Hey, everybody, it's Eric from the one you Feed with another mini episode, and this week I want to talk about the benefits of having a routine. A lot of us have a negative connotation of routine. I think we sometimes confuse it with authority, or with boredom or monotony or living a lifeless existence. But really it's not any of those things if it's a routine of our choosing.
And the main reason that that a routine is so powerful is that it allows us to spend our energy not so much on deciding what we're gonna do, but on actually doing things. So there was a pretty popular article in The New York Times a while ago that talked about the idea of decision fatigue, and it was really around the idea that every time we make a decision, it it takes something from us, and we have a threshold beyond which a certain point we don't make good decisions.
We interviewed Tony Stubblebine from LIFT. I talked with him the other night. I'm not sure when it will air, but he talked about very similar idea of the idea of a cognitive budget. We've got so much ability to make decisions and think things through, and then when that goes away, we start to really slide into making um bad decisions. We pick the easiest path, we fall into old habits. So the benefit, one of the big benefits of routine is that those are a bunch of decisions
I don't have to make. So for example, if I don't know what time I'm going to get out of bed, then I might make a whole bunch of decisions before I even get started. Should I get out of bed right now? No? Not right now? When should I get out of bed? I don't know? Should I get out of bed now? No? Not right now? When should I get out of bed right? And this just goes on,
and that's just a draining thing. Um. You know, if I wanted to develop an exercise habit, if I don't know what days I work out, then every day I'm thinking should I work out today? Am I gonna work out today? Oh? If I work out, what am I gonna do? Am I gonna do weight training? Am I gonna do running? So again, these are all these decisions that are draining that cognitive budget. It's exhausting to keep having to make decisions over and over, deciding what to
do and when where's this out? And if for a lot of the folks who listen to the show, there's an element of depression. And one of the key indicators of or key symptoms of depression is this inability to make decisions. So if I am battling with that and I don't have routines, then I very quickly become overwhelmed and it's easy to not do a whole lot. Routine is shown to pretty consistently help with confidence promoting stability
in our lives. It's the same reason that things becoming a habit is so valuable because we don't have to think about it a whole lot, we don't have to negotiate about it. It's the same thing with routine. Once we set a routine, we can have a plan in place and we don't have to debate it all the time.
One of the guests we had, and I think I've talked about this other times, um Joel Zaslowsky was talking about this idea of I make a plan and then when I hit that moment and I'm supposed to go do this thing, even when my mood is telling me, oh, I don't think I feel like it. I don't want to do this, He goes with the part of him that made the plan, the old Joel he called it, that made that plan, And a routine is a very
similar thing. We've we've spent the time to think about what's important to us, what we want to do, the things that we know are good for us, and then we don't have to re engage in the debate around those things all the time. Once you've got a routine in place, then the mental processes that make that behavior happen start to take place a lot more automatically, and we save time and energy and stress by sort of doing that mental to and froing of making a decision.
And then the other thing is that instead of kind of having to create each day from scratch, these routines can create a framework of all these small decisions that we don't have to make, so we can spend more time on what matters. So what are some things that can help us with with building these routines. So I think one we talk about all the time on the show is start small. You don't need to schedule out
every minute of every day, uh from now on. But it is very helpful, particularly for those people who have more time on their hands to schedule more of that time so that there is less of that decision and it's less likely that that time just gets away from us for whatever reason. When I have a lot of time on my hands, I find it very difficult. I get far less done than when I have less time and I m am forced to schedule it better. Second would be, you know, let's be specific about what is
the routine that I want to do. I want to work out every day, but more specifically, I want to do this specific exercise on this specific day. So the more clear we are, the easier it is to act on that routine. We don't have to Not only do we decide whether we want to do it or not, we also don't have to decide what we're gonna do. Getting support is another big one. Ask for help, Ask your friends to encourage you in the routine, ask your
family to encourage. There's applications out there, um Lift, It's called it's now called coach dot me. It's an iPhone app. You can get a lot of online support, but get get support where you can and then plan for success and and an interview that will be coming out soon. Another one where we talked with a woman about the process of thinking through the obstacles that stand in our way in advance so that we encounter them we know how to get over them. And then this last one,
which is sort of paradoxical, is to really be flexible. So, yes, routine is important, but we also have to be flexible or we run into what we've talked about before, that all or nothing mentality, which is like either I do this thing every time perfectly, or I don't do it
at all. And there's gonna be days where we've got a routine plan in some thing comes up, and it's important to have some flexibility and be able to make good decisions about Okay, well today I said I was going to do this at noon, but there's this other thing going on that I think is important, and I
can do this thing at another time. To just kind of reiterate, I think that the main benefit of of building some of these routines in our lives is that we don't wear ourselves out having to make decisions about a lot of small things, and then we can make better decisions about the big things and have much more energy to do the things that are important. And it's a you know, it reduces anxiety, it reduces stress, and it gives us more energy overall. Hopefully that's helpful in
some way, and we will talk again soon. Thanks bye,