If you read about the morning routines of “successful” people, they often have a cultivation of habits that eliminate decision making. The more decisions that need to be made in a day, the more your energy and willpower are depleted. Eventually, your willpower is all used up and the decisions that still need to be made suffer. It helps explain why at 5 PM you absolutely do not care that you planned to make a chicken roast with treasure trove of vegetables for dinner and why instead, you stop at an easy drive-through on the way home. In fact, Cornell researchers (Wansink and Sobal, 2007) found that we make around 221 decisions about food each day alone! And to me, those are the fun decisions! A routine helps save willpower for other choices that don’t come naturally and can eventually bring you closer to a fill-in-the-blank-life. So why not start one right when you wake up?