How To Talk Yourself Out of Your Routine
Living alone has made me realize that you often don’t notice when your routines start disappearing. The majority of the time, they get talked away quietly. Not by other people, but internally, through small excuses that often in the moment, sound reasonable. The issue isn’t that you stop caring about a routine, but it’s that you start to justify small exceptions to delay, adjust, or ignore until eventually your routine is no longer there.
One of the most common ways this happens is by pushing things to tomorrow. “I’ll do it tomorrow” sounds harmless, because it doesn’t scream out the fact you’re destroying your routine, but merely delaying it. For example, when you arrive back home after a long day, it is easy to look at what you planned to do before the long day, and decide you don’t feel like doing it. Nothing is necessarily forcing you to follow through with your schedule, so moving tasks to the next day feels like a reasonable readjustment to how you feel, not a habit breaking decision. The problem is that the next day, when the same decision shows up again, you will already have enabled the standard that you can push back your routine because of how you feel, making it just as easy if not easier to delay it a second time. What makes this idea effective is that it doesn’t feel like you’re losing control. It feels like you choose a better moment to start.
Another pattern is hiding individual decisions as one time exceptions. On some days, one takeout binge, one late night, or missed task feels too insignificant to the integrity of your routine, but this perspective is exactly why it’s so dangerous. In the moment, nothing feels different because you haven’t fully deviated from your routine, since you have just made a small readjustment. However, this is what makes decisions like these so easy to repeat. Each decision stands out on its own “reasons”, so nothing feels serious enough to call into question, but by the time you notice your system has broken down, there is no clear line to where it really ended.
A lot of the time, we think of habits in their most perfect form. Cooking must mean a full meal with proper prep. Studying should mean, you should be locked in focus with no distractions. This is your internal definition of doing it the “right way”. The issue is, when your day inevitably doesn’t support this version, such as when you’re short on time or mentally drained, you don’t downgrade the habit to fit the situation. You reject it altogether. This feels rational because a lot of the times doing something “halfway” feels pointless, not worth the effort, or unfit for your standards, and as a result, you reframe this “I’ll do it later”, looping back to the first issue I mentioned. You think you’re protecting your routine by sustaining the quality of it, but instead you sacrifice consistency for an ideal version that rarely happens. The truth is, routines don’t survive on perfect days, or on the upfront quality that is produced, but on days where doing less is the only option.
The next issue is a lot more dangerous than the others, primarily because it doesn’t register as a mistake, but rather, a reward. Often times, your routine will have effort tied to it, on top of other activities in your daily life. Similarly to the second pattern I described, when you have had a long, tiring day, you link the effort you exerted into entitlement towards the effort you put into your routine. This appears in thoughts like “I’ve done enough”, “I’ve had a long day”, and “I’ve been productive”. This train of thought shifts the decisions you make from how they can benefit your routine, to how justified they can be to deviate from it. This feels right because on a surface level, its pretty logical. You’re not choosing to not follow through with your routine, but you’re compensating for effort by seeking mental relief and to relax. The hidden problem is that you view this as a “reward” without tying it into the abandonment of your structure, so over time, you learn to deviate from your routine as a result of stress, too much effort, or increased productivity. The danger from this is that you notice that this changes your routine, but instead of ignoring it, you view it as a valid decision, because every time you do it, there is a “valid” explanation, and this can become a slippery slope since there is no friction to stop it.
What makes decisions like these incredibly difficult to catch is that none of them feel like you’re quitting your routine. Every decision has a reason behind it, and they all make sense in the moment while still being small enough to ignore. But when your decisions are based on what feels right in the moment, instead of what keeps your routine intact, you slowly negotiate it away, one reasonable decision at a time.
