This Is The Way
Or, the last essay you will probably ever need to read about routines and habits
There’s a joke amongst my friends that I love chaos. It’s true to an extent. I love observing chaos. Chaos is fun, it’s exciting, and makes for good stories. So long as the chaos doesn't actually involve me.
The thing is, I’m naturally an anxious person who, left to his own devices, is nervous all the time and worries about everything. It takes a lot of work to not be anxious, and I’ve had to develop ways to be less anxious. Journaling helps me clarify and organize my thoughts. Meditating helps to focus on the present and not worry so much about tomorrow or yesterday or things I can’t control. But what makes those activities even more effective when it comes to reducing my anxiety is doing them as part of a routine.
When I was growing up, my dad talked a lot about having a morning routine. Even though creating routines didn’t become a focus of mine until later in life, the seeds were planted in those early mornings as a kid. I was home recently, and I asked him why he thought routines were so important.
“Routines make me feel better,” he said. “If you don’t have a routine, then you kind of wander. Unless you have a ton of money, then it don’t fucking matter.”1
Why is it that routines make us feel better? Well, there’s tons of articles and studies you can read about the mental and physical health benefits of routines. You can also find research on why being too inflexible can be harmful. For me, though, the benefits of routines come down to peace of mind and comfort. They help create consistency and remove a few question marks from my life. In other words, they reduce chaos and provide peace.
I subscribe to the belief that life is, in large part, about growth. I mean this both at a biological level and at a psychological level. Quite literally, what separates living organisms from inanimate objects is that they are growing at the cellular level2. They multiply and grow more complex, and in the process, less chaotic. A fancy term for this is negentropy, or more specifically, negative entropy3. Living systems trend toward more order.
Now that cellular, biological phenomenon applies to full-ass human beings. Just as cells want to grow, so do to humans: spiritually, emotionally, physically. We want to master skills, we want to improve. It feels good to do these things, and we have a natural inclination toward these behaviors. Look at a child. Babies don’t learn to walk or talk because they have weighed the economic benefits of speech and mobility, or because they fear being shunned by society for lacking common skills. With a little encouragement—and a lot of observation—they figure it out simply because they want to figure it out. And when a kid learns to do something, they feel good. They do it a billion times, over and over and over again. Your grandparents might get annoyed with technology, but once they learn how to use it, watch them go nuts and brag to anyone who will listen.
But as a kid, our whole life is learning and mastering skills. Everything is new and failure is irrelevant. Yes, it’s frustrating to fail and this manifests in crying and temper tantrums and the like. Some kids are shy. But kids aren’t afraid to fall when running the way I am afraid that when I publish this essay, it will have mistakes and you will all think I’m a moron. They don’t have that fear yet. Ironically, they haven’t learned that fear.
So what is the point of all this? It’s that routines help us to grow because they provide clarity and consistency. I don’t have to improvise constantly or play catch-up or feel like I haven’t done anything in awhile. Rather than lurch from obsession to obsession, I can do things incrementally. And then each and every day, even if I have a bad day for whatever reason, I know that in some ways, I improved. And that improvement will make me a more content, happy person, which also enables me to be more present and engaged with the people around me. Everyone wins.
Routines also help deal with the tyranny of choice. Every day there are a million different things to do. By identifying a handful of things that I think are worth pursuing at regular intervals, I cut back on having to make as many decisions. And I can do so without regret because I have a plan. Perhaps ironically to some, this structure actually makes me feel more autonomous, more in control of my life, and less paralyzed by all the things that I could be doing. I also have more free time because I’m spending less time thinking about what I need or want to do, and since I am making incremental progress on these tasks or initiatives, I don’t feel the need to spend hours and hours on them each day. If I study a little Italian each day, I don’t feel the need to do quite as much in one sitting. If I read one or two chapters of a book each day, I don't feel the need to finish a whole book every weekend.
Routines are also a kind of diagnostic. They teach me something about myself: which things I intuitively value more, or which things I enjoy doing intrinsically versus those things I think I have to do because of some extrinsic pressure. They force me to ask myself why I value doing some activity in the first place and whether it’s not serving me anymore—in which case, maybe I can just stop doing it.
I want to talk a bit about my routines because they work for me. I’m not advocating you copy this exactly because maybe you value different activities, but maybe the format could be helpful. It’s worth noting that I don’t have any kids and I mostly work from home. I have lots of time for doing exactly what I want to do. Knock on wood, someday this will change. So will my routine. My point is more that adopting and committing to a couple things can make a large difference in your overall wellbeing.
Each day I try to do the following:
Meditate
Exercise
Watch a lecture
Study Italian
Read a few chapters of a book
Write
Of these six things, meditating is non-negotiable. Even if it’s just 5 minutes, I do it every morning, no matter where I’m at or who I’m with. Exercising is the next most important routine because it literally helps me stay healthy, and if I’m not healthy, I can’t do anything. And my goal really is health, rather than, I don’t know, being a CrossFit god (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I’ve written before about why I think running is important. I also love weight training, and think it’s crucial to do yoga a couple times per week. Reading is the easiest habit to keep because I just enjoy reading. Watching lectures is also easy, almost too easy, and I need to be careful to not just let that crowd out everything else. Studying Italian is one that I am often tempted to put off, but is the most rewarding when completed. Writing everyday is…a struggle. It’s such a struggle I wonder if attempting to write every day is just not possible for me and I should try to write every other day.
Generally, I wake up in the morning and chug a bunch of water. Then I meditate. Then I drink coffee and read. After that, the day is variable and I fit things in where I can. Sometimes I’ll work out before work, sometimes after. It depends on how I feel or how busy I am. I’ve found that trying to do everything in the same order every day just doesn’t work for me. So instead, I employ a habit tracker in the form of a bullet journal, which is simply a grid in a notebook where I jot down which things I’ve done over the course of the week. I don’t track these things long term. That’s not really the point. I just want to be aware of how I’m doing right now.
It’s important to acknowledge that one can make their life over-routinized. It’s difficult to know the exact point consistency becomes dogma, but I think it’s generally when maintaining the routine becomes the object in and of itself, rather than the benefits from the underlying activities or exercises. Yes, routines create regularity, and regularity can be comforting and familiar. But regularity without growth can lead to stagnation, and stagnation leads to feelings of apathy and listlessness. On the opposite end of the spectrum, regularity plus suffering will lead to burnout and dejection. Routines—like rules—are intended to be tools, not an end in and of themselves. Occasionally, you may want to break the routine. You may have a vacation and want to prioritize spending time with your family. You may discover you’ve lost your desire to learn [insert skill here] and that you’d rather spend your time practicing something else. That’s OK.
Before we go, I want to talk about the cousin of the routine, the habit. If routines are intentionally recurring activities, habits might be considered unintentional recurring activities, at least to a point. Habits also have a negative connotation. People have drug habits, not drug routines. We all have habits we’re not proud of and we all do things reflexively we wish we didn’t. Most of us probably wish we could respond to things less defensively or not get so angry when something upsets us.
One of the reasons mindfulness practice, or meditation, is so important to me is because it helps me to improve my habits. One of the objectives of mindfulness practice is developing the ability to sit with and accept various emotions and feelings before acting on them. A classic example of this: If you have an itch while meditating, instead of scratching it right away, just sit with it. Focus on it. Eventually the itch might subside. If you really can’t deal with it, you can scratch it. But this simple exercise of contemplation before acting begins to lengthen the gap between sensation and action in regular life. And all emotions are a result of some biological phenomena.
When I talk about this with people, I like to imagine the story of The Three Brothers from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. (Spoiler alert—but honestly, if you haven’t read or seen Harry Potter by now, do you really think you are going to get around to it?) When telling the story, Hermione says one of the brothers “greeted death like an old friend.” I try to cultivate this relationship with my emotions, with varying degrees of success. I think, if I can greet anxiety or fear like an old friend (“Ah, anxiety, good morning! I haven’t seen you since yesterday!”) then I can at least react to it a little better than if I hadn’t greeted it at all. So in some sense, mindfulness is about increasing the gap between sensation and response. As Dr. Shauna Shapiro says, “Mindfulness helps us to see clearly, so we can respond effectively.”
It’s an essay unto itself, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that the collective habits and routines of a society create and really are its culture and values. When people talk about systemic racism, systemic sexism—systemic anything—it’s the cumulative effect of a society's habits, common behaviors, beliefs, and traits that have been adopted by some mass of the population, generally without most of the population being aware they even have those behaviors, beliefs, and traits. This is another reason why I believe mindfulness is so critical. It is one way to kindly meet, understand, and question the origins of your feelings without judgment, and then react to them in constructive, effective ways.
In a few minutes, I’ll open my little black notebook and check today’s box for writing. I’ll send this draft to my wife for edits. She doesn’t know that is going to happen and she may be mildly irritated about it. I’ll feel good that even if she thinks I need to do major revisions on this, that I sat down and wrote. I got my thoughts down on paper and that feels good. Eventually, I will load this into Substack, send it out to all of you fine people, and hope that you enjoy it. While she edits, if she edits, I will most likely clean something around the apartment as a peace offering. Then, I think I’m going to watch a lecture about France because we want to go there later this year, so that's all I think about these days. We’ll eat dinner and then watch something on TV. I’ll go to bed, and when I wake up, I’ll do a lot of the same things all over again. And I’ll look forward to doing (most of) them because they make me feel good, and like my dad said so simply, routines make me feel good.
I think it does matter but the quote is too good to get pedantic.
Regular readers and people I annoy in real life may recognize how this mirrors one of my favorite quotes, “Growth is the only evidence of life,” from Cardinal Saint John Henry Newman. Apparently, Newman got called up to the big leagues in 2019 and is a full on saint now.
There is a semantic debate about the terms “negentropic,” “negative entropy,” and “free energy” that dates back to the 1940s and Austrian Nobel Prize winner Erwin Schrödinger’s book What is Life? It’s too in the weeds to delve into at length, but I figured I’d mention in case you are into these sorts of things. Basically, Schrödinger admits negentropy isn’t exactly what he meant but was the term that people would grasp. You could probably write an entire essay about the social impact on language from that statement alone. The point here is life grows in complexity and order whereas nonliving objects cannot maintain themselves and deteriorate over time.
Really enjoyed this Joe.