A Morning Energy Ritual: The Upward Spiral of Success
Hi, Louise here. Today I want to share something I’ve been deeply fascinated by this week, a new framework I’ve been working with that has completely shifted how I see mornings. I believe it will change the way you look at the gift each new day brings too. Let’s dive in.
Let’s start here: we are all energy. Every single cell in your body is vibrating right now, atoms firing, moving, and constantly in flux. This isn’t just spiritual language; it’s physics and biology. Your body is an electrical system, always sending signals, building charge, and communicating through tiny biochemical and energetic pulses.
This beautiful micro-electrical computer system is always running, waiting for inputs: What should it do with today? How should it feel? Where should its focus go? The truth is, you can direct it and co-create alongside this system. But too often, when we wake up, grab our phones, scroll, and check our inbox, the world dictates the inputs before we’ve even taken our first conscious breath.
Despite this, each morning we are given a clean slate. Sleep is not just rest. It is deeply restorative on a cellular level. Overnight, your body clears toxins through the glymphatic system, rebalances hormones, regulates your nervous system, and consolidates memories. It lowers cortisol, restores insulin sensitivity, and gives your entire system a chance to reset after carrying the load of the day before.
So when you open your eyes in the morning, your body has essentially cleared the decks. Your brain chemistry, hormones, and energy are primed, waiting for direction. Which is why those first choices in your day matter so much. You are in control of your direction. Where your morning takes you, your day takes you, your week takes you, and ultimately, your life takes you.
We’ve all heard that before, and I know it can sound generic and uninspiring. So let me reframe it in the way that changed my entire perception of mornings: your morning decisions determine which spiral you ride for the remainder of the day.
The Three Morning Spirals
I believe there are three paths available to us every morning.
1. The Upward Spiral of Success
This is the state that primes you for a good day. It’s where small micro-moments come together to lift you up, to make you feel aligned, on track, and in the right space - physically, mentally and emotionally. Being on, or stepping onto the upward spiral is the sense that things are flowing, that you’re generally where you need to be in life and, sure, while we all might like an extra million dollars, it’s the quiet inherent belief that “life is good that it’s only going to get better from here”.
Psychology calls this an expansive state. Polyvagal theory calls this a regulated state. The spiritual and manifestation world call it an aligned or abundant state. And for some of us? We just call it a good day, or a good mood. Already proven to have an emotional frequency, the emotions and energy running through your body are of a ‘higher frequency’ (Dr. David Hawkins for more). These means they trend towards hopeful, joyful, happy, and content. Because of this, and how it feels to exist inside of your body, your heart space is open and willing to connect, learn, receive and evolve. In these moments, even if your past may have been rocky, you believe in your future and yourself. You know that any single day has the power to change your life and you understand that your potential is unfolding, day by day.
When you step onto the upward spiral of success, you are more likely to make decisions that serve you. Your inner dialogue champions you, and your internal thoughts are supportive, understanding, and curious (even if not always loving and kind). In these moments, while you may always have a shadow of an inner critic, for the most part, your body feels like it is working with you, not against you. You believe in yourself.
Biologically, the upward spiral of success looks like a regulated and optimized nervous system. You are more steady rather than reactive. Your heart rate is coherent, your brain waves move into alpha and theta states that promote creativity and flow, and you breathe deeply from your diaphragm, activating your vagus nerve and calming cortisol output. Your mitochondria are producing clean, sustainable energy (ATP), not just borrowing from stress hormones. You don’t feel exhausted, over worked, over controlling, or panicked. You don’t over think or over react.
In this state, you move through the day without constant frustration. You’re not bouncing between tasks or panicking about control. You’re in flow, handling challenges with competence. And when you’re here, good things compound. Opportunities arrive. Connections open. You catch yourself thinking, this feels fun, even easy. Even your HRV (heart rate variability), one of the strongest markers of resilience and recovery, improves in this state, showing that your body can flex between stress and rest with ease.
That is the upward spiral of success. Knowing that whatever happens, you are on an upward trajecty and you can move through.
2. The Baseline
Next, baseline. Baseline is a temporary but necessary state. Just as your nervous system naturally shifts between activation, regulation and dysregulation throughout the day, baseline is the space you wake up in (unless you truly had an awful night’s sleep) and the space you come back to after the highs of expansion. It is the point of gentle landing. You recalibrate, restore, and integrate. It is a space where you can think, “that was a good day,” and soften into rest or where you instead think “that wasn’t my best day, I’ll try again tomorrow”.
As much as Type A women may try, we cannot be “on” all the time. Our biology and more masculine dominanted states requires balance… and baseline provides the sacred middle ground.
But baseline also has a shadow side. If you do not know how to rise into the upward spiral, or do not take daily decisions that align with shifting you onto this spiral, baseline can becomes stagnation. Alongside being resting and restorative, it can also be a flatline of energy, where you are simply getting through days without growth or forward motion. Psychology describes this as learned helplessness. Polyvagal theory describes it as freeze or fawn, where the nervous system is neither expansive nor activated into flow and the energetic and spiritual world would call this being 'out of alignment’.
Over time, the compounding impacts of staying in baseline for too long looks like lack of movement, lack of belief, and a slow drain of possibility across every area of life. The longer you stay in baseline, or the longer you take daily decisions that do not support you onto an upward spiral, the more you can start to think ‘what’s the point?’. This lack of cellular energy, and self-belief is not an expansive, hopeful, joyful or exciting state. Instead, contraction within this baseline state, or staying here for too long can lead to us to the third spiral.
3. The Downward Spiral of Sabotage
On the flip side of the positive spiral we have already spoken about (the Spiral of Success) is the Downard Spiral of Sabotage. We all know this one. The mornings where you drag yourself out of bed, grab coffee on an empty stomach, and scroll your phone before you even know what you are looking for. One stressful email later, your day begins with a cortisol spike and your nervous system is already dysregulated. Maybe you start panicking about someone who wants a meeting with you, or a client who doesn’t want to renew their retainer. One small moment in baseline can lead us straight into the downward spiral of panic, fear, and dysregulation.
These early moments and choices hold the power to send you into a spiral. As your cortisol spikes, your appetite shuts down and on this mornings, you are more likely to skip breakfast, destabilizing your blood sugar further. Instead of doing your morning routine, your morning rituals, or getting outside to move your body, you ‘double down’ - an action that only accelerates the downward spiral of sabotage. As you double down, you start to push through the day with adrenaline and cortisol, keeping you glued to your desk and again, forgetting to eat and your cortisol and adrenaline spiking over, and over. You do not function at the top of your game, you do not feel good, expansive or hopeful. You may start to react too fast, over think too frequently and the brain fog will start to get in the way of important calls, conversations and discussions.
This type of stressful, frustrating, out of alignment day, forces you into a place of dysregulation, distress and often self-soothing behaviors. By the afternoon you crave more sugar, caffeine, or more distraction. By evening, you crash into the sofa, numbing out, but carrying guilt, shame, or regret for the way you handled the day. You knew that all you had to do in the morning was not open up your inbox, and not have a coffee at 7.30am on an empty stomach, but you did so anyway.
Psychology explains this as the shame and guilt cycle and because of this, your inner critic grows louder: “You should know better. Everyone else is doing it right. You have already failed.”
Equally, the protector parts of you (that exist to shield you from the pain of these parts ‘failing’) instead jump in: “order the pizza, you deserve it.” Biologically, high cortisol and adrenaline take your logical, rational, prefrontal cortex ‘offline’ and you start to numb from the bad ‘day’.
This is why one bad morning often leads to a bad day, and one bad day often spirals into a bad week and a bad week leads to ‘I’ve fallen off now, I might as well enjoy myself before I go back to the gym on Monday’.
In these states, you aren’t thinking straight, and the poor choices compound. I call this the downward spiral of sabotage (and I have been there many, many times).
The Morning Clean Slate
The more that I sat with this upward and downard spiral of success and sabotage, I started to realize: Mornings are the gateway. They are the clean slate that determines whether you rise into expansion and success, take a gentle day at baseline, or fall into sabotage. Not every day needs to, or can realistically be an upward spiral, but if you are on a path of growth and success to a happier, healthier, more successful version of you, the aim is clear: to create more good days than bad. And this involves days full of more momentum than stagnation, and more expansion than contraction.
It requires us making daily decisions that help us shift towards the spiral that serves us, rather than sabotages us.
For me, I started to realize that it all comes down to those very first choices after I wake up. On the days when I had something health or wellness related that had to get me up and out of the house (like walking with a friend, or going to the pilates studio), I always felt better without fail. I would come home, eat breakfast, shower, prepare for the day and then step into my first morning feeling great. But getting to the pilates studio is not always possible, particularly with jam packed calendars that often start way before the average.
The more and more I sat with this, I realized I needed a morning solution that would get me up and out the door and that would serve me from every angle. I tried walking meditations and I didn’t need ‘calming, soothing or regulating’ activities at 7am. Instead, I needed something to turn on the ignition of my life and shift me from baseline right up into the upward spiral.
And that’s the beautiful thing about the upward spiral. The smallest decisions can take you there, and from there it can just start getting better.
With all of this in mind, this is why I created the Morning Rally Walk - a daily walking ritual to anchor the clean slate into direction, energy, and momentum before the world gets to you. It’s a daily reminder of who I can be, how I can feel and how I can prime myself to step into an Upward Spiral of Success, or, on some days, to soften myself into a day of gentle baseline (often an important part of the journey for Type-A, shame-based perfectionists).
The Story Behind The Morning Rally Walk
But for me, the Morning Rally wasn’t just about getting up, out and waking me up (although it’s honestly a godsend). Really, as someone with an autoimmune-driven chronic pain disorder, what I have learned is that body accumulates stress residue quickly and it is more sensitive to them than most. Lactate, cortisol byproducts, and adrenaline metabolites build up in my system, and if I do not move them through, they turn into physical pain (yes, really) by aggravating nerve, muscles and tendons in my body. And my body is also equally sensitive to the emotions that I experience. Big emotional states send biological cascades through me — via neuropeptides, stress hormones, and the intricate signaling pathways that connect my brain to my immune system, gut, and even my skin. It’s not just “in my head.”
Exercise has always been my saving grace (ever since I was a dancer and a gymnast as a young kid). It’s been the one consistent thing in my life since my teens too (in fact, I used to be a fitness blogger). And the more I spoke with women like me - driven, ambitious, with big dreams running through their veins - the more I realized something: movement works for them too. They don’t always appreciate being told to ‘come down or calm down’ and I felt that. At 7:30am, I didn’t crave stillness or silence - I needed to wake my body, switch on my brain, and ignite my energy for the day ahead. I needed to remind myself of who I was, what I was doing in this lifetime and instill the safe belief that YES… I will get there, I just have to keep taking action, day by day.
Morning Rally is more than a walk. It is a methodology. A way to rally my mornings so I can reign over my day, my week and to take me onto the upward spiral of success.
What To Expect
With a Morning Rally walk, all you have to do is get up, get out and press play. I do the rest for you. In just 23 minutes, you will move through interval-paced walking layered with euphoric music, oxygenating breath, and mindset cues to shift your state. This one 23 minute daily decision helps you to prime your productivity and potential before the chaos of the workday begins. It helps to cut through fatigue, wake you up, and light up your drive and capability for the day ahead.
My philosophy is simple: sometimes you have to rally - to do the thing you do not feel like doing - to shift your energy, reach your potential, and unlock the life you actually want to live. And the days I do? They are always the days I love my life the most.
Now, it is your turn.
Try the Morning Rally Walk Free
The best way to try my Morning Rally walk is with my Morning Rally Challenge: 3 days, 3 guided walks, powerful bonuses, and the exact system I use to turn my mornings into momentum. And the best part? You can try it completely free.
Welcome to your upward spiral of success!
x Louise
