Morning Routine Sensitivity

Here's a sensitivity exercise: picture your morning routine. It's just a small part of your everyday experience but if most of us don't do exactly what we want when we want in the morning, it sets off our whole day in a less positive way. You set your alarm and you either hit the snooze button or you get right up. Or you don't have an alarm and wake whenever you want. You maybe grab a cup of coffee made exactly the way you want. Maybe you have another cup before you get moving. Or maybe you hop right into the shower. You might read the newspaper or exercise. Maybe you do chores before you head out for work.

Here's my routine, for example: 1) Alarm goes off at 4:50 so I have 10 minutes to wake gently. 2) Get out of bed at 5am. 3) Yoga poses while I wait for tea to steep. 4) Drink black chai tea with almond milk and stevia while reading or writing in journal.  5) Go for a walk if weather is nice. 8) 6:50am shower. Wash all body parts in the same order. (How much do we take that for granted?) 9) Make breakfast, same thing everyday - a smoothie. 10) Dress.

All right. So what happens if anything is out of order? Or what happens if I don't get to read or relax and drink my tea? At the very least, I am set off and my day doesn't feel quite right for a while. On a different day, this might ruin my whole day.

Now I'll pick one of my acquaintances who happens to have an intellectual disability and lives in a group home. Here's her morning routine: 1) Staff wake her up, different time everyday. 2) A new staff asks her to get in the shower but she usually gets her medications first and now she is confused and something doesn't feel right to her. 3) Staff help her to shower but ask her to wash her hair first and she usually does that last, again setting her off-kilter a bit. 4) Breakfast involves her getting her own things ready but this new staff helps her by getting some of her things, setting her off a little more but she doesn't have a way to verbalize this. 6) She likes to have a cup of coffee while she waits for her van to come pick her up for work but staff didn't know this and she didn't get a cup of coffee this morning.

The end of the story is that she doesn't have a good day at work, is not able to tell anyone why, and doesn't know the sign for coffee so can't express what she needs to make her day go better.