Ever wondered what the health benefits of having a routine are? Routine helps mental health by impacting your mood.

Your mood determines how you experience life, whether you feel joy and peace or frustration and emptiness. Overtime, good moods add up to happiness.

Psychologist Robert Thayer suggests that your mood isn’t created by things you encounter in life, it’s created when the things in your life become patterns. Having negative thoughts after a stressful day might mean you aren’t in a good mood that day, but what’s key is that it’s temporary. It’s a one off. If you are routinely in stress and thinking negative thoughts, however, then it becomes a pattern. Over time, continually experiencing a bad mood exacerbates the effect of the stress and negative thoughts and adds up to discontent and exhaustion.

Routine is important because of how it affects your mood, which is the basis for your overall perception of happiness.

When you have a routine you feel like you are in a familiar environment, a safe space, so you have energy to nurture your passions. You don’t need to use your energy protect yourself – your body isn’t chronically in fight for flight mode trying to contend with change or newness. Which means you have available energy to put toward learning, innovation, the things that leave you fulfilled.

Which patterns you adopt and how you use them to shape your day informs your life’s routine.

Routine also means you are working toward something. Consistent daily actions add to your sense of purpose. Reading one chapter in a book everyday adds up to new knowledge in a month; a few months of this and you’ve developed a new skill.

New skills, lost weight, finished projects, a deeper understanding, whatever your daily actions add up to, it affirms your sense of success and self-efficacy, which reinforces your sense of self-worth.

It doesn’t matter what your routine looks like so much – just that you have one that works for you and supports what you are trying to build.

The routine that supports what you are trying to build is made of conscious choices, not spur of the moment impulses.

Getting hooked at midnight on cliff hangers in your latest series does not support the big presentation you are giving the next day. The pattern you adopt changes shape according to each small choice you make in the moment.

Wise choices – small and large – add up over time to a healthy pattern.

Your pattern is key to defeating procrastination. If you don’t have a routine, the way you use your time is elastic, even when you need it to be firm. That deadline you have? If you have a routine, your pattern will keep you working even when you don’t feel like it. If you don’t have a routine, you’ll be twice as likely let yourself take the break that will derail your success.

When you intentionally create your routine, consider the quantity of what you are including.

More is not better. Whether you feel you should be doing more because you derive your sense of self-worth from what you do, where exhaustion and overwork are badges of honor, or because you feel so passionate about what you are doing that you can never do enough, ask yourself if doing more is really going to make you happier. When the quantity of to-dos far outweighs the quality of how well you can do the task, it’s a recipe for unhappiness. You will never feel like a success because your to-do list is always looming, and to make any headway on the ever-increasing list, you can’t do the type of work you feel proud of.

A routine that supports you should feel like flow.

Because you know what’s coming and you feel comfortable because this is what you know to do at a specific time, you are able to completely immerse yourself in the present moment. If you are lost in the present, your worries and fears can’t upset your success. Where your body memorizes cues for waking, exercising, eating, and working, you don’t need to use any energy toward planning or disciplining yourself into action. You can use all of your energy toward the task you are engaged in. Depending on how much you struggle with procrastination, how much easier would getting a thing done be if you didn’t have to use energy to wrestle yourself into submission and could put 30% more energy toward accomplishing it?

If you fear creating a framework means you will be bored or you can’t seem to design anything that sticks, click here to schedule a discovery call with me to explore what a success looks like for you.

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With gratitude to Michael Murphy for the artwork! Find out more here: https://www.perceptualart.com/index.html