Mornings & Phone Usage

I traveled away from home for about a week and a half to Germany for my day job, and I haven’t had my normal set up available to me for my morning routine.  In place of an alarm clock, I have been using my phone.

At home, my alarm wakes me up with Pandora playing a station of ambient music (think spa music 🙂) and maybe 10 minutes later or so, the regular radio turns on tuned to a local top hits radio station.

In the hotel, I wake up to the beeping of the phone alarm and I do something I don’t typically do at home – I grab my phone and start thumbing through my messages.  First it’s iMessage and Facebook messenger so I can connect with people at home and check on my kitty.  Then, I open up social media – Instagram and Facebook itself – which I know is a bad practice because of what I learned from my 99 days of freedom project – but as I’m fairly isolated from friends and family while I’m traveling, this helps me feel connected with home.

Aside…let’s not even begin to discuss what Instagram is doing with their ads.  I’m seriously about to quit using it because of all the irritating ads. 🙁

Then I start catching up with personal emails, and then, if it gets really bad, I even start reading slack and work emails before I even get out of bed. *Gasp*

I know this is a bad practice, all of it really, because when I start my day with a cup of tea and writing, which I did only one day on this trip and I have a slow, intentional start to the day, I feel better and it makes the rest of my day go better.  Unfortunately, I didn’t do this during my trip and I need to be more mindful, especially when using my phone as my alarm clock, to avoid getting caught up in bad patterns of behavior.

What habits do you fall back into that you really wish you didn’t?  How do you keep your good habits when you’re out of your normal environment?