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What are some of your routines or habits?
Im trying to get into the habit of setting a daily/weekly routine of hobbies, chores, meal planning etc.
Right now, they happen when they need to happen but its not the most efficient or well coordinated. And i'd like to spend less time thinking about when to do things or what to do for routine activities.
What are some routines that work for you well?
Oh my, what a question! Where do I start? I feel like everything in my life is a routine.
When you get older and settle a little more into just living as an adult, you realize that a lot of your happiness is tied to just having your life together, and that means being organized, respecting your time, keeping the calendar updated. It also means doing what "needs" to be done, like all the chores, going grocery shopping, cooking, etc.
So yeah, my apartment is always clean, apart from the dishes, I clean my apartment maybe 2 hours a week? It's just spread apart every day because I don't let stuff "stay where it's not supposed to be"
I'm getting better at that, so this is what I do for now
As for the rest, I feel like I'm top of things, I love reading reddit and tildes, because I'm a curious person and any knowledge is good knowledge for me so I read random stuff every day. That's about how I live my life.
Very thorough! Any occasion when you break your routine? I have a problem where if i start a routine and break it, i end up falling out of it.
I do yeah, especially during summer when I'm off work for like 2 months. I don't really have a routine then and I kinda don't like it. I wanted to start school again just to get back in the routines lol
It helps that my work days are always the same since I'm a teacher. So that really helps.
Also, I'm medicated for ADHD since january and it literally changed my life. It's way easier to keep a routine and stay organized when you're constantly able to be on top of things. It's easy to break a routine when your life is filled with mood swings, energy swings, motivation drops, etc. I don't really have those anymore, I just do stuff now.
I feel like I don't really answer your question. I do break it sometimes, especially anything related to food (cooking, groceries), but that's just because my evenings always fill up with random stuff. The rest of the routines are all kinda unbreakable at this point because I forced myself to do it for so long because I wanted it to become a routine. If I break it one day or one week, my brain doesn't like it lol
Trazodone makes me feel hung over. I take Apigenin and Magnesium Bisglycenate. These both have calming effects. I'll do a bit of Yoga Nidra to help calm down when I lay down to go to sleep. Or I'll listen to History podcasts. These have dramatically improved my ability to sleep.
If I really want to get knocked out I'll take half a gummy that's higher in CBD.
Thanks for the recommendations, I'll definitetly try these. I have not been able to get a full night sleep in about 20 years. Trazodone helps for now so we'll see.
Gummies and pot never helped.
Yw. I have self diagnosed ADHD, my therapist says she has no doubt I have it. I'm high functioning at work. My biggest issues are when I'm concentrating I don't hear other people. When I'm not my brain is all over the place. So falling asleep and staying asleep has been difficult for me. Higher stress also impacts that.
So the supplements and listening to something when falling asleep have helped. Guided meditation and or yoga Nidra help me calm down. I'm not sure what the main thing is, but when I combine all 3 I sleep much better.
Nowadays my health doesnt allow for regular habits, but before I got sick I had a couple that worked well for me:
For 20 years I woke up and exercised every day before anything else. It worked great because I'm not a morning person but exercise helped improve my morning mood and energy. I found it helped getting started before I was awake enough to talk myself out of it.
When I got serious about music, I would practice as soon as I got home from work. Same basic strategy as the exercise-- get it in before all of the other stuff distracted me.
My cat is the best at helping me keep my routine.
She wakes me up at 7am.
I bring her out for a walk.
Feed her. Brush my teeth. Clean cat stuff.
Then I leave to exercise.
Return and shower.
Meditate
Begin work.
Lunch
Play with the cat
Meditate
Continue work
In the evening I feed my cat dinner
Exercise.
Return and shower.
Do the night routine of throwing the trash and stuff.
Sleep.
The routine always starts with the cat. The hardest part is starting it. But once I start going, it's easier to do the next step. Since the cat will demand I get up and feed her or play with her, I built my routine around the cat.
That has helped a lot.
What kind of exercise do you do? For how long? I envy that you can fit that in before work!
The exercises aren't tough! They're just some basic things my physiotherapist asked me to do. I spend about 35 - 45 minutes on it. But most of the time is spent walking. I've got chronic pain issues so I've just been tasked with walking a lot for now.
It's only doable because I work from home!
Got a few very minor ones:
I keep my water on my night table overnight, but my morning meds on my dresser. When I take my meds, my water gets moved, providing a visual indicator that I took them in the morning.
I have meds that I need to take in the morning and evening. The physical reminder is that I put my watch on/off when I take those meds.
Both of these habits have stopped me from guessing if I took my meds or not, as I look at the physical reminder
I use an AM/PM pill organizer for the same reason.
My brain takes a bit of time to come online after I’ve woken up, so my morning routine is basically me running on autonomous autopilot through the things consciously I set up the night before (e.g. laying out my clothes). As such, I’m pretty much unable to answer the question “Did I take my meds?” in the morning because my brain genuinely doesn’t know. It’s just running the script.
As such, a pill organizer is a complete necessity for me. It also stops me from taking more than one of the same pill because, if I do them directly from their bottles, I won’t be able to remember if I took certain ones.
So my morning and evening meds are an inhaler, so a solution like that is just unfeasible. One of the flaws in my water system is I occasionally leave it on the dresser as I am getting ready for bed and notice it is still there once I am in bed. Luckily, normally my wife is not in bed yet so I just get her to pass it to me since she understands my system
I have exactly one routine and it’s a cappuccino in the morning (whatever time “morning” ends up being). Everything else can go, but this one is sacred and if I don’t have it, I have a meh day.
All through the workweek, I just put my laptop to sleep whenever I stop using it.
On Friday, when I leave for the weekend, I do a full shutdown.1 It feels like a nice symbolic closure to my workweek.
Similarly, on Sunday night, as I'm preparing for my workweek, I shut my phone and smart watch off for a bit, just lie in bed with no stimulus or screens or anything, and have a brief moment of disconnected peace.
I then boot them back up (which also gives me minor benefits from actually restarting my phone regularly), make sure my alarms are set, and then go to bed.
1. Tip for anyone considering this: for reasons I'll never understand, Windows 11 doesn't actually shut your computer down when you tell it to shut down. So, if you're stuck with a Windows machine, you have to hold
Shiftwhile you click the menu option to shut it down to get it to actually shut down instead of doing a fake shutdown.There's also an option in the control panel to disable "Fast Startup" so you don't have to hit
Shifteach time, but your work might not give you the user permissions to change that. (Mine doesn't)Thank you for that tiny Windows 11 text hint! Our workplace upgraded last month (I know, pretty late to the party, I’m pretty sure Win10 end of support is really quite imminent) and I’ve learned that the power button never actually shuts down, but I’ve trusted the start>shutdown button so far. Maybe I’ll switch to holding Shift and see if it behaves differently?
My strongest habits relate to savings money in various accounts.
I kinda squirrel money away into various accounts. Can't spend all my money if it's split up all over the place! I used to have really poor impulse control and shopping problems like a decade ago, so this is how I've tricked myself into not spending. Also I end up saving a decent amount each month. Kinda crazy how quickly these accounts grow. And then I use them for trips or bigger purchases.
Also created a skincare routine of sorts.
Idk if it all works, but my skin feels nicer. And I do seem to get less zits and such. Could probably do more.
Though that wouldn't be as big of a problem if I had healthy sleep habits.
Sleep schedule is still a WIP, but I feel like I'm making progress. But then it gets blown up on the weekends when I'm up til like 4am...on the computer.
I think the last habit I have, which isn't exact is grocery shopping every other weekend. Doesn't have to be a full restock each of those weekends. But at least it keeps food in the house, which means I'm much less likely to want to eat out, which is expensive. So are groceries these days, but I think eating out is still more expensive.
I am jealous (or unsettled) by your hours of sleep per night. If I get less than 9 hours, I’m grumpy for the whole day.
I’m pretty sure this is one of those things where I need to just bite the bullet and follow up with my referral to talk to the nose surgeon (deviated septum and some other thingy that means I snore like a freight train) because from other people who have had similar sleep apnoea and gone for surgery, they’ve told me that they wake up more refreshed even with less sleep than they used to need, so I’m hoping it can do the same for me.
I don't really have a routine except for going to the gym 3x a week. Personally, I find routines really depressing for some reason.
I know that my life would be objectively better if I went to bed at 10 every night, had a reasonable regular breakfast, planned my meals, had everything in the same place, and so on. When I've done that though, I don't know. It makes me feel too regimented and responsible and adult. I'm middle aged, but I still have that teenage rebellious spirit that makes me hate monotony, bed times, doing laundry, and so on, even though the only thing I'm really even rebelling against at this point is my own comfort.
For what it's worth, I have a lot of the same feelings.
Every morning starts with a coffee and cig (I know) in my bathrobe on my back deck watching the sun come up. Then some light stretching, then getting my dailies in Gems of War (F2P game but you don't have to spend money) for 5 minutes before my daily ablutions. Then log in to work.
Good habits save you time. And they are like grease to keep my life swimmingly.
So a few I implemented are:
AM:
Take my daily supplements. I use am and pm so I remember to take them.
Put away the dishes from the dishwasher.
Make breakfast and coffee.
Play wordle and NYT mini.
Take a shower if its a office day or WFH day.
Throughout the day only if I have a day off or WFH.
If I cook, clean up as I go. Put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher.
Start the laundry.
PM
Take a shower if I go out in the field/walk my dog (because of ticks).
After dinner, finish rest of the dishes and run the dishwasher.
Fold laundry if I have laundry.
Get ready for the next day.
I have to take my pills at night in a very specific order, otherwise I can't sleep. Not because the medicines interact, but because it's going to drive me crazy that I didn't take my medicine the "right" way. It goes Capsules, large pills, dissolvables, small pills, ibuprofen (as needed). This order includes any medicines and supplements I need to take on a daily basis. Currently I take 6 capsules, 4 dissolvables, 1 large tablet, and 5 small tablets.
I don't have too many habits anymore. I drink coffee every morning, and can count on one hand the number of days I didn't have coffee sometime in the day. I also play a bunch of crossword and word puzzles in the morning with my coffee. (WaPo Mini, NYT Mini, Wordle, Whittle, WaPo On the Record, WaPo Keyword, Whittle (I'm not good at it though), Raddle, Connections, Strands, Merriam-Webster Missing Letter, and on Puzzmo, the crossword and Pile-up Poker, although not so much lately as they just recently started paywall. )
As someone who was chronically dehydrated for many years and did not realize it was the cause of a few health issues, I now have a 48oz container on my desk which is impossible to ignore. When it's empty I refill it. I've refilled it as many as 3 times in a day, so I'm much better hydrated now.
I also have developed darned good oral hygiene. I had a lot of cavities as a kid (or rather, the dentist claimed I did, leading me to a lifetime of fillings that needed to be redone every so often), my teeth are crowded and hard to floss without ending up with floss in pieces. I get pockets in my gums. Last time I went for cleaning my hygienist threatened to make me come in for deep cleaning (I am skeptical of it doing much more than funding my dentist's kids' college education), so I made a deal with her to buy one of those water flossers. It's an awkward beast but actually quite good at keeping away plaque. I'll be seeing her in a couple weeks so we'll see if it actually works as advertised. I also started on Invisalign a few months ago, so now I'm water flossing twice a day and brushing twice a day (though the morning brush is only for one minute; evening is the full two). Not sure if I'll maintain that when Invisalign is over -- really too soon to say.
I went to make an appointment at a new dentist recently and it was with a sinking heart that I saw their
propagandaadvice on brushing THREE times a day, when you wake up, just before going to bed, and after lunch (but not immediately, I assume, because I've read that's not advisable). Feels like I will never live up to (any of) my dentists' standards.Ain' nobody got time fo' dat!!