The Power of a Regular Routine

It’s February already? Hard to believe we’re a month into the new year.

This is about the time when many New Year’s resolutions start going out the window. It’s a sad fact, but we make it tough on ourselves when we decide that January 1st is going to be the day we change our lives for the better. Eat better, lose weight, exercise more, make more money, drink less, read more, watch less TV, spend more time with the family, be more organized…the list goes on and on!

But somehow, we keep doing it year after year. Decade after decade. Sometimes with the exact same things we want to do differently, aka better.

Perhaps what we need is a different way of looking at “doing better”. Maybe a more powerful strategy would be to think about our routines and how they have shaped our lives up to this point.

Routine:
a customary or regular course of procedure:
commonplace tasks, chores, or duties as must be done regularly or at specified intervals; typical or everyday activity:
regular, unvarying, habitual, unimaginative, or rote procedure.
an unvarying and constantly repeated formula, as of speech or action; convenient or predictable response
From dictionary.com

We all have all kinds of routines:

• Waking up and getting ready for the day
• Hygiene and self-care
• Fitness
• Getting the kids ready for school
• Traveling to work
• Arriving at work and getting the workday started
• Lunchtime
• Task oriented routines, both work and personal
• Getting home
• Meal preparation
• Homework
• Family routines
• Shopping
• Leisure activity
• Bedtime

Routines are the foundation of our days. They help make our daily lives make sense. They feel comfortable and reassuring. If we had to think about and make decisions about every part of our day without routines to guide us, we’d never get anything else accomplished. Yes, life could be more stressful!

But a lot of the time, we tend to allow our routines to become entrenched, and never take the time to evaluate whether they are helping or hindering us. Or maybe just keeping us stuck in a rut.

We may have fallen accidentally into our routines, without making any conscious decisions about whether each part helps us accomplish our goals and dreams, or even just makes life a little easier. They may even be making life harder, crazy as that sounds.

Have you ever been talking to a friend or family member, and they complain about how something or other in their life isn’t working for them? You think to yourself, “Well, it’s obvious why that’s not working. If they just did XYZ, that would work so much better. It’s so simple – why can’t they see that for themselves?”

Sometimes it’s easier to have those insights from the outside looking in, but we fail to look with the same objectivity at our own lives and routines.

So instead of lamenting your resolution lapses, this is a great time to look with fresh eyes at the way your daily life flows and decide whether any one portion of your day could be tweaked to help you make some of those desired changes more easily.

One caveat. Don’t try to tweak everything at once! That’s just a recipe for failure, kind of like New Year’s resolutions can be.

The idea here is not to be so structured that you feel constrained by your routines. Yes, if you make changes, it may take a little time to become comfortable, but it should never feel like hard work or like pushing a boulder up a hill.

The idea is that routines should make your daily life easier; more on autopilot so you can conserve your mental energies for focusing on the big things that are important to you.

Little tweaks throughout your daily routines can make all kinds of improvements you might not expect. One of those is better sleep.

Changing up your evening routine or even just the little pre-bedtime routine that you do during the half-hour or so before shutting off the light can help you sleep more and better. The fancy term for this is sleep hygiene.

Surprisingly though, getting the routines throughout your day right can provide an ease that follows you all the way to bedtime. You might call it a domino effect, or a chain-reaction, or something like that. Whatever you want to call it, it can be a delightful surprise.

Here’s how that might play out:

• Your evening routine includes a little prep for tomorrow, like planning breakfast, making kids’ lunches, laying out clothes and shoes.

 

• Because of that, your morning is much less frantic. You spend a few minutes talking with your kids instead of running around. You are right on time instead of running late for the bus, carpool, your drive to work.

 

• Arriving at work is less stressful because you left yourself enough time to get there, maybe even getting to work a few minutes early.

 

• That starts your work day off on a more positive note. Instead of scrambling to avoid the boss seeing you arrive a few minutes late or grabbing up your unread notes to get to a meeting, you are sitting calmly at your desk when the boss strolls by and you have time to read the materials and be prepared for the meeting.

 

• Just feeling calmer and less stressed, you are better able to tackle your work for the day. You’re more patient with customers, clients and co-workers. You might even have a sense of humor about challenges that crop up. You’ll be in control and will project calm efficiency and capability.

 

• You leave work feeling like you weren’t running on a treadmill all day. Maybe you even get to leave on time.

 

• You get home feeling calmer. You are more patient and loving with your spouse and kids. You have a nice dinner with your family, have a little relaxed leisure time. You do a bit of next-day prep that worked so well the night before, and you get to bed before you drop of exhaustion.

 

• AND…..

 

• You fall asleep easily, knowing that tomorrow you will be well-rested and able to tackle another day that somehow feels calmer than they did before you tweaked your routines to flow better with your life.

Okay, that may be a little idyllic. And we’re not saying that life won’t be just as busy, and that crazy monkey-wrenches won’t suddenly appear in your days.

But little incremental changes really can have exponential effects.

Give it a try?