Benefits of Having a Daily Routine – While having a daily routine may sound boring, it presents many potential benefits for both your physical and mental health. Whether you are looking to floss more often, drink more water, or start using anti-aging skincare, routines can support your goals and help you make progress on them daily. From reducing stress to improving sleep, here are nine benefits of having a daily routine:
Routines help to alleviate stress and anxiety.
A lack of structure and routine can contribute to stress and anxiety, because every single day looks different. Not only that, you have to constantly remind yourself to take care of essential activities such as drinking water, eating food, and taking a shower, which further increases stress. By automatically building time for these activities in your day, you will decrease your stress and anxiety and free up time for other, more calming activities.
Routines save your brain power for important decisions.
Decision fatigue occurs when you have to make too many decisions at once, decreasing your decision-making power and often leading to worse decisions overall. Even small choices, like what face peel to use or what to eat for lunch, add up over time, taxing your decision-making power and leaving you less energy for important decisions. Building a routine will take some of these decisions off your plate, because you do the same activities at the same time each day. In turn, this saves your brain power for more important decisions that matter.
Routines encourage healthy eating.
Grocery shopping and cooking food take time and require advanced planning, making them difficult to do on the fly. If you don’t build them into your weekly or daily routine, then you will likely end up ordering unhealthy fast food frequently. Having an established routine makes it easier to cook at home, which encourages healthy eating and a well-balanced diet. If you don’t feel up to cooking every day, try doing meal prep on weekends and then eating the leftovers for the rest of the week.
Routines start your day off on the right note.
It takes most people some time to wake up; very few of us can roll out of bed and hit the ground running. Creating a solid morning routine means that you can go through the first part of your day on autopilot, giving your brain time to wake up while you check other things off your to-do list like washing your face and drinking coffee. This gets your day started off on the right note and sets a positive tone for the rest of the day.
Routines help you sleep better.
If you’ve been struggling to sleep, then having a bedtime routine might be the solution. Doing the same set of activities each night (brushing your teeth, changing in pajamas, etc.) will cue your body and brain that it’s time to sleep. Going to bed and waking up at the same time each day, even on weekends, will support your circadian rhythm and help you to sleep better and longer. Try to put away screens at least an hour before bed since the artificial light can keep you up at night.
Routines increase productivity and efficiency.
Routines increase productivity and efficiency in multiple ways. First of all, you do the same activities at the same time each day, so you don’t have to waste time deciding what to do in what order. You will also get faster at the tasks the more frequently you do them, which will further increase your productivity and save you even more time. And if you decide to eliminate choices — by wearing the same thing or eating the same food every day — you will further increase your efficiency and productivity, not to mention speed up your daily routine even more.
Routines improve concentration and focus.
Constantly switching from one task to another is a surefire way to destroy your attention span and make it difficult to concentrate on things. Not only that, frequently stopping your day to do tasks as you think of them makes it hard to get momentum going on bigger projects. Having a daily routine means that you can get these tasks out of the way in batches, freeing up long blocks of time for uninterrupted, concentrated work that requires a high level of focus.
Routines free up time overall.
While routines do take up time during your day, they free up time overall. That’s because you can consolidate activities together in the morning and evening instead of breaking up your entire day. You can spend that extra time doing a meaningful activity or hanging out with your loved ones instead of having to do yet another task that you forget earlier in the day because you didn’t have a routine.
Routines support healthy habits.
If you have a healthy habit you are trying to do more often — whether that’s using your skincare products every day or exercising more regularly — incorporating them into your daily routine will help to support that goal. Once you get used to your routine, these activities become automatic and you don’t have to think about doing them. It’s much easier to stay consistent with healthy habits on a daily or weekly basis when you’re no longer having to motivate yourself to do them each time.
Do you have a morning or nighttime routine? If so, what benefits have you realized from having a routine each day? If not, what activities are you hoping to integrate into your new daily routine? Let us know in the comments below!