mean, we, it's like two hours our morning routine and we still feel a level of tension and aggravation at the point where we have to leave because things haven't been done. And I just don't ever think I factored in how difficult it would be to mobilise two little human beings. you know, when you're doing things for yourself, that's one thing, but when you have to do it for yourself, whilst also doing it for two other children who are not very cooperative at the best of times... Not time sensitive at all. No. I think that's one of the things is if you said, I need to leave by a certain point, you might say, I'm not going to have an elaborate breakfast and I'm going to eat quickly and I'm going to get dressed quickly or whatever. And with the kids, there's just no speeding up the routine. They want food. They'll take a long time to eat the food. They won't take the time constraint seriously. Yeah. They're so easily distracted by things. So they start to do a task and then get distracted and then they forget what they were supposed to be doing. We have to remind them several times. And so our ideal morning routine would be that we would get up an hour before the children to do some yoga, start the day with a little exercise, maybe to have a coffee and spend some quality time together discussing the upcoming commitments that we have. And then both have a shower because we don't always have time to both shower in the morning, fully prepare ourselves. So sometimes I feel like I can get myself dressed, but I haven't had a chance to wash my face, or maybe I haven't put my makeup on or brushed my hair. And so it would be nice to get up, exercise, have a coffee, get fully ready for the day, and then deal with the children because then you're not distracted by your own needs. You can fully focus on the children's needs. In order for us to get up an hour earlier, we'd have to go to bed an hour earlier and we are really bad. We're really good at having desires and setting goals for our lifestyle, but very bad at sticking to them because we're both workaholics and therefore we have very little downtime. So by the time we've exhausted ourselves, by 10 o'clock in the evening, we've finished working, we want some downtime. We don't want to go straight to bed. So we need to be better at setting realistic goals and then being more disciplined with them. Do you agree? I think a realistic goal is stop working by 9:30 at night. And I think you're really bad at doing that. Well, yeah, there's always so much to do. Yeah. And, you know, we're both extremely bad at saying, let's just watch just a five-minute thing just to switch off and, you know, stop thinking about stuff. And then five minutes turns to 10 minutes turns to... It's the rabbit hole. You end up going down a rabbit hole on YouTube. I think that's the problem is we just allow one thing to roll into another, into another. Maybe we should set some kind of like parental controls on the TV. So the TV automatically turns off at a certain time and we're like, oh, okay. I genuinely think about getting one of those plugs. Where you can just turn everything off. No, it just turns off whatever it's plugged into, right? Oh, like a timer plug. Yeah. It's not necessarily that it would stop me from turning it back on again. If I was like a hundred per cent, I want to do this and we're completely bought into turning it back on again, but it's the effort of turning on, getting underneath the cupboard, and switching the switch back on again versus just going upstairs and going to bed. There must be people listening who have children, but also have quite a strict regimented morning routine and able to stick to that. And so if that is you, if you're listening and you are able to, with children, keep quite a regimented routine in the morning that's less than two hours long, then I'd love to hear more about how you've done it. And any tips that you may have for speeding up a morning routine. And I'd also like to know how listeners enjoy starting their day. Do you start with exercise? Do you eat straight away when you wake up, or do you like to start with a coffee and a sit-down, or do you tend to have a lie-in and hit that snooze button time and time again? Anyway, hopefully, we'll be able to change our morning routine, Nick, as our children are getting older and their sleep is improving. Hopefully, we can be more disciplined. So thank you for being on the podcast today and discussing this with me. Let's make a plan... You're very welcome. And see if we can improve things for ourselves. Thank you to our listeners until next time. Take very good care and goodbye.