No, you don’t need to optimize your damn morning routine.

Consistency is overrated. Your nervous system was built for repetition, not perfection.

The usual suspects.

After a lifetime of searching for the perfect spiritual & creative morning routine, a search that only intensified in desperation as I was trying to scrape some kind of life back together after ravages of late-diagnosed AuDHD perimenopause burnout, I have come to the following liberating conclusion: you do not need a fucking morning routine.

Now let me describe the kind of morning routine I was looking for, the one thing I hoped was gonna save me from myself: I wanted to know precisely what were the best/ideal/optimal things to do in the morning so that I would feel rooted & grounded in my body and in my day, feel connected to Spirit, and be able write and run my business again.

I’m a whole-ass yoga therapist, which means I have received extensive training in creating routines & rituals that connect mind/body/spirit. I am a lifetime planner and notebook nerd who has created her own custom systems in various-sized Moleskines over the years. I’m an Autistic witch who has read Mary Oliver poems and wrote morning pages for years at a time.

Juniper, the office manager, supervising morning routines.

I am highly qualified for this pursuit of a perfect morning routine, and I thought it would be a fairly simple matter of discerning what were the correct things I needed and how to put them in the correct order in order to get the desired effect, which was to feel like myself again and be able to take creative action in my work and my writing.

Spoiler alert—it didn’t work. I never found what the perfect routine was, for mornings or otherwise, and at this point I have abandoned that particular quest, because instead I have learned something infinitely more accessible and—here’s the kicker—potent.

You don’t need a perfect routine: what you need are reliable rhythms and repeatable structures.

A sturdy trellis that provides support for a growing vine is one thing; a gilded cage that imprison a wild bird is quite another. Some structures offer us the vessel we need to contain our flow; some structures shut off our flow at the spigot.

So, if we need some form of structure but don’t want to veer into restriction, how are we supposed to know what the fuck kind of structure we actually need?

No one has ever seen what your thriving looks like, and that’s both the good & the bad news. The good news is you get to invent exactly the kind of structure that will support you in the body you have right now, in the life you have right now. The bad news is no one can tell you whether you’re doing it right.

What I discovered is that trying to fit my life into a pre-determined shape or structure doesn’t work because it’s a top-down approach, when my disabled Autistic ass is a bottom-up processor.

In the realm of project management, top-down processing starts with a broad, big-picture view and breaks it down into specifics, while bottom-up starts with specific details and builds them into a larger picture.

My search for the perfect morning routine was entirely a top-down approach: what’s the big picture I’m trying for, and how to reverse-engineer the process until I reached myself at the. starting line And honestly, that didn’t feel any different than masking, forcing, pushing, or any of the harmful bullshit that caused my burnout in the first place.

Switching to a bottom-up approach was a game changer, because I got to experiment with different things, follow what felt great, and really lean into my weird. That’s where I not only found the practices that really worked for me, but also got the rewrite the nervous system story that I needed to look everywhere but inside myself to find the medicine I needed.

Journaling with Juniper.

Repetition > Consistency

A common piece of creative advice that floats out there is the “challenge” model: 10 days to your best whatever-it-is; write a novel in 30 days; 3-month meditation marathon. I mean, it sounds good, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t a 10-day streak of creative practice be a great start to a life of abundant and joyous creativity? Yeah, maybe—but not necessarily.

I’m gonna tell you a secret: there is no inherent virtue in doing 10, 30, 100 days of anything. We don’t have the same needs or capacity every day, so why are we trying to do the same shit every day?

There’s nothing wrong with it either—going for the streak—but if you’re neurodivergent, chronically ill, and/or disabled, that kind of forced consistency is not meant for you, and it won’t give you the result you need anyway, which is a sense of intimacy & trust with yourself & your creative life. The reason that trying to force yourself into a schedule has never worked is that it’s the wrong strategy for you.

I mean, technically, if you worked super hard, could you do it? Could you build a beautiful, unbroken streak? Sure you could. I’ve got a few beautiful unbroken streaks under the belt myself, some of which actually were very nice.

But would a disciplined, unbroken streak meet my need for safety & connection as I crawl out of Autistic burnout? Not a chance. It would at best be a huge waste of resources, and at worst would reinforce the patterns of protection & the survival strategies that caused this mess in the first place.

Remember what Mary Oliver, the patron saint of soft animal bodies: You do not have to be good. You don’t need to crawl on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You don’t have to prove or perform or push into some ideal of goodness and correctness engineered by systems of conformity.

Your nervous system doesn’t respond to consistency, it responds to familiarity. That’s how it learns to trust.

You think that consistency is the thing you want, but what you actually need is to trust yourself: trust that your body, when resourced and rested, will naturally want to move towards tasks that are meaningful to you, and trust yourself to move through the cycles of forgetting & remembering that are an inevitable part of being an awake human on this earth.

Your nervous system isn’t wired for consistency, it’s wired for repair. An unbroken streak might be something you feel proud of: it might be comforting to point to it and feel relieved that you are in fact good in the ways they want you to be, but at what cost? How much did you need to push or coerce or extract? Are you teaching your nervous system that consistency is more important than rest, more important than repair?

Morning crew.

Repetition builds trust; it’s how the system learns & creates new patterns.

I’ve learned that I don’t need a perfect morning routine to have great mornings that set me up for a day of being an Autistic witch sitting on my bed. What feels like a great morning for me is when there is enough familiarity that I know what to reach for next—meaning there is no confusion or immobilization as I try to figure out what to do—while I also have the freedom to attune to the soft animal of my body and determine what my actual needs are that day based on what kind of capacity (or lack thereof) I woke up with.

Most mornings start with coffee (decaf with cinnamon creamer) and journal (by which I mean doing a lot of stickers and a little bit of writing) while listening to music (starting with whatever scrap of song was in my head when I woke up.) That feels good and right. But it doesn’t matter which journal I work in. It doesn’t matter what kind of page I make or don’t make. It doesn’t matter if I pull a card or not, whether I read a poem or not, whether I pray or not.

It does not matter what I do or don’t do on any given day because my life isn’t a spreadsheet, it’s a messy and gorgeous spill of complexity, at once wildly new and soothingly similar with each new morning.

What matters is that this rhythm is reliable, and the structure is repeatable, so that when I inevitably have a day when my brain flatlines and I have zero dopamine and cannot for the life of me figure out what to do with the blank pages open in my lap or the blank screen on my laptop, I can give myself a fucking break and play on my Switch or watch Girls again because I trust that it won’t always feel like this, and that when it starts to feels different, I will be free to start over, and when I do, I will have a familiar place from which to begin again.

You’re not an arrow; you’re a spiral. You’re not wired for consistency, you’re wired for return and repair.

Stop trying to shoot yourself in a straight line when your system is built to swirl, to eddy, to flow. Do not waste your precious life force trying to attains the empire’s metrics of success.

Your wild soul needs a much bigger container than the ones we’re allowed to want under the spell of capitalism. The soft animal of your body needs a soft, warm, safe place to return to again and again when it gets spooked or tired. And the wild more-than-human world offers your inner tending witch every single thing they might need to meet the needs of both your wild soul and your soft animal.

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I’m teaching a workshop on Saturday, November 1st in which I will try to teach you as much as I possibly can about Autistic burnout recovery, spoonie embodiment, and creating the conditions in which you can rewrite your nervous system story.

In Portals & Tunnels, you’ll learn:

• Why attention tunnels of absorption, immersion, and deep focus are the sweet spot where your nervous system & your soul can both have their needs happily & pleasurably met.

• How to build accessible portals—that is, the kind of environmental & sensory conditions in which your system can reliably get into flow states.

• How to transmute the poison of shame into ease, pleasure, and joy—and how to imagine your way forward into new possibilities for thriving from there.

We’ll cover:

• Two key NEUROLOGICAL TRAITS that no one ever told you about & that will change your whole life forever I swear.

• Three key SOMATIC SPELLS to transmute shame & internalized ableism into agency & action.

• The SECRET SAUCE of nervous system magic that makes true, lasting change possible & approachable.

You’ll leave with:

• Your very own custom somatic spells that work in the life you have right now.

• Hope that change is possible—and that it can be much easier & more fun than all the shit you’ve been doing.

• Joyful curiosity to experiment with new ways of doing shit & playful permission to fuck around and make mistakes.