Emonthebrain - Neuroscience-backed Morning Routine to Rewire Your Brain & Manifest Whatever You Want

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

Em shares the exact three-step neuroscience-backed morning routine she has used for five years to rewire her brain and that she has given to thousands of coaching clients worldwide. Interested in coaching or learning more about my program, MindCraft?? Sign up for my free masterclass! https://learn.emonthebrain.com/masterclass Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emonthebrain?igsh=aG1wNDY0OXZ1c3pi  I'm Going on Tour! Here's the link to RSVP for your city! https://laylo.com/emonthebrain/m/2jAoUd?utm_id=97760_v0_s00_e0_tv3

This is the exact morning routine that I have used as a neuroscientist for the past five years to rewire my brain and completely change my life. I have also given this routine to thousands of people that I have coached. And in this video, I'm going to give you this routine too. I'm going to be sharing with you the exact steps of this neuroscience-backed morning routine formula and giving you the science behind why they work, why you should do them, and give you examples for how you can do them too. The proper morning routine really will change your life. Back when I was getting my first degree in neuroscience and undergrad, and I was first beginning the journey of rewiring my brain and manifesting the life that I want to live, a morning routine is seriously the first thing that I did.

If you feel stuck, if you feel like you are lacking energy, if you feel anxious, if you feel stressed, if you feel like you have potential or goals or dreams, or maybe you don't know what your goals and dreams are, start with the morning routine because the proper morning routine will prime your brain. It'll get your energy right, set your frequency right, so that you just become more open to abundance, opportunities, blessings, things that maybe you didn't even know to ask for, maybe opportunities that are aligning with where you're actually wanting to go or maybe you don't even want to go.

So buckle up and get ready because the game of life is a game of momentum. Just like in sports, where the players that have momentum, the teams that have momentum, they're the ones that tend to generate the scoring opportunities. They're the ones that tend to be getting more points in the game. You win the day. You win life when you have momentum on your side. And a morning routine is how you get momentum working in your favor. So if you're wondering, you know, I just need to get these habits in place. I need to get started on this project, this business, this dream that I have. If you're wondering how to do that, a morning routine is how you do that. Morning routine is how you get momentum working in your favor.

Every single morning, you wake up like a little ball on the top of a hill. And you get to decide which way you get the ball rolling. You get to decide whether you open up your phone and scroll social media, read your emails, respond to texts, go on Pinterest or online shop or whatever it is that you're doing. you get to decide which way you get the ball rolling. And so that is why step number one of the science-backed morning routine formula is to wake up with intention. And this one step might make all the difference for you if this is something that you

currently don't do. When you first wake up in the morning, your brain is in a highly suggestible state. What this means is that whatever you do, first thing in the morning, sort of primes you. If you go on social media first thing in the morning and you spike dopamine immediately, you're priming your brain to be in a more distractible state the rest of the day. You will find yourself, maybe you've noticed this, maybe you haven't, you will find yourself craving the phone, craving social media or craving quick dopamine hits more that day because that's what you primed your brain with when you first woke up. Maybe it's not dopamine. Maybe when you first wake up,

You go to your email or the news or text messages if those stress you out sometimes and you immediately jump straight into reactivity mode. Reacting, being behind or maybe priming your brain with stressful events from the news. Now you are dysregulating your nervous system as soon as you wake up in the morning and you are putting yourself into a reactive state rather than a creator state. And so step number one of a morning routine is about waking up with intention. it is about putting yourself in the kind of creator state first thing in the morning. When you first wake up in the morning, maybe there is an affirmation you want to say.

Maybe there is a mantra or a prayer. Or maybe you just want to sit, lay in bed in the silence of your mind. Maybe you want to go straight into meditation, whatever it is. The point of the step really is just to be mindful and to be aware that when you wake up first thing in the morning, you are soil. You are a ball at the top of the hill. What seeds are you going to plant in the soil? Which way are you going to set the ball rolling? Another important little scientific fun fact that we must discuss before I get into the real juice of this morning routine is cortisol. Cortisol often gets a bad rep because people, a lot of people, many people nowadays, are chronically stressed.

And so if you aren't cortisol, in case you didn't know, is a stress hormone. If you are chronically stressed, you might have chronically elevated cortisol. Now, that is not a good thing. But cortisol is not bad inherently. It's not inherently bad. It's not actually, it actually can be very good for you in short bouts, in a cute little cortisol spikes. And one important thing to note about a morning routine and about the way that you start your day is that cortisol is actually meant to be higher in the morning. Like you're actually supposed to wake up with elevated cortisol. or at least, you know, higher cortisol than before you fall asleep at night, the end of the day. And that is biological design at its finest, right? Like, you want to wake up and be alert and not be stressed, but be wakeful and alert and, you know, be paying attention to what's around you versus late at night being alert and maybe even a little stressed and wakeful. You wouldn't, you wouldn't want that. So cortisol really is supposed to be elevated in the most. morning. And so as we move into the real juice, the main steps of this morning routine,

I want you to keep that in mind. Activities that get the blood flowing that maybe elevate cortisol a little bit can actually be helpful in the morning to move you into a more wakeful state. If you are someone who is needing that, if you are someone that wakes up feeling anxious and overly alert as it is, then maybe that's not something that you want to prioritize. So the real core of this morning routine that you can use and customize comes from the three M's coined by Dr. Chatterjee. Dr. Chatterjee wrote a book about these three Ms, but you don't necessarily need to read it if you don't want to because I'm going to explain it to you right now. The first M is movement. Movement is extremely important first thing in the morning for many different reasons when it comes to your biology.

All right? So reason number one is that every single night as you sleep, your brain dumps a whole bunch of waist down into your neck through something called the glymphatic system. Now, if you don't move your body, if you don't get up and move, it might sit there. And they've actually linked this to cognitive decline in older age, this kind of buildup in the neck. all right so you want to so you want to get the blood flowing you want to get the glimphatic system flowing the lymphatic system flowing by moving your body when you first wake up in the morning that's reason number one another reason why morning movement is so so so important is for blood flow

oxygenating the brain another reason dopamine boost an endocannabinoid boost mood boost focus boost motivation boost energy boost all right morning exercise will change your life especially if you are someone who has been diagnosed with ADHD, maybe you think you have it. I myself have been diagnosed with ADHD and I found very early on that exercising in the morning allows me to be so much more focused, more productive, more on top of my life. I feel better. I do better. I think better. Just all around everything is better. Okay. So that doesn't mean that every single morning I'd get up and I do some crazy one out. I don't do like a whole one hour and a half workout that stuff. Some days, yeah, for sure, if I have the time to do that. Some days, it looks like getting

up in the morning and stretching back whenever I was in my PhD and I had to be in lab by 6.30 a.m. or 7 a.m. to run a specific experiment, I wasn't doing a whole workout in the morning. I would get up and I would do three morning sun salutations, which is just a little quick yoga flow. It took me maybe two minutes to complete this morning movement. And so I'm getting you these examples just to kind of paint the picture that there really is no hard and fast rule for what movement looks like. Sometimes I want to activate my whimsy a little bit extra. And if you're watching this video, you can tune in. And I have this little rebounder, a little mini trampoline that I like to bounce on to activate my whimsy. And so that's fun as well. There are periods in my life in the past

where I felt like actually going to the gym and lifting weights and hitting a hard workout was disregulating me. I started to feel maybe a little anxious after I would leave the gym in the morning and I paid attention to that. So what did I do? I shifted into more regulating exercise. For example, Pilates or walking, right? Also making sure you eat food before you exercise in the morning is really important. And the way that you feel yourself is really important. I love water with electrolytes first thing in the morning, that would also be a game changer. The reason why I love the term movement in this step is because it's not telling you, oh, you need to go do a workout. It really is any sort of movement. You can put on a song and you can dance. Whatever you are feeling called to do,

do it. It can be as simple as stretching. But movement is so, so, so important, especially in just one little extra bonus benefit. It really is a great way to prime yourself for the the next step, which is mindfulness. If you are someone who struggles to meditate, exercising before you meditate, moving your body before you meditate will be a game changer for you. It was a game changer for me. I actually, it's the way that I started with meditation. I knew that I wanted to start meditating. If you've never meditated before, if you don't have a regular meditation practice, highly recommend a meditation practice. Meditation will allow you to boost your focus, your attention, your presence, your joy, your peace, your ability to regulate your nervous system,

your superpowers, your connection with the divine, just so many different benefits to meditation, which I highly recommend doing. But I get a lot of clients, a lot of people that I coach that they ask me, you know, like, how do you meditate? I really struggle with meditation, blah, blah, and I tell them, try meditating after you exercise. And if you've ever done yoga, you will find that in yoga, this is actually the way that it is done. You do the yoga flow and then at the end you do Savasana or corpse pose, a meditation pose. And I love that. That's my favorite part of yoga. But you will find that it is so much easier to drop into the present moment after you've moved your body. It's sort of like you're able to clear all this movement monkey energy out of the body and then your mind can rest.

So if you have not caught that yet, mindfulness is M number two of this 3M system, of a morning routine. Mindfulness doesn't have to be meditation. It can also be journaling. It can be breathwork. Any sort of practice that allows you to observe your mind, I've found that even, you know, on Sundays, I feel called to do a brain dump, a morning brain dump. Well, if I have a morning, right, let's say you have mornings like this where you're trying to meditate and you just feel like your mind is full of this clutter. I've found that doing a brain dump to kind of dump all of the information that your brain is kind of cycling and looping and your working memory out onto some external hard drive like a voice memo or journaling on or

typing in your notes app. I found that it is extremely helpful to do that. And it will also allow you to observe patterns that maybe you haven't noticed before. Now, if you're wondering what type of breathwork, what type of meditation, it really is up to you. There's no right or wrong answer. And again, this is why I love this sort of morning routine formula because I don't believe in one size fits all approaches, but what I do pay attention to is our biology and how the brain works and setting the brain and our biology up for success in the best way. Now, it is really important to customize each of these steps so that they resonate and work for you as an individual. I know lots of you will have questions on meditation because every single time I talk about it,

I get lots of questions on it. You can leave your questions in the comments if you have specific questions, but I'll answer a few right now. When I first started meditating, it was guided meditations only. I had no idea what I was doing, and I actually have a playlist on YouTube of the exact meditations that I used when I was first starting out. Now, this is not a playlist that I made for myself five, six years ago. When I first started meditating, I made it for myself, and then I've just since made it public. since I started creating content, since I started coaching people, I've just made the playlist public so that you can go and use it too. So those are my favorite guided meditations in one

playlist for free on YouTube, and you can use those if you are new to meditating and you're just starting out. I now am a huge fan of meditating in silence or just two frequencies of music. I love it because I sort of have come, I've developed my own meditation structure. where I like to go into meditation. I always start with a few physiological sighs. If you have never heard of a physiological sigh before, what that looks like is it is one deep inhale through your nose. We can do one together right now.

So one deep inhale through your nose, followed by a second inhale through your nose. It's just going to be like a super tiny expansion to the tippity top. And then a long sigh, exhale through your mouth. If you do two or three of those, it really shifts your nervous system into the parasympathetic branch. And if you notice, I'm already talking slower and calmer. But it really shifts your nervous system into the parasympathetic branch, which is that rest and digest state. It allows you to sort of just drop out of your brain, out of your mind, and into the body, and it really allows you to feel calm and relaxed.

then I usually like to do just a little gratitude in my mind, things that I'm grateful for maybe just 30 seconds to a minute in my head, and then drop into silence and just observing my head and trying to let go my thoughts. And I'll do that for however long I'm feeling, however long I'm wanting to meditate that day. And then toward the end, I will ask a question. I really like to ask questions to the divine, to God, to the universe,

to my highest self, I usually like to ask, you know, like, what is here for me today? What is there for me to know? If I'm feeling anxious, maybe a little bit that morning, I'll ask myself, you know, like, what can I do for you right now? Like, yeah, like, what is there for me to know? Like, how can I support myself right now, right? And so just questions like that, just like intuitive questions that will come up, like, how can I support myself right now? Or if I have a really busy day, like, how can I make today great, how can I make today? You know, and whatever it is, like, if there's any sort of uncertainty, if there's anything, I will just ask. And what I have found is that if you start with those physiological size or any sort of breathwork, go into gratitude, which shifts your nervous

system into rest and digest, parasympathetic and love even further on top of the breathwork, it allows you to drop into a deeper meditation a lot easier, a lot quicker. And then toward the end, I start to ask some of these questions. I don't always ask these questions, but sometimes I do. I like to. And then at the very end, we shipped into the third M. The third M is mindset. Mindset looks like affirmations, intention setting, praying, saying your prayers. I often get asked, what is the difference between mindfulness and mindset? And the analogy that I like to make is mindfulness is like raking the soil. like raking the dirt, the soil. And then mindset is planting the seeds.

So you're going to clear out your mind, rake your mind, get it free of weeds, and then plant the seeds that you want to grow. So if there are new beliefs, you're trying to wire in, this is an opportunity to maybe say some affirmations or visualize or, you know, say your prayers, set your intentions, whatever that looks like for you. One of my favorite intentions, and I have shared this many times, and I've actually got a DM from someone on Instagram saying that this affirmation alone changed our life. So tune into this one. One of my favorite intentions or affirmations is today I am prepared to be surprised

by the unexpected blessings and opportunities coming my way. This primes your brain to look for and scan and filter your reality for things going right, for blessings, for opportunities. And I'm telling you when you set this intention at the end of the day, you will look back over your day and be like, oh, wow, that one thing happened. Or it might so happen that in the middle of your day, something's going to smack you in the face. This has happened to me before, where I am halfway through the day, maybe a few hours after saying that affirmation, and something amazing happens. I get great news or I receive an opportunity, and I'm like, oh, there's that affirmation at work. So give that one to try if you feel called. But I like to set intentions. I like to think about,

okay, like, what am I doing today? Like, do I have a lot of meetings? Do I have a lot of calls? Do I? am I coaching people today? Am I teaching classes? Am I creating content? Like, what am I doing today? And I will set intentions for how I want my day to go. I will set intentions for also like how I want to be, right? If I'm feeling like I am taking life a little bit too seriously,

I will set the intention to have more fun with my tasks today, be more whimsy with everything that I do today. If I feel a little more high strong, if maybe I'm feeling a little anxious, I will set the intention to relax through what I'm doing today, to slow down with my tasks, right? And so this part of the morning routine, especially in tension setting, is about tuning into how you feel and adjusting for that.

Maybe you feel absolutely incredible. Like I have days where I'm just like, I feel absolutely amazing. And my intention is just to be love, just to move through the day with the energy of love. In this third step of the three ends, I really like to say my prayers as well. and that can be more gratitude, more thanks, maybe asking for things, something that I've asked for for years now is guidance, clarity, and wisdom. But altogether, these are really the threems. This is the threems of a typical morning routine every single day. Now, what I want you to notice is that every single step has so much flexibility and you can adjust and customize and do something

different every single day. Like it doesn't have to be the same type of movement or the same type of mindfulness practice or the same type of mindset, right? And another thing that I want you to know is that all three of these steps can be done in 10 minutes. You can move your body for three minutes. You can do a three minute meditation and then take three minutes to say some affirmations and be done. So there really is no excuse for not being able to do this. Like you can take as much time or as little time as you want on days where I'm really busy. I really, I do five minutes. It takes five minutes. But on days where I have more time, I like to do more of a workout and actually take the longer meditation and do a little more of a visualization. This morning, I did that. I did my 30, I did a 30 minute workout,

did a 10 minute meditation and then took, I think, an additional 10 minutes to visualize and go through sort of like my formula for leveling up that I have inside of Minecraft. And I'm like, okay, because I just finished a huge project of mine that I can't wait to talk more about. And I'm like, okay, like what's next? And I was kind of visualizing, moving through the steps of the My Mindcraft method that I've created. And I'm like, oh, this is what's next for me. This is the step that I need to focus on. So every morning can look different.

And for example, you can do all three of these steps on a walk. You can go for a walk and make it a mindfulness walk and do a little bit of a walking meditation. Now you're getting movement. You're also getting morning sunlight. which I haven't mentioned yet, but morning sunlight is really beneficial for waking up your biology, setting your circadian rhythm, setting a timer for melatonin release at night, which is really important for sleep, also boosting cortisol, boosting dopamine. So that morning sunlight is so, so, so important. And so you can get up, go for a walk. So now you've checked movement, you've checked mindfulness,

and then you can take the last five, ten minutes to do a little mindset. I actually do this frequently. I do all 3Ms, my entire morning routine in a 15 minute, 20 minute walk. You can go back to doing the same thing that you've been doing every single day, or you can try the 3Ms. You can try this morning routine out for yourself, customize it, make it work for you, make it fun, make it exciting, okay, use dopamine to your advantage, make it fun, make it something that you look forward to. Don't let yourself have the matcha or the coffee until after the morning routine, okay, delay reward, motivate yourself to actually do it. And then you can watch. your life shift and transform into a life that you never imagined possible. And I know that that is

a high promise for something as simple as a morning routine, but genuinely, my life completely changed when I started doing the three ends. And I have seen thousands of people that I've coached change their lives with the three ends. If you are somebody who doesn't like to do the exact same thing every single day, I get that, I need novelty. I love flexibility as well. The threems gives you that. So try out this morning routine and let me know how it goes for you. I'm very excited to see your results and transformations. I can't wait to hear about them. And if you are wanting to learn more about coaching with me, my Minecraft program and the Minecraft method, the community, everything that you need to know is going to be down in the description. A link to my next live masterclass will

be in the description as well. And by the way, if you have not been to one of my live masterclasses before, they are absolutely incredible. Every single time, I hold one, I get DMs from people saying that their lives completely changed. I actually had someone on my last class who said that he attended my class in April and he came back to my most recent one just to tell me that he changed his life. So the classes are incredible. I dive into the neuroscience of the subconscious mind, neuroscience of manifestation, reprogramming your brain, all of that. And I give kind of an entire method, an entire process. So definitely come. If you are interested, it is completely free. I am also planning a tour. So if you are wanting to see me live, make sure to RSVP for your city. And the link to do

that is also going to be in the description. Thank you so much for watching for being here. I am endlessly grateful to you and for you. I am sending you so much love. I believe in you. I'm rooting for you. You got this. Go and get it. Have a great week. I'll see you next time. Bye.