Break the routine: The destructive power of unthinking repetition

Those who have been following my story will know I’m doing some serious thinking about what I want from life. As part of that I’ve been contemplating what, exactly, is holding me back from making big changes. Fear is part of that, but that’s too generic to work with. Breaking down my thinking I have concluded that I’m too comfortable. My life runs on rails. In many ways it’s effortless.

Part of that is because I’ve consciously automated much in my life. Those bits aren’t the problem. The problem is that I’m stuck in my routine.

Routines contain incredible power. Often that power can be constructive. For example, if you want to get fit then building in a regular gym routine may be a key plank to deliver that. Heck, I get it. A paean of praise to the morning routine was one of the first posts that I wrote.

But there is a darkness to routines as well.

This is something that we will all have seen in our lives or in other people.

This is what I’m seeing in my life.

Routine has slowly and insidiously wrapped itself around me and cocooned me in its comforting repetitiveness. Placid in its embrace I’ve relaxed and stopped thinking. When I shake my head and wake for a moment the thought of the effort that it would take to break free is just tiring. Therefore I lean back and allow my routines to drape their tentacles back around me and drag me back under.

Thus, routines slowly and perniciously destroy.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. This post explains why I have taken against unthinking routine – and the key word there is unthinking – and then talks about what I will do to try to break the routine.

A little bit of context

It’s not just me that sees the importance of breaking a routine.   The issues with people going through their days “zombielike” has been written about in this article in Forbes. This article appears to suggest there are benefits to your brain function from breaking your routine. While this post in Medium suggests a break in routine will lead to greater creativity.

There are clearly benefits to breaking the routine, but why is it so hard?

Natural routines aren’t natural

Routines are natural. As humans we have been conditioned to routine by the very world we live in. No matter what we do with our days almost all of us expect to wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night. In between we expect to eat and drink. Nature creates natural routines. To break the routine is to break with nature. Or so we think.

To take one counter example. We unthinkingly expect to eat several times every day. But that’s a cultural norm. In many places and in many times people will only eat one proper meal a day if that. That was what normal looked like. Even in the modern day west the idea of fasting whether it’s Intermittent Fasting or some other form has taken hold The most natural of routines aren’t necessarily natural.

We’re all in thrall to routines

Conditioning to a routine starts early. From the first weeks after we are born our parents try to get us into a routine of sleeping and feeding. Before we walk or talk we sense their approval when we fall into that routine.

A few years after birth is when the conditioning to accept routines really starts though. Barely more than a toddler most of us start school and the easy freewheeling years are left behind. The routine nature imposes to keep us alive, humans distort to create a cage without bars.

A schoolchild’s life is regimented. At least mine was. Get up, put on a uniform, get to school, move to the bell. Write now, play now, eat now. If you don’t you get disciplined. Even those children that rebel have been conditioned. To push against the system you need to understand there is a system in the first place. That’s where the hegemony of routine starts to tattoo itself into your soul. And it does it whether you think you are accepting or rejecting it.

That was my existence for almost the entirety of the first two decades of my life. I’m not unusual. Is it any wonder that when we emerging, blinking, into adult life that we see routine as normal?

The daily grind: The routine burrows deeper

Trained, conditioned, cowed, we find out what it was all for. Having left education behind it’s time to work.

Get up, ablution, commute, work. Put in your hours, turn around, come home. Dinner, then a bit of time for TV/chores/hobbies/friends/family/whatever then bed. There are a few variations to that, we might have a work trip, or a night out or something but that’s basically it. Every day of the working week.

But it goes further. If, like me, you work five days a week then almost all your weekend is structured. Kids have clubs and activities. There are chores, errands and admin to get through. There are regular family/social/religious/sporting obligations that we do.

Even then though that’s not all. It goes further still. Work dictates the amount of vacation that I can take and, often, when you can take it. That leads to habit. A couple of weeks away in the summer to that little place we all love. My sister and her family over Christmas. That group of college friends you always see at New Year. Going to visit granddad at Easter.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I hate doing this. Much of it is fun. But it’s unthinking. It’s pre-programmed. It’s a routine.

And so the years roll by. One by one.

The unnatural academical break from routine

Almost the most tragic aspect of all of this is in a window between school and work many of us are shown another way. And we love it.

University.

For many of us university is the first time we get to experience significant freedom and autonomy is when we leave home. We largely control how we spend our time. The strictures that we grew up with on waking, eating, sleeping, working are all thrown up in the air and the parents and teachers that policed it are now far away.

At the same time we’re surrounded by a world of opportunity and people who are facing the same freedoms and, quite possibly, we have more money than we have had in the past. That is a heady concoction and many of us take full advantage of it.

In a tragic twist, that time at university so often becomes seen as an aberration. A thing to laugh at. I was at a wedding recently where I fell to reminiscing with university friends.

“Wasn’t it mad how we used to just talk about the same boys/girls until 3 in the morning every night?”

“Do you remember when we just decided to go to the cinema one afternoon and watch the Star Wars trilogy back to back?”

“Can you believe that we backpacked across Africa?

We look back with a mix of wistfulness, disbelief and horror that we could ever be so free and careless. Then we shake our heads and drop back into our daily patterns.

Routines are good. The aberration was breaking the routine for a few years.

Hold on. What’s the problem?

The counter to this is that I’m jumping at shadows. I’m creating issues where none exist. Are routines so bad. Suck it up. Toe the line. Save hard. Get it done. Do I want to achieve Financial Independence or not? This is what it takes. Why do I want to break my routine?

So here is my real problem. And, as I said at the start, this is essentially me talking to myself rather than anyone else.

Routine allows me not to think.

Routine gives me the feeling that I’m achieving and progressing. As this article in The Guardian says “Routines help reinforce the illusion that we have a fairly large degree of control over our lives” But a routine is a false friend, it’s the enemy of conscious choice. I just keep doing the next thing.

It was John Lennon who sang “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” He could easily have said: Life is what happens while you’re busy following your routines.

When life is busy, that’s what you do, you just follow the routine. You do the things that ‘have’ to be done.

And time ticks on. The months and years and decades pass while you follow the routine. Of course things change: relationships start and end, children are born and parents die, you move house or change jobs. That’s what the rhythm of society tells us we need to do. Everyone else is doing it, it’s what we see on TV and in films.

Following the routine means that I’ve done all of the ‘right’ things. Education, job, car, house. But those have ended up being the things that society has told me are the right things to do. I pause in my routine to look around at my peers and I’m doing what they’re doing. I look at my parents and while their history hasn’t repeated itself in me it has certainly rhymed.

Unthinking routine leads us to stagnation. My fear is that it will lead me to look back at my life and regret what I have done with the years I have been granted.

I refuse to just tick forward and unthinkingly follow the routines that will take me inexorably to my end.

Breaking free of unthinking routine

That is all well and good but what am I going to break my routine? I have been giving this a lot of thought. Interestingly, but maybe unsurprisingly, the time that I have been able to do that has been when I have been away from work. It started with my family cruise a few weeks ago and then again over the last week when I have been off for a few days as the kids are have been on school holidays.

I need to take control, be deliberate in my choices. I have focused on the problem with routines but there are good things about them as well. My problem is that I have unthinkingly adhered to a routine.

As a result I’ve been running the numbers to work out what I may need in order to change my work pattern. Importantly I am not setting myself the high bar of a purists Early Retirement. If I wait until I can entirely live off a passive income from a share portfolio I’m going to miss out a on a lot of life. Most critically I’m going to miss out on my children growing up. For me hitting retirement just as my kids leave home would be a Pyrrhic victory.

That means I’m working on a different plan, I think that there is another route that involves earning money…but differently. Once I’ve thought it through a bit more I’ll share that with you.

That’s only part of the plan though. I need to break my routines in other ways – or at least build in more positive routines. I’m going to try different things in little ways, change my commuting routine, my exercise routine, my blog routine.

Haven’t shaken off my torpor I’m fizzing with ideas. It’s energising.

Final comments

When I touched on routines in my post about the joys of work I said that I had a lot more to say about. Reading this back that would appear to be true.

My journey is to happiness and within that I mostly have the money side of getting to Financial Independence under control. What I struggle with is the mental side.

If I want to move on I need to get past myself. I’m the only person standing in my way. Breaking the routine that I have convinced myself is necessary and normal is going to be key to that.

Wish me luck.

Thoughts?

Do you feel trapped in the routines of your life?

Have you managed to break your routine? How did you do it?