On routines – What to want to do and how

I’ve talked about the journey you can start as you learn to want all over again. Below is more detail on how you should want to use your time from everything from your 10-year career plan to the unexpected 10 minutes of spare time you just found. Here are routines to build into your overall lived experience that will consistently drive your well-being and buttress your mental health.

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The big and obvious ones

Sleep – Ensuring you sleep at least 7 hours a night 4+ times a week is arguably the most important long-term routine (I draw a lot on Why We Sleep – Mathew Walker (2017)) for everything from aging, well-being and cancer risk factors. Don’t sacrifice the quality of your 50s in your 30s just to get that extra episode in of a series that probably wasn’t any good anyway. Put down that blue light, especially if it is your work email – can it really not wait? Are you just showing subservience and a lack of boundaries? Equally, try to keep your bed free of activities like reading, watching tv or eating – then you will create mental associations of the bed being primarily for sleep and you can conduct (almost) everything elsewhere.

A note on the 5am club and executives espousing their sleep deficits as badges of honour, necessary to succeed. This can be a route to madness. If you can reliably fit a 5am wake-up and achieve all that is set out on a daily basis, whilst maintaining the duration and quality of your sleep, that is excellent. However for most of us regularly getting only 4-5 hours of sleep is not sustainable or healthy. Everyone is on a normal distribution here not a power curve. Most likely, you aren’t Bob Iger or Margaret Thatcher.

Diet – You will not be surprised to find this here. You are what you eat and drink: #stayhydrated! During one relapse period, I was mostly just dissolved ham sandwiches and biscuits, a sub-optimal set of staples contributing to a low mood. Think of all the products that provide the right sort of slow-release energy, with low GI, salt, fat and sugar content. It is of course easier said than done to actually execute the myriad tips, tricks and hacks when your meal prep can be thrown into chaos or out the window entirely by work or your mental health. The internet is awash with plenty of fads and guidance you will need to test out yourself – from lowering sodium, intermittent fasting, keto, blah blah. Below is more some of the routines to keep an eye on to stay healthy in a demanding job

• Manage your meals – Breakfast and lunch should have set times of the day that have little time variability for you and most of your team. Whilst breakfast isn’t the most important meal of the day (it was Kellogg’s marketing ploy), it is important to get your metabolism going in the morning. Caffeine and working out are acceptable substitutes to actually just eating some oats, yogurt, fruits, and so on. This means you’re well set up calorie-wise should the late night come along. If you can, build in a WFH transition to allow you to stay on top of what you eat by what’s at home and then crack on to hit the midnight deadline you have with the team
• Swap out the standard menu – Don’t let long hours and eat-in dinners get in the way of staying true to your food dos and don’ts. Avoid the pizzas, burgers, and other high-carb high-GI foods, they are actually detrimental to your immediate focus and can be more soporific than energising. Swap those sliders for a salad, pizza for sushi, chips for quinoa or wild rice
• Focus on rewarding the future – Weekend or even mid-week meal prep knowing you’re going to have some late ones is crucial. Do yourself a favour that when you come home you actually have food to eat. Reduce the gap to action when it comes to dinner, have something in even if it’s just some light pieces. This is, of course, easier when there are two of you but looking after yourself solo you can lose track of things. Meal prep according to your schedule such that you aren’t wasting food but equally making sure you have some when you need it

Meditation – The activation energy for making this part of your routine is very high. I find a common worry is people find their internal voice (or the “monkey mind” as Buddhism refers to it) is too overwhelming, and they cannot get it to stay quiet, their mind would constantly wander. Well, yes, that’s what we are here to practice. Try rather than 5 minutes that can feel like an eternity, just do a simple 9-second stretch right now:

• Pause for a second, breathe in through your nose to the count of four, hold for a second then breathe out through your nose to the count of four. Now, you have meditated for today by focusing on your breath. Keep this simple practice up once a day for a week, at the same time of the day
• Next week, think about doing it several times a day. Then consider doing a longer session (to 30 seconds, then a minute, then two) but keep to a once-a-day basis again and then increase the daily frequency again. Build up stepwise from here. Your mind will wander, but that’s ok just bring it back to focusing on your breath
• You may find focusing on your breath works best, but others find focusing on what they can (or cannot) hear or smell. Open up the senses you take for granted but don’t actively rely on

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Further activities to build into your routines

• Expand from movement to exercise – If I were not obsessed with the rule of three, this goes above. Increase your physical activity to at least 30 minutes a few times a week and focus on elevating your heart rate, not trying to game the steps challenge that you have with work. Gym, sports teams, peloton, running well-known routes, hiking, yoga (valuable to help with meditation but just taking yoga is unlikely to be the holistic and sustainable solution for your mental health), whatever it is you should build this in. Again, commit yourself to the absolute bare minimum and then do just that for a week. Then build up step-wise – giving your brain a chance to adapt and you to normalise it as part of your routine. Finally, we have sedentary jobs, so do get up and move around every 30 – 45 minutes. You will likely get some social interaction around the office, and if WFH you’ll get a valuable screen break.
• Engage in savouring – take time to recognise and reflect on the things you enjoy the moment it happens. As the stoics had negative ideation (imagine the worst possible and you will be armoured against it), positive psychology has savouring i.e. taking time to pause, absorb and reflect on the good moments of life. This is even more powerful if you do it as the moment is happening
• Write down your gratitude – express gratitude for the people and things in your life, try getting a simple gratitude journal that will structure the process, or just get a piece of paper and note down 3 things you are grateful for at the end of every day. Research supports continually journalling about good things that are happening or are grateful for will strengthen your mental and physical well-being
• Do more acts of kindness – increase your acts of kindness, you never know how you could make someone’s day with the smallest action. Equally, charitable giving has been seen to increase the well-being of the donor outside of just value-signally, even when anonymously given. So money can buy you happiness, you just need to spend it on someone else
• Strengthen social connection – make connections with strangers and acquaintances along with scheduling time for the people in your life. As such, it seems that talking to strangers makes us happy. Even if you are reluctant to talk to a stranger, you and the stranger get a happiness boost after talking to each other. So next time you’re sitting at a bar, waiting for coffee or getting your haircut, try having a chat with the barista

We need to talk next about habit forming, as it is easy to read and understand the content – the process of implementation is the hardest part to make stick.