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I'm Ali Graymond. I'm an expert in OCD recovery because for the last 19 years I've been helping people fully recover from OCD. If you would like to do personal coaching with me, all the information is on. You have OCD.com you can sign up from there. Let's talk about a game plan for your OCD morning and how to get through it with as little damage to your recovery as possible. So first of all, in the morning, serotonin levels are very low and cortisol levels are very high for every human being on the planet unless they have their hormones thrown off. But generally speaking, that's the cycle. So your cortisol is high in the morning and then lowers throughout the day and the evening is at an all time low. So you can sleep your serotonin, your serotonin is on the opposite cycle, very low in the morning as to not relax you. Right. And then as the day continues, serotonin rises and then again you feel calmer for going to sleep. So what we need to do in the morning, what the body wants you to do, is to be very active. This is where in the kind of prehistoric times you would be chasing, I don't know, a wild boar or something like that. That's what we want to do. We want to throw that cortisol into action. So you're going to get up out of bed and right away start getting on the tasks. So you're not going to lay in bed, you're not going to ruminate, you're not going to check ChatGPT for answers or Google for answers. You're going to start the day right away. And the busier you are, the more you're using that cortisol, you're throwing it out. So you need activity, high physical activity if possible. If you can go to, if you have the luxury of going to the gym or going for a walk or going for a run in the morning, great. Um, if that's a situation where you start to ruminate, maybe it's not the best idea. So see kind of what works for you. But anything physical and mentally active is great if you have tasks that are more passive that you need to do, where you do have more room to ruminate and you can fall into rumination easier. Try to save those for later on in the day when the cortisol drops. But when the cortisol is high, the more activity you can pack into the morning. First of all, you're going to get things done and that's already great. And you're going to do very little damage to your recovery. Because for a lot of people, that's when the damage happens is in the morning. So if you're aware, you got up right away, you started to do tasks, you didn't give yourself the opportunity to sit around and think about things or to talk to people about your thought of the day. If you didn't give yourself that opportunity and you're pushing through throughout the day, you're setting yourself up that the rest of the day is going great as well. Do you know what I mean? But if you start to mess up in the morning and let's, let's talk about the opposite. Woke up, went on the phone, cried a little or a lot, asked for reassur, you're setting yourself up for a disaster. So it's very important that you set yourself up right. Stay focused and know that that cortisol high that you feel in the morning where you're super stressed out, everything feels real. Might not even feel that real by the afternoon when the cortisol levels drop and serotonin levels rise. So you just got to get through this time again without doing damage to your recovery. Thank you for listening. If you have not subscribed, please subscribe. If you would like to do private coaching with me, please sign up through you have ocd.com I'll see you tomorrow.