My alarm goes off at 5.30am and I get out of bed. I brush my teeth, have a shower, then cleanse, tone, and moisturise my skin. I go to the kitchen where a cup of coffee awaits me, freshly brewed from ground beans in the timed machine I set up the night before. I meditate for ten minutes, then journal for fifteen minutes. The sunlight streams through the window and I am ready to face the day.
In an ideal world, that would be how every day starts. A few times I have even managed a morning like that.
It never lasts.
Routines are a big part of the self-help package deal. Habits, mindfulness, and routines seem like the top three things that come up whenever I embark on this journey. Routines hold the allure of being a reset button. A ritualised defence against chaos, as though a few behaviours might hold back the immeasurable madness of the world.
My problem has always been that I never can get that morning routine just right. Do I want to meditate or do yoga? Or try some Tai Chi? Do I want breakfast, or just a protein shake? Should I be journaling or free-writing? Should I be getting up early, or would I function better with an extra 30 minutes of good sleep? It seems that every time I try to redefine myself, I seem to reinvent my mornings.
This is a recurring trap I fall into. I pin all my hopes for transformation on the morning routine, like it’s some sacred keystone—get this right, and everything else will fall into place. Routines take on a symbolic weight far beyond their practical function. They become rituals of becoming. A redoubt for the change-weary, a series of methodical movements we use to summon the person we want to be. I tell myself that if I just perfect this sequence—wake early, meditate, journal, move, eat well—then surely, change will follow.
And maybe that’s not entirely wrong. I think back to James Clear’s Atomic Habits: “You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” What else are systems, if not the routines we build to hold us together when motivation gives way? That’s the promise, isn’t it? Build the right systems and the rest will follow.
James Clear is right, by the way. Our systems are the baseline to which we will fall when all other motivation has ceased. When the excitement and the novelty of trying has eroded beneath our feet on the fifth day of “new week, new me”, we fall to the systems that have lasted the longest, even if they no longer serve who we’re trying to become. We see the gap between who we are and who we aim to be, but we fail to see that the rickety bridge of routine was never going to span that ravine alone.
When we “fail” a routine, when we skip a day and tell ourselves “tomorrow we’ll get back to it”, we are engaging in an act of denial. That lack of commitment is a hit to our identity. It becomes another piece of evidence that the person we are simply cannot become the person that we aspire to be. It becomes another scuffed step in the dance and we stumble and falter and eventually stop. We take the rest of the week off. We tell ourselves we’ll try again. We tell ourselves next time will be different.
So what do we take from this? Routines are the enemy and we shouldn’t be trying? It’s easy to look at the evidence and conclude “well, I tried my best, but it looks like I’m not actually cut out to change. It just isn’t something that I can do.” It’s easy to just give up.
The truth, the cold, hard, difficult truth, is that change is hard. If it were easy to change who you were, then no one would be miserable. Any time you started to feel discontent, you would just choose a new identity to put on like a new pair of shoes and off you go walking a new path. It doesn’t work like that of course, so there’s something more to unpack here.
In his book Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg says that “emotions create habits. Not repetition. Not frequency. Emotions.” This helps us to understand what we need to do, but it also helps us understand how we got here. James Clear talks about this as well, of course. The habits we have, the ones we want to break, exist because they serve us in some way. The routines we naturally fall back on are the ones that gave us something in the past, and so we learned the behaviours by rote. Changing those behaviours is possible, but it is tough.
The problem with the “new routine” approach, at least for me, is that a new routine deceives you into thinking you’re making one change, when really you are making many. A “new morning routine” might sound like one simple change, when in fact it hides a plethora of new behaviours that don’t align with who you are right now. Skincare, brushing your teeth, meditating, having breakfast, doing yoga—any of these might not be part of your life right now. But a new routine tricks you into bundling them together, as though they were a single, simple change.
What I am learning to do, with some difficulty, is to take that step back and ask myself—really ask myself—what is actually important to me right now? Oliver Burkeman talks about this in his book Four Thousand Weeks. He reminds us of the lie we tell ourselves, that despite what we might like to believe: time is finite.
The problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important—or just enough of what feels important—is that you definitely never will.
I have been sitting with this quote quite a bit this week, as I have gone back and forth, yet again, on my own routines. James Clear urges systems. Burkeman urges restraint. Somewhere between them, I’m learning to be selective—to strip things back and start from what matters most.
But what makes the cut?
What do I choose to focus on and what actually doesn’t matter to me right now? How do I select the things that absolutely must form the foundations of who I want to become? How do I build that firmament on which to erect the temple of who I’m becoming? And again I am brought back to that question: Who do I actually want to be?
I still don’t have the answer to that, but I do know how to reshape my relationship to routine. Routines became the ritual performance of improvement that I used to lie to myself that change was happening. Now I choose to view them as permission to adapt the habits of old into new opportunities to choose who I want to become. James Clear, again, once told me “every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.” I am choosing to view my routines as a chance to take that vote again, and again, and again.
I’m not lazy, or undisciplined, or a failure. I am a person in flux. And that is ok.
Magical thinking is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it leads us to believe the impossible is real. That the right routine can transform us into somebody new, if we can just find the right combination of steps. It tricks us into looking for simple solutions and handy checklists for success. On the other hand, it gives us a glimpse of something truly incredible—our ability to believe in new beginnings.
I don’t believe that a perfect routine exists that will make me who I need to become, but I do believe that I can figure it out and become him.
And, honestly, that’s just the kind of magic I need.
References
[1] James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (2018)
[2] BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything (2019)
[3] Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021)
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