Healthy Habits for Life – Routines
Routines help you create healthy habits and stick to them.
Do you feel overwhelmed or do you lack concentration and focus?
This could be down to a lack of routine in your daily life helping you get done what needs to be done leaving you time and energy for the important stuff!
Benefits of routines
Routines can help us:
- Be more efficient
- Stress less
- Procrastinate less
- Reduce decision fatigue (read this blog on willpower for more info on decision fatigue)
- Help find your Flow
What is Flow?
In positive psychology, a flow state, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.
Wikipedia
Being in a Flow state means you function at your fullest capacity.
If your mind is split with different tasks, your should, could and would’s, trying to juggle and multitask you will not find your flow state and function at your best.
By creating routines for mundane tasks or a task that you need to perform consistently to reach a goal, you can take care of those in a flow state and move on to the next activity without being bogged down by the ‘to do’s’ floating around your brain.
Everyone can follow a routine
You just need to find the right one for you!
We all remember to brush our teeth (well mostly!), eat our meals, get dressed, go to work (even if its just going downstairs at the moment). We all follow some sort of routine to get these things done.
By creating a routine on purpose you can support your goals in life and live with more intention which will lead to greater satisfaction and fulfilment.
When we lead a more satisfying life, we find it easier to lead a healthy lifestyle as we aren’t looking for external emotional support from things like food, alcohol and smoking.
My morning routine
- Get up, head to the kitchen
- Make warm water and lemon, drink Aloe Vera gel and take probiotic
- Empty dishwasher while waiting for the kettle to boil
- Read while drinking lemon water
- Get dressed in exercise clothes, brush teeth, wash face, make the bed
- Make coffee, write in my journal/brain dump while enjoying coffee
- Exercise – some kind of yoga flow or targeted routine
- Eat breakfast
- Start work
Depending on how much time I have I adjust my routine accordingly. Maybe I only have time for 5 minutes each of reading, journalling and a quick few rounds of sun salutations but I have supported my goals at the beginning of the day and it puts me in a positive frame of mind.
Emptying the dishwasher and making my bed are small wins for the day. This may sound trivial but completing these activities make the rest of my day run smoothly. I can load the dishwasher as the day goes and have a clear kitchen to start dinner later on. When I walk into my bedroom at the end of the day, if everything else has gone tits-up my room looks tidy and tranquil.
Routines help us automate our lives so we can focus on real, creative and important tasks and work towards our big goals.
Routines don’t have to be boring!
Ok, ok, I hear you. I can’t believe I am banging on about routines either. As a flighty Gemini, I would have thought myself the last person to advocate such things and for many years I poo poo’d them myself. The thing is…
Routines give you FREEDOM!!
TIME freedom, ENERGY freedom. They remove the motivation sucking chaos from your life. Routines give you structure, they decrease stress and anxiety.
If you want to mix things up, make your routine different:
- Walk a different route
- Make a new meal
- Change the kind of exercise you do
- Add an hour of ‘fun’ to your day – decide what on the day
The key is to perform mundane tasks without having to use up your valuable thinking power.
Review your routines
Create a routine that works for you and your family.
Build daily, weekly, monthly (even quarterly) routines to help your life flow more smoothly and ensure you are working towards your Big Goals.
Review your routines and your goals on a regular basis to make sure they are still working for you and you are heading in the right direction. If they no longer support you, change them or if you have tried something for a week or so and it doesn’t work, ditch it!
WARNING, don’t overdo it. As with everything in life, there is a healthy balance to be found.
Need support?
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Book a free, no-obligation call with me and come away feeling inspired and motivated to take control of your menopause health whether you choose to work with me or not.
Menopause is only the end of your reproductive years.
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