Changing Routines to Shift Your Thinking
A photo from the top of the Phare des Baleines. Saint-Clément-des-Baleines, France. July 5, 2021.
Before a few weeks ago, I couldn’t remember a time when I’d felt as disoriented in my typical routines as I did for a few days after we returned from a rapid-pace, visit-family road trip across France.
Context: Thousands of Miles of Movement
Intellectually, I knew what I’d always done when. But after only a little more than a week away, I confronted Monday with a feeling of hazy uncertainty.
I couldn’t find the rhythm I knew I’d had, the flow in which I could do all the things I always did in all the normal ways without undue thought or organization. Seamlessly. Almost unthinkingly.
And though people may complain about this sort of disorientation—including me, most of the time—I welcomed it.
The disorientation I felt—since dissipated in the weeks that have followed—made me realize that the trip we’d taken had forced a complete disruption of all my routines for several days back-to-back. Though the voyage looked nothing like a vacation, as we spent more time on highways in the car plunging from one side of France to another to see this person and that person after too much time away due to the endless coronavirus crisis, the trip absolutely vacated the normal rhythm of my life.
On most travel, I manage to maintain some vestige of my typical day or week. I take a few business calls here and there. I spend at least a handful of hours each day working, usually in front of my computer with reliable Internet access. I eke out a bit of exercise every day or so, which once upon a time meant going for a morning run and now means sneaking in a session of yoga. Generally, I eat at approximately the same times each day as I do when at home, and in mostly in similar quantities (i.e., larger lunches and smaller dinners). I tend to go to bed and to wake up at or around the same time as I would on a normal week.
Context: We even worked out every day while on our honeymoon.
However, on this trip, we ate when we could and as seeing people dictated and had a rigorous driving and visiting schedule that didn’t allow for exercise or work—and, in some cases, ventured into areas that lacked even Internet and phone access. (Note: Some places in Normandy must have reliable decent-speed Internet and reliable cellular service, but I seem incapable of finding them.)
The complete break in rhythm had, I discovered on that Monday following our return home, given me a new perspective via discombobulating my brain and body in ways that I truly needed.
Routine has Value, Typically
Most of the time, a routine helps keep my life running smoothly and reduces my stress.
I don’t have to make numerous small decisions throughout the day that slowly drain my energy and my cognitive freshness. I can move through certain life-maintenance activities—making the bed, cleaning the kitchen, brushing my teeth, deleting junk mail, filing paperwork—without much thought, leaving me space for higher level processing and contemplation.
Medical experts even recommend routine as part of good life hygiene, saying that it improves mental and physical health across several facets—and can improve relationships as well.
Turns out, though, that routines can cause a decrease in life satisfaction and, in my experience, a mind-numbing stagnation that prevents assessment of new opportunities and new ways of approaching activities, relationships, and life in general. It can hamper my creativity as well—and as someone who loves to create and write and think, simply contemplating a slow dimming of the ability to do so crushes my spirit.
Further, as I wrote in my article about the spectrum between routine and happiness, a lack of variety brings on the doldrums. We need at least a little variability to spice up our days, if for nothing else but the joy factor of the new.
However, sometimes we need to go beyond just adding a little spice to the everyday.
We Need the Atypical, Too
My recent road-trip-through-France experience taught me that, while it can help to sprinkle variation into my routine, including trying new workouts to gain new perspectives, I should pepper into my life a complete shake-up of all routines for at least a short period. A week-plus (we went to France for nine days) felt about perfect.
While a moment of something-new here and there during the regular day or week provokes moments of surprise and awe—which ties back to the increase in happiness they provide—these moments of fresh and new do not equate to a complete and short-term sustained shift in life rhythm, which provides less of an immediate happiness boost and more of an aftereffect that shifts perspectives in valuable, rewarding ways highly different from momentary jolts of serotonin, the happiness hormone.
Finding a way to prolong a complete change of rhythm for at least a few days will fizz your brain and force you to approach your rediscovered, reclaimed routine in a way that shows you where you’ve gotten stuck in practices that no longer serve you and where you have opportunities to grow.
How has breaking routines served you?