Rise & Glow Collagen: Your new morning beauty regime explained

Discover your new holistic beauty regime and reveal your inner radiance with the Rise & Glow morning routine

Start your Day Beautifully 🌅

Our modern, busy lifestyles have taken their toll on our beauty and play havoc with our skin.

In the Western world, the modern convention is to default to waking up to screens before sunlight, a sugar loaded carby breakfast on the go, caffeine instantly on waking and a diet full of seed oils, grains and sugar - which impacts our health on the inside and therefore our appearance on the outside. 

We’ve lost touch with our ancestral beginnings and it's causing problems with our appearance!

Instead, a more holistic approach is needed to address these problems and come up with a natural solution which fits into your everyday routine.

We know that lots of you love to begin your morning with movement, or simply by being mindful and enjoying the basics of hydration, natural daylight and getting outside. Rise & Glow Collagen fits perfectly into this way of life - for a natural and simple solution to help you look and feel good every single day.

Get the most out of your daily beauty tonic with our simple ancestrally inspired 5 step morning routine, to help get your day off to a beautiful start.

The Rise & Glow 5 Step Morning Routine 🌺

 

Steps 1 & 2. Wake up at the same time each day and no caffeine within 90 minutes of waking 💧

It's really important to wake up and go to bed at a consistent time every single day. This is because it supports your circadian rhythm (you body's internal body clock) and will give you greater energy throughout the day and will actually help you sleep better at night. 

There are a few reasons why it might not be best to have caffeine first thing in the morning.

One of them is based on the relationship between caffeine and cortisol. Cortisol is our stress and alertness hormone produced by the adrenal glands. Every morning, our daily levels spike within the first hour of waking. They then decrease rapidly over the subsequent few hours and gradually diminish throughout the remainder of the day.

If you consume caffeine when your cortisol levels are still high, such as immediately upon waking, you're introducing caffeine into your system when it may not be as beneficial, and should not naturally be necessary. This can interfere with the natural flow of cortisol and the pressure we put on our adrenals to keep pumping it out.

There’s also research to show that relying on stimulants like caffeine first thing in the morning might lead to a tolerance buildup over time, requiring increased coffee intake for the same energising effects.

However, if you wait an hour or two before having your coffee, the caffeine will take effect as your cortisol levels start to decrease - precisely when you need the boost the most.

The suggestion of waiting 90 minutes before enjoying caffeine after waking has famously come from Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. An expert in how our cortisol and caffeine levels interact, Huberman based his research around the way that caffeine interacts with the compound adenosine.

Adenosine - the compound responsible for inducing sleepiness and sometimes referred to as our ‘sleep pressure gauge’ - accumulates throughout the day, contributing to increasing feelings of fatigue until we rest. As ATP (energy) levels decrease, adenosine increases and tells the body to start conserving energy. 

During sleep, the body eliminates adenosine, promoting a refreshed state upon waking. However, if we don’t get enough sleep our natural adenosine can’t fully clear from the system, which can cause us to wake up feeling tired (and even more likely to reach for a coffee!)

Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors, preventing the typical drowsy effects. However, as the caffeine's influence diminishes, the retained adenosine resurfaces, leading to a return of fatigue. If we allow the natural cortisol to clear the leftover adenosine before we drink caffeine, we’re less likely to interfere with the whole process.

 

Step 3: Enjoy a refreshing Rise & Glow Collagen Tonic 🌺

Swap out your morning coffee for a Rise & Glow Collagen Tonic. Rise & Glow was created to inspire healthier morning habits that nurture your inner glow from within, and it aligns perfectly with the rest of the steps of our suggested morning routine.

 

• Replace your morning caffeine with a Rise & Glow

As cortisol is produced in our adrenals, it’s important to hydrate effectively and help to support their function in the morning with a drink that’s not coffee! Alongside electrolytes (including sodium), feeding the adrenals with forms of Vitamin C such as those we’ve incorporated into Rise & Glow is going to be a really good option first thing, as our adrenal glands love vitamin C.

If you're a keen coffee lover, you might miss your morning cuppa at first - but one of the easiest ways to kick a habit is to replace it with something else, and Rise & Glow is the perfect solution.

 

• Enjoy Rise & Glow in the sunlight

Whether you're mixing Rise & Glow Collagen simply into water or adding to your morning shake, smoothie, breakfast or yoghurt bowl - enjoying it outside is a great way to embrace its full benefits alongside some natural sunlight (see step 4 below for more details). 

If you have a garden you can sit and enjoy the start of your day sipping away on a refreshing Rise & Glow Collagen tonic. Watch the sun come up and expose your skin and eyes to the first morning rays.

For those of us without a garden, try taking Rise & Glow Collagen on a walk in the great outdoors for some morning exercise. Incorporating a short walk into your commute is a great way to build this healthy habit too - helping you to stay hydrated during your morning movement.

You can also enjoy Rise & Glow Collagen outside barefoot, to combine this practice with your morning grounding ritual. By the time your drink (or breakfast) is finished, you will have had some good exposure to sunlight and grounding - to get your day off to the best possible start.

 

• Sip away on Rise & Glow Collagen whilst reading a good book or absorbing nature, instead of screen time

Replace your screen time in the morning with reading a book, listening to a podcast or enjoying some morning exercise.

Even just sitting and absorbing nature in the outdoors is a simple practice to spend the time you'd usually waste on your phone, doing something more productive and nurturing.

 

Step 4: Get some natural sunlight 🌅

We need exposure to the sun as it is literally the ‘guiding light’ for the human diurnal circadian rhythm. This is the near-24-hour body clock that makes us wake in the day and sleep at night.

This rhythm is intrinsic to almost every physiological process in the body (which is why you feel utterly rubbish when you’re jet lagged!) And how do you think we keep our circadian rhythm in sync? We do it by exposing ourselves to the sun; through our eyes, and our skin.

Sunlight activates the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the hypothalamus - the central pacemaker of the circadian timing system. Exposure to sunlight is the most potent cue for entraining our circadian rhythms - helping to synchronise our internal clock with the external world.

Information received by light will be used by the SCN to guide a cascade of hormonal changes that control feelings such as alertness versus tiredness, and hunger versus satiety. A lot of these feelings are driven by melatonin, cortisol and leptin, which are the master circadian hormones which impact all of your other hormones downstream.

Evidence has shown that outdoor exposure to sunlight first thing in the morning is going to be the most powerful trigger for setting your circadian rhythm, making you feel alert and energised for the day, and improving sleep. This is because viewing sunlight stimulates a rise in cortisol in the morning - making you feel alert and stimulating metabolic processes during the day, whilst also setting a biological timer for sleep that evening.

The research on exactly how much morning sunlight exposure we need is still insubstantial as there are varying factors depending on the individual, environment and seasons, but it’s recommended to aim for at least 5 minutes (in direct sun), or ideally 30 minutes.

The reason why sunlight is the only light that we can use to guide a healthy circadian rhythm is because it is the only natural source of light that we’ve evolved with and it is ‘full-spectrum’.

By that, we mean that it provides every colour of light at some point throughout the day. And if you think of yourself as a painting, you will use every different frequency/colour of that sunlight for a different purpose in the body - again, only if you are actually exposed to it, without glass, contacts, or sunscreen getting in the way.

You can learn more about the benefits of sunlight in our article below.

👉 Benefits of sun exposure and why you don't always need sunscreen

Step 5: Get outside & ground your feet on the Earth 🌎

Grounding, also known as earthing, refers to the practice of connecting with the Earth's surface by walking barefoot on grass, soil, sand or other natural surfaces, or by using grounding devices that transfer the Earth's energy to the body.

The practice works because we live on a giant battery. The surface of the earth is electrically charged and we are bioelectrical beings that run off electrons.

The ‘electron transport chain’ is a critical phase in energy metabolism during which ATP - the energy currency in the body - is generated. Electrons are also needed in many other biological processes including driving our heart beat and controlling water balance (hence ‘electrolytes’).

There is a growing body of quality scientific studies that have reported evidence of significant health improvements when the body is grounded vs. non-grounded. The speed at which grounding charges the body is instantaneous, but the longer you spend doing it, the more effective it is likely to be at improving your health.

Grounding has been shown to reduce inflammation, oxidative damage, pain and stress, while improving blood flow, mood, energy levels, and sleep. What’s more, grounding, just like exposure to sunlight, has also been said to help regulate the body’s circadian rhythm. So this is why grounding while exposing ourselves to morning sun is a powerful combination practice.

We love grounding because it’s so simple, feels entirely natural and innate, and is a free and easy antidote to the Global epidemic of chronic inflammatory conditions.

Extra tip: No screens within 60 minutes of waking ❌

Many of us are guilty of reaching for our phone almost the moment our eyes are open. Whether it's turning off your alarm, checking important emails or catching up on the news - there's always an excuse to grab a device first thing in the morning.

We know that our phones and devices are invaluable tools to manage a busy and productive lifestyle, but this is one unhealthy habit that you need to kick if you want to embrace a better morning routine.

When we first awaken our brain switches from delta waves to theta waves - a sort of daydreamy state between deep sleep and full wakefulness. The more you wake up, your brain then switches to alpha waves - which are produced when we are still relaxed but not having to process much information.

Checking your phone first thing interrupts your brains natural process of waking up - forcing your brain to skip the important theta and alpha waves and instead go straight to the beta stage of being wide awake.

This is important because what our brains process when we first wake up can have an impact on the rest of our day. If we check our phones and overload our mind, this triggers a stress response and primes the brain for distraction. In comparison, waking naturally and experiencing the brain waves your body has evolved to function best with can set you up for a much better day.

Try to resist the temptation to pick up your phone by following the other steps in the morning routine before checking your phone. It might take a while to get used to, but making this a healthy habit is a must if you're going to embrace a morning routine that nurtures your body and mind.

 

Maximise your morning routine for optimal health & beauty and to enhance your natural circadian rhythm.

Say hello to a new you with a refreshing Rise & Glow Collagen morning tonic.