Happiness and the Routine-to-Frantic Spectrum

By taking a different route on my way back from a French class, I discovered this wall art in a garden below the main path. Lausanne, Switzerland. June 22, 2019.

About a year ago, I moved around so much, so often—between so many time zones, places, groups of people, and projects—that I had zero remnant of routine in my life for several months on end.

A go-go-go pace with every decision made from scratch each day has a level of excitement at first. Yet toward the end of the stint, I started to feel a low note of panic. I felt unmoored, stressed, lacking the stability needed for deeper thought and processing.

On the other hand:

I’ve had stints during which every day looked like every other day and every week looked like every other week in a seemingly interminable chain. Days and weeks that mush together into an amorphous blob feel as stressful—if not more stressful—as the times in life that feel a little too frantic.

And oddly, the amorphous stints seem equally oppressive and limiting when it comes to higher level thought as the frantic weeks, because they lead me into a near-depressive murk of an existential crisis in which I question how I’ve chosen to spend my limited days on this earth.

A Sudden Downshift: Stress across the Spectrum

When the COVID-19 crisis arrived in early 2020, Arnaud and I had reached the halfway point in a series of months of hectic travel for work and life and pleasure that didn’t have a planned pause before early summer. Though we had braced ourselves for a long stretch of to-and-fro activity, the lack of all routine had just begun to feel overwhelming when the coronavirus crisis yanked all plans to a halt.

The first few weeks of the COVID-19 downshift felt unstable in a different way: Though mostly static in terms of location, everything happening for work needed a complete overhaul. (For the full scoop, read my coronavirus diaries.)

However, as the months of staying inside and holding our breath and washing our hands continued and the hecticness of work turned into a routine of its own (though the anxiety did not), the days began to take on a new variety of shapeless, amorphous, endless form without variation.

At about the three-month mark, I started to feel sincerely frantic, panicked, trapped, and deeply melancholy.

The Happiness Sweet Spot

I love that I can set the rhythm of my week each week—and, sometimes, each day—within FrogDog’s distributed workforce structure. While the work needs to get done, the team needs support, and the clients need our presence, we can each set our own schedules provided that we cover these critical elements.

Typically, with this work set-up, I can avoid too much routine yet maintain enough stability to feel in control and able to think, process, and do the deep work critical to success in my field.

However, with the crisis underway, I couldn’t sprinkle a little fun into my day by grabbing lunch or coffee with someone. I couldn’t work from a coffee shop for the morning. I couldn’t change towns for a week (as I did regularly before the COVID-19 crisis). I couldn’t easily—if at all—vary the speed and the components of my days.

In the depths of my doldrums—feeling lonely and confined and lacking variety and even the hope for variety—I realized that somewhere along the spectrum of constant change and constant routine lies the sweet spot for my mental health and wellbeing.

Research on Happiness and Variety

As I can’t leave these types of musings alone, I had to see if anyone had studied happiness along the spectrum of routine and lack of routine. Had any intrepid researcher yet identified a sweet spot for happiness along this spectrum?

Alas—albeit perhaps unsurprisingly—no one has conducted a broad-scale research program to investigate such a massive subject with so many facets. Doing so would take years and untold funding.

However, in May 2020, a group of scientists did publish the results of a study in a journal called Nature Neuroscience that analyzed the self-reported life satisfaction of study participants in alignment with their geolocation. The researchers found a direct correlation between a new experience—one as simple as taking a different route to a familiar place—and a higher level of happiness. Further, the researchers said that this correlation appears to be self-reinforcing: People reported feeling happier when their lives included a bit of the new and unexpected, and the people who reported feeling happier sought more variety in their lives.

A plethora of other studies have evaluated the effects of constant uncertainty on the human psyche and physiology, and they don’t paint pretty pictures. Obviously, humans have a limit to the amount of variety they can sustain, even if they thrive from a bit of it on a regular basis.

In other words, the random-to-routine spectrum of thriving does exist. We just don’t yet have measurements for an exact happiness sweet spot upon it.

Cover the Variety Baseline for Maximum Happy

While no one would advocate tossing all vestiges of security and the comforts of a certain level of routine, recent research at least does encourage adding a little spice of variety to your life, if you can find it not too far from your comfort zone.

If you can’t make major changes to your routine –no matter the reason—at least try to cover the baseline to pep your happiness meter: Make a side jaunt during your commute to the grocery store or figure out a new machine at the gym. Risk buying a new vegetable or fruit and trying it in a recipe. Sit somewhere different—even in your own home.

Though my times of frantic movement and stints of monotony shouldn’t wrangle pity from anyone—I recognize that feeling too busy or too bored doesn’t count as a valid complaint in the grand scheme of life and possibilities—I at least take comfort in knowing that we all have a sweet spot along the spectrum of no routine and too much routine, and that no one should veer too far into the mundane (or the frantic, for that matter).

Keep things new and fresh, my friends. Life is short.