I know everyone has a lot of things that they wish for. Some of them are never said out loud even when you need them desperately. All of such wishes will never come to fruition unless you decide to work for them. In other words, having a work plan to try to attain what you wish for is the key to transform your wish into your reality. There is no other way around it. This work plan that you make is a routine that you come up with for your life to follow if you want to achieve the end goal. People misunderstand the concept of routine and try to imagine it being an execution of some activities of your life in the same way each day every day. This is not what you need from a routine as this can be thought of as just a by-product of following the routine. Following this approach, many people try to do certain parts of their life at the same time each day just so they can also have a routine. But, they almost always end up abandoning the idea after a few days. The worse part is that they then feel bad about going back to their original lifestyle rather than sticking to their routine and demotivate themselves further.
The way to follow a routine is by first identifying why you need a routine in the first place. And no, this is not about telling you how a routine gives a proper shape to your life so you can lead a better life. That is true, but it is also quite general. What you need is a very specific reason for following any activity with your new routine. Consider, for example, you try to make it a routine to wake up early in the morning. If you do not have anything productive planned to do after waking up early in the morning, you will eventually find it pointless to do so. Waking up early should allow you to take care of something that you were not finding the time to do otherwise like going to the gym or reading a book etc. Once you do manage to reach your intended goal while everyone around you was still asleep, only then would you see the benefit of following this part of your routine. Sure, it won’t become easy just because you did it one day and you would have to constantly make arrangements to remove the obstacles that prevent you from waking up early and taking care of whatever it is that you decided to do in that time slot. But, it would become considerably easier now that you know the exact benefit for it.
Another thing that would help you is to try to add things slowly in your routine rather than trying to follow a 24-hour routine right from the beginning. First of all, it would make things difficult for you to adapt to so many new changes at once. Secondly, if you try to start from one activity only and work your way from there then it gives you a sense of accomplishment for each activity you add. This dopamine release entices your brain to work harder to acclimate yourself to any new changes as well, as it would trigger another release of dopamine hormone to make you “feel-good”. In contrast, starting from a full day routine with different activities would only make you feel bad even when you miss out on one or two activates for the day. That is because you will associate that dopamine release with the completion of your full day routine rather than with any individual activity even if you actually work harder in this case. This is how our brains work and working harder will burn you out faster thereby making you give up on your full day routine all together.
Following an incremental approach would also allow you to let go of any such activity in your routine that you are having difficulty acclimating to without giving up on other routines which you are already accustomed to. So, even if you fail, you do not fall backwards to a lower level but rather just fail in ascending to the level above. This reverse funnel kind of approach is best used when you start from an activity that is very easy yet a fundamental part of your life. After assimilating that in your life for just a few days, you should immediately look for other activities that are related to this one. Preferably, you would want to identify such activities in your current routine that oppose this newly acquired activity. Working on such and impeding part of your current routine would reinforce the newly added pair of activities. Going with the same example as above where you tried to wake up early in the morning and even managed to get some productive work done by doing so, it can still be an issue every day to wake up on time or wake up and then feeling sleepy all day. To resolve that, you should try to see if you are going to bed early or not. If you are not getting a proper 8-hour sleep then it is only right that you would have trouble waking up early in the morning as well. So the next part you need to fix in your routine is to try getting to your bed atleast eight hours before you are planning to wake up. Similarly, the next part of your routine that you fix maybe putting away your mobile phone in the morning before checking it for any new notifications. The “fear of missing out” is real but you should know that now that you are waking up earlier, you can just check your messages at a time where you would have woken up before following your new routine.
These are but ideas and you can decide which is the best part for you to decide for yourself and work your way from there. In conclusion, I would just like you to try to think of following a proper routine rather than allowing each day to be a mystery. This does not take away from your freedom to do whatever you want but it does give you back the control for your life and for your time. Interestingly enough, following a routine and waking up early or on the same time every day also eliminates the concept of waking up on the wrong side of the bed and having bad days just because you woke up that way. You can try it and verify it for yourself. Good luck!
