What's your morning routine?
Who still gets a cup of tea in bed and is breakfast still popular? Our Saga survey reveals your morning habits and an expert tells us the best routine to set you up for the day.
Who still gets a cup of tea in bed and is breakfast still popular? Our Saga survey reveals your morning habits and an expert tells us the best routine to set you up for the day.
It seems that having a morning routine no longer entails stumbling out of bed slightly later than planned and popping sliced bread in the toaster. For some, it’s turned into a quasi-sacred endurance event.
Actor Mark Wahlberg gets up at 2.30am for a 90-minute workout followed by an ice bath; Gwyneth Paltrow starts her day at 6.30am with a tongue-scraping session; and Elle Macpherson wakes up at 5am and immediately smiles – which wouldn’t be most people’s reaction to being awake at that time.
Thankfully, Saga readers are rather more down to earth in their morning choices. Our survey of 2,430 customers revealed that most are early risers:
Only one in ten wake later than 8am, which may prove the science that even if you’re a night owl when younger, most end up as larks in the end. As leading sleep expert Professor Till Roenneberg notes: "People over 60, on average, become even earlier chronotypes than they were as children."
"Chronotypes" refers to your inclination to sleep and wake. Not that all Saga customers are happy with their sleep: 54% say that they don’t sleep as well as they used to.
However, you’re a disciplined lot. Around a third get out of bed immediately after waking, and a further 30% lie in bed for only ten minutes or less. A morning hot drink in bed seems to have fallen out of favour, too: 58% say they never do it. Of those who do, tea is three times more popular than coffee.
Around half shower before breakfast, and a third have breakfast first (the rest vary it). As for what’s on the menu, women tend to be healthier.
Packet cereal is men’s favourite (48% eat it), followed by toast (37%). These are popular with women, too, but they’re more likely to have fruit.
They’re also more likely to choose porridge, muesli and the current fashionably healthy breakfast – yogurt with fruit/nuts/granola. One in three women chooses this, compared with just one in five men.
Only 8% never eat breakfast, but 76% think it’s important, which pleases Clare Thornton-Wood at the British Dietetic Association. "Breakfast literally means 'break fast'. Following a night’s sleep, we have generally used up most of our glycogen stores that provide energy overnight," she says.
So, is there a perfect breakfast, health-wise? Experts say that traditional toast and jam misses out a key ingredient: protein. This helps stop your blood sugar plunging mid-afternoon.
"I always suggest carb, plus protein, plus fruit and veg – so wholegrain cereal with Greek yogurt and fruit, or wholemeal toast with eggs and tomatoes, or porridge with added seeds for protein and fruit," says Thornton-Wood.
When it comes to the ‘perfect’ science-backed morning routine, Saga customers do pretty well according to the work of neurobiologist and Stanford professor Andrew Huberman, who thinks he’s cracked it.
He gets up at 6-6.30am, like many Saga customers, then heads outside for 10-15 minutes to absorb daylight, which sets you up for sleep that night (only one in five Saga customers do this, however). He drinks lots of water (one glass has added salt "to stimulate ionic flow") and there’s a green vitamin shake in there (of course).
However, he waits 90-120 minutes for his first coffee. This is because your body has plenty of the ‘alert’ hormone cortisol in the first 90 minutes of the day, so you’ll get the best boost from caffeine if you wait. In one study, 9.24am was named as the perfect coffee time if you get up at 7am.
Just in case you want to set your alarm.
(Hero image credit: Getty)
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