Routines Just Might Have Changed My Life

During a Youtube “Day in the life” binge, I began to notice just how many lifestyle videos were focused on routines. My night routine, my morning routine, my skincare routine, my realistic after school routine, trying the “that girl” morning routine, the list seems to go on and on. As I continued to go through the long roster of highly addictive routine videos, I started to wonder if any of these lifestyle Youtubers had a non-routine part of their days at this point. I started to think: if there are so many people making content on routines, and even more actively seeking to watch them, there has to be something good about these daily rituals, right?

I have never been much of a routine person. The most of a routine that I have had prior consisted of brushing my teeth, washing my face, and going to bed at relatively the same time every night. Well…give or take half an hour in each direction. I suppose that I had never felt much need to do the same things in the same order at the same time consistently, despite being autistic. I’ve always been the organized chaos sort of autistic. All I had ever bothered to think about was getting it all done at all.

However, after all of this thinking I did at around 1 in the morning, I decided I would do a little bit of an experiment. I was going to try and commit to a routine, if nothing more than to see what all the hype around them was for.

Research

the basis of any good experiment is to see what knowledge has already been obtained about a subject, and given that this was more of an opinionated experiment than a scientific one I thought that it would be beneficial to see the facts behind the subject matter.

The deeper I got into these articles the more my mind was boggled (a wonderful phrase that is, I should start saying mind boggled more.) Not only were academic and clinical articles supporting the idea of routines, but claiming that they were proven to improve one’s physical and mental health. I’m almost as surprised as the time I learned I was supposed to be drinking 5 more cups of water a day than I was already.

Some of the common benefits I found:

-Better sleep

-Less stress

-Eating healthier

-Become more active

-Boost happiness (I found this one to be a very bold claim)

-Contribute to lessening the symptoms of behavioral disorders

-Feel more grounded

Creating the routine

I struggled quite a bit with this step. Honestly, it had to be revised several times after realizing what I wanted from this was unrealistic. I definitely blame those articles, maybe I got a little too hyped up about all of this. This wasn’t a magical fix-all for my messy life, this was supposed to be the ground work.

I started to redirect my focus from adding things that I wanted done to adding things that would help me get things dones through the day. I started to focus on tasks that set a good mood in the morning, improve my bodily health, and create a productive and healthy mindset.

With this in mind, I finally created a morning routine that I could stick to. All that was left to do was record my findings.

The result

It took about a week before my routine had turned into second nature. Suddenly if I didn’t have my little routine I. The morning, I felt incomplete or that I wasn’t ready to do anything else.

Shock above all shocks, I was going to bed excited to wake up and do my routine. I had a lot of thoughts of how this could turn out, and this was NOT one of them. Baffled me, really.

Looking back on the list of benefits, I find a lot of them are true. Well, due to outside factors I was definitely still stressed, and I don’t really know if the severity was changed by starting a routine, but I was definitely more active, more productive, and felt a lot more connected to my life instead of just dissociating my way through my mornings with a cup of coffee and a dream.

I can’t say that any of my autism habits were changed much during this, but I’ll admit that it probably takes longer than 2 weeks to change anything like that. So despite this, I’d definitely call this whole experience a qualified success!

Now I’m going to bed, I’m ready to wake up for my new morning routine.