“Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.”― Charles Duhigg
A routine is important for organizing a chaotic lifestyle. Life is chaotic. There are challenges everyday that we need to face. These challenges are best handled when we acquire the right tools and techniques to do so.
Adding a routine in my life changed how I was able to handle everyday challenges. My older anxious self was lost and overwhelmed by the dragon, the chaos of life, and coped with this chaos by engaging in pleasure seeking bandaids. I always found myself making things worse. I was not organized in my thinking, and I was very confused about what I should do next. The life I used to live did not consist of routines and productive habits but of coping startegies. These coping strategies only kept my repressed emotional problems at bay and only continued to fuel my anxiety.
The day I decided to change and overcome my anxiety disorder, I knew that I had to take responsibility for it. By taking responsibility, I then discovered how deeply flawed I was. I looked at myself in the mirror and awoke to the uneasy discovery of my flawed being. Someone who has been narrow in their view of the world, but also someone who caused their own suffering. I was to blame for how chaotic my life had become.
My discovery of a morning and night routine came from others such as: monks, Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, and fellow YouTubers I was researching. These successful people expressed their routines and why engaging in a routine daily prepares you for the challenges ahead of you. A routine helps you to organize your thinking, allows you to release negative thoughts, and plan ahead to the challenges that you predict will happen during the day. Also we can’t forget, it lessons anxiety.
I constructed a morning routine which involved three activities: journaling, meditating, and stretching. These were the common activities suggested by the people I mentioned earlier. These activities were tough to get into at first because I was met with cognitive dissonance, feeling, acting, and behaving in a manner you are not accustomed to. Then after a week of repetitive action, I noticed a change in myself. I felt proud for sticking to this routine even though every part of me wanted to resort back to my old habits. I noticed that having a routine kept me organized in the chaotic days I was living in. What happened was I now had a plan for each day. I knew what to do when I woke up and what to do in the evening. But then it kept getting better. I noticed a difference in my anxiety. I now had a plan for each day, and the uncertainty of what was to come each day lessoned. Then I eventually bought myself a weekly planner, a white board, and hung it up in my bedroom. Then I planned out each and everyday and the uncertainty of what was to come during the weekdays lessoned substantially.
I was facing the unknown, the dragon of chaos, everyday. Overcoming anxiety was now a major challenge in my life. Each day I was placing myself in situations that made me uneasy. I was engaging in a routine that was leading me further away from my old anxious self. This was a major challenge of itself because a part of me wanted to go back to my old ways, to take the easy road. The path I was on involved pushing through pain daily. Pain was something I was avoiding my entire life up to that point. The new routine, which consisted of the new habits I mentioned earlier, pushed me further away from my old self toward the person I so desperately wanted to be. At the time I had a vague idea of what that person was, but I knew that engaging in this new routine was something completely opposite of what my old self would have done. I was just completely tired of living my life the way that I was, chaotically.
My routine:
- Morning: journal, meditate, and stretch (30 min)
- Night: meditate, read, and journal (30 min)
To begin a routine make sure:
- You construct a morning and night routine (the two most important times of your day is the first 30 minutes after you wake up and the 30 minutes before bed).
- Do it for everyday for a month. It takes a month for your unconscious mind to run the new routine unconsciously.
- You model your routine after someone you aspire to be
- You are patient and persistent. Change comes to those who push through the cognitive dissonance.