The Importance of Routines – 3 Reasons You NEED Routines!

I have spoken about morning routines, and how to wake up earlier, on MSBLife before. But, routines aren’t just for mornings. Routine provides structure to people’s daily lives and the aim of this post is to spread a lil’ bit of light on why you should start forming yourself some routines…

The Importance of Routines

1. Your brain becomes accustomed to the Nike motto

The defintion of a routine is a ‘sequence of action regularly followed‘. When you choose to do the same things, in the same order, regularly you adapt. You tweak your behaviour, create the habits and follow the routine for a while. You will find that you no longer have to think about it, you just find yourself doing them – your brain just does it!

The benefits of this can be seen in a morning routine with the goal of getting yourself to your morning workout.You wake up and you are so used to your routine that you don’t even get a chance to question whether you want to go. Motivation plays less of a part and you find yourself SMASHING your workout before you are even aware you did it.

If you find yourself facing specific challenges when trying to start including a new aspect into your life then forming a whole routine around it may help. Take meal prepping for example. Getting yourself to spend time on a Sunday to prepare all your food for the next week can seem a daunting and time-consuming task. Instead, turn it into a routine. Get yourself off down to Tesco and do your food shop at a certain time. Get home and into some comfy clothes and turn on your specific meal prepping playlist and get cooking! Soon you won’t even have to think about it and suddenly you find yourself at Tesco. (I can relate…) PLUS – if you only listen to certain songs duirng your meal prep then it will make you want to do it more!

2. Your body and brain knows what’s going on

I’m all for getting outside your comfort zone, as my blog series shows, but sometimes doing the same thing can be beneficial. Your body and brain know what to expect and almost becomes a clock. I tend to eat my dinner between 5:30pm and 6:30pm each evening. This menas that my body gets hungry then and expects food. If i’m going out and end up eating at 8:00pm then my body has been thrown off and is like, ‘bro wtf?’

Now, this one may not be an exact science (…) but I can vouch for it. If I get myself into a gym routine then my body seems to know what workout day it is. I’m not joking. IT’S AS IF MY BODY KNOWS THAT IT’S LEG DAY meaning I can perform better during my workout!

It is also important to make sure you set realistic routines, especially when it comes to the gym. If you haven’t worked out before then don’t go create a routine where you workout 7-days a week. If you are looking to set realistic goals then you may be interested in the blog post I wrote on SMART goals!

3. Less stress

Let’s be real, life can be stressful. I, unfortunately, get stressed quite easily. Therefore, I want to try avoid putting myself in these situations as much as possible – routines help avoid stress. A good example of this is my night routine.

I make my breakfast the night before, I set my clothes out the night before and I pack my bags the night before. Everything is ready the night before! I then spend some time reading my book and doing some stretching before catching some ZZZs. A night routine allows my body to fall asleep easier. All these things make my life a lot less stresssful and I recommend setting yourself up some routines to seek the benefits.

So, how do I create routines?

• Ask yourself: What do you want to achieve? What aspect of your life to do you want to improve?
• It’s not easy. At the beginning you need to motivate (and sometimes force) yourself to do it EVERY DAY. If you do something every day for a month then it becomes a habit. From there it gets easier.
• Keep track of your progress. How do you feel? This may help you with motivation at the beginning and it can be quite interesting to look back on!

If you have any questions regarding the importance of a routine, setting a routine up or even around workout splits then please feel free to leave a comment below! You can also find me on Twitter and Instagram.

Till next time my friends!

-Millie 🙂