Are Routines Actually Good For You? The Pros & Cons of Consistency

The importance of a routine is obvious to anyone who’s ever had to handle a job, a relationship, a social life, and a regular exercise regime all at the same time. Add a family to that mix and a routine is more than just important – it’s crucial.

But what is this special power routines have to help us spin so many plates at once? And are routines as healthy as doctors and self-help gurus would have you believe?

Are Routines Healthy?

Broadly speaking, yes routines are healthy, but it’s worth remembering that there’s more to this topic than meets the eye.

Many people, when they first start a new routine, run into surprising negative side-effects. They become stressed by the pressure of keeping up with all their new obligations. In that kind of headspace, it can be easy to blame yourself for not being able to hit unrealistic expectations.

Routines are great, yes, but they’re not magic. We all have our limits and while a routine can absolutely help you balance many aspects of life, routines that are too strict can quickly become crushing.

Put simply, the job of a routine is to give guide-rails to your day, ensuring that everything you want to do gets done and you can maintain some feeling of self-discipline. A good routine can be liberating, giving you the confidence to know that the things you plan to do will get done. A bad one can feel like a prison, never giving you the time and space you need to reflect.

Why Routines Are Important

To understand why routines are important, it helps to think about what’s going on inside your head as you go about your day.

At any given time, your brain has a certain amount of energy reserved for making meaningful decisions, while the rest of your energy is spent running on autopilot. 

For example, deciding to walk down to the shops is a meaningful decision. Once you’ve left the house, deciding to put one foot in front of the other is not. Nine times out of ten, every step of the way from your house to the shop and back again requires little to none of your will power.

This is a fairly simple model that most of us intuit at some point or another. The tasks we do on autopilot are far easier than the tasks we have to focus on.

A routine is like a method for training your autopilot. Just as weight lifting can help build up the muscles in your arms, so too a routine can help build that metaphorical muscle in your brain. Do the same thing every day and, sooner or later, you don’t have to think about doing it at all.

There is, of course, a large up front cost to this. Training that new routine can seriously drain your will power. This is why it’s good to add new elements slowly.

If you’re looking to give up smoking and start going to the gym, then you may find the combined effort burns you out. Instead, focusing on one goal until you’ve trained and then bringing in the next will allow you to eventually build up to that healthier routine.

Of course, that’s just one example and it certainly won’t work for everyone. If those are your goals, then the best thing to do is to keep trying approaches until you find the one that works for you. All of which brings us to our final point…

Everyone Is Different

If you really want to measure the importance of a daily routine, then you have to look at the end results. For some people, strict routines are the key to success, helping them find focus in a disordered and chaotic world. For others it’s not always so simple.

If you’re struggling to build routines that work for you, then remember that some people are at their most successful when they have free spaces to work in. We’re not saying you should embrace the chaos entirely, but if you find daily routines crushing, then try introducing ways to give yourself more choice.

One common alternative to a strict routine is a “to-do list” approach. You give yourself a set of goals but make no rules about which order they have to be done in. Ultimately the same work gets done but you can still maintain some feeling of freedom in how you choose to do it.

And last but not least, don’t be afraid to experiment with different routines until you find one that’s a good fit. When it comes to healthy routines, you only fail when you stop trying.