Radical Balance
The Morning Buffer
The Morning Buffer is the foundational practice I put into place when I started getting well. It was the first piece I put into place when my growth started to click.
I started this practice when I was very deep in depression. I would wake up every day and feel assaulted by my mind and emotions. Worries would flood in. Negative beliefs about myself would spin up automatically. This happened most mornings and felt almost unstoppable at the time.
That was the problem I created the Morning Buffer practice to address. I found that when you're working against conditioning and entrenched habits, some of which may have developed as a sophisticated trauma response, being overwhelmed and distracted often starts first thing when you wake up. And when you're overwhelmed, it's normal to forget who you are and what you're doing in the present moment. Old patterns and responses take over. Parts of you that are stuck in the past play out their confusion in present-day situations.
What I discovered as the most pivotal foundational step was to establish a five-minute window every morning that I would make it to without fail.
At the beginning, it matters much less what you do during those five minutes than that you simply make it to them. Make it to the cushion. Make it into the session. That's the whole task at first.
These five minutes are a time to remind yourself what you're doing and who you are: the journey you're on, the things you tend to forget once the day's momentum takes over, the perspective you want to hold as you move through the rest of the day.
As a supporting practice, I highly recommend composing a simple reminder card to read each morning, and any time during the day when you need to check in and reorient. The two practices work together: the Buffer creates the protected time, and the card gives you something to remember during this important time.
Practice: The Morning Buffer
- Pick a time and a place. First thing in the morning, before the day's demands start pulling at you. The same time and place every day, as much as possible. A chair, a cushion, the corner of a couch — anywhere you can sit undisturbed for five minutes.
- Set a low bar at the start. The only success metric for the first week or two is that you made it to the seat for five minutes. What happens in those five minutes is secondary. If you sit there and your mind wanders the whole time, that still counts. If you remember what you wanted to focus on for thirty seconds out of five minutes, that counts.
- Use the time to reorient. Once you can reliably make it to the seat, the five minutes become a chance to remind yourself what you're doing and who you are. Sit quietly with that, read a reminder card, or do a short breathing or settling practice — whatever helps you arrive in the day deliberately instead of reactively.
- Protect the boundary. This is a buffer between sleep and the day. No phone, no email, no news, no checking the calendar. Those things can wait five minutes. The whole point is that they don't get to set the tone of your morning before you do.
- Don't extend it before it sticks. Five minutes is small enough that you cannot reasonably argue you don't have time for it. As the practice settles in over weeks and months, you can extend it — many people end up with twenty or thirty minutes once the habit is established. At the beginning, hold the bar at five.
- Notice what changes. This practice doesn't announce itself dramatically. It works underneath, by interrupting the way the day pulls you into reactivity from the moment you wake up. Over time, you'll notice the day starts differently. You're a little harder to knock off-center.
Five minutes a day at the start of the morning is the smallest commitment I can think of that is actually capable of changing your life. It changed mine.
Filed under: Meditation & awareness practices · also useful for: Integration practices, After a medicine session
