habit and routines

The idea of setting up habits that help you be successful is having a moment. It's everywhere. I first ran across it about a year ago in one of those list articles-- "5 things that all successful people do" or something like that. Number one on the list was having a morning routine. There are plenty of other examples--books (The Power of Habit, Better than Before, Mini Habits) and TED talks and a gazillion articles (google "habits of successful people").

Having routines is one of those things that probably falls out along personality types. Either you're someone that thrives on routine, or you're someone that doesn't. If I can be forgiven for using a dog to represent a personality type, our dog Sadie is someone who loves her routines.

Every single morning, she gets up at the crack of dawn with Dean, goes outside to do her business, and comes back in to have breakfast. She gets about a third of her food in the morning, and the other two-thirds at 4:00. The 4:00 feeding is usually my responsibility, and I can tell you that she has an absolutely uncanny internal clock. She's a time genius. She knows when it's four o'clock. 

Then after we eat dinner, she gets a treat. She is not willing to vary this routine in the slightest. She does not want to skip getting a treat one night. She does not want to wait and have all her food at four o'clock. She does not think it is deadly dull to do the same thing every single day. Life is very simple in her head, and it involves breakfast with Dean, dinner at 4:00, and a treat in the evening. End of story.

So we will put Sadie at the "thrives on routine" end of the scale. I don't have a good example of someone who absolutely cannot abide any routine, because I'm somewhere in the middle and all my family members are more toward Sadie than toward me.

If I have a strict daily routine (eg, when I was working) that happens every day, the same way, in the same order, for too many days in a row, I start to get antsy. For me, it doesn't take much to make it feel like I'm switching things up--I can just change the order on the weekend (read in bed for awhile, take a shower later in the morning, etc) and that's good enough. Someone with even less tolerance for routine might have to come up with something more drastic.

You listen to these Habit People talk about the power of setting up a routine and it sort of sounds like magic. So I've been thinking about this. How can I "harness the power of habit" (to use their words) without making myself feel like I'm being smothered by routine?

I am not a morning person, but I am also not a person that sleeps late. I'm almost always awake by 7:30, even if I don't set an alarm. It's not that I'm not awake, I'm just groggy headed. It's like my brain is stuffed with wool. The people who say you should meditate first thing in the morning because that's when your head is the clearest have never looked inside my head. I don't start thinking clearly until an hour or two after I wake up.

But the plus side of that is that if I can sneak a bunch of stuff in that first hour, I get things done before I'm even awake. Things like brushing my teeth, putting in my contacts, and making the bed I just do every morning without even thinking about them.

I've been experimenting with adding to that list. What else can I sneak in before I'm even awake? How about doing stretches at the end of my shower while I'm dripping off? (I've been doing that for several months now and it works pretty well, and also has made a pretty big difference in my flexibility.) What else can I sneak in?

But I haven't figured out how to fit in a regular meditation time. If I do it in that first hour, I just fall back asleep, but it's hard to set aside a regular time later in the day. Work in progress.

And also, are there routines I can do at night? It kind of makes sense, since I'm more of a night owl. If I have to be somewhere early, I can figure out what I'm going to wear the night before when I can think, rather than trying to do it in the morning when I'm barely conscious. When I was working, I packed up healthy snacks the night before so I wouldn't eat junk food when I got hungry. What about setting up an audiobook to listen to in the car so I don't have to mess with it in the morning? 

That's all for this topic right now, but if I come up with more ideas, I'll let you know. Let me know if you've come up with a good solution for fitting meditation into your routine. The decluttering has started but I didn't get anything written in time for tomorrow, so I pulled this one out of the draft folder.