How To Make or Break A Daily Routine To Become A Better Version Of Yourself?

If you think that a routine drains you mentally, physically, and emotionally then how about having no routine and no structure in your life!? A 2016 study published in the American Psychology Association revealed that while boredom does not kill it leads to depression and while we may think that boredom affects few people the study showed that two-thirds of the population feel boredom for a rich experience during the period of ten days. No matter how attractive an experience is, we will feel bored after a certain period of time and a series of repetitions. As eye care professionals, a huge amount of our daily work involves routine. If we get bored we will have to change what we are doing and sometimes this may mean changing our whole career; which is not very practical. Moreover, we cannot become successful in life without making daily routines. Building tiny daily habits yield extremely powerful results and make huge differences in productivity.

Charles Duhigg, a reporter for The New York Times and author of “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.”, revealed in his book that up to 40% of our daily actions are powered by habits. When such a significant amount of our subconscious mind can either work for us or against us we realize how powerful building the right habits can be. Will Durant, an American writer, historian, and philosopher, referred to passages in Aristotle’s Ethics by saying: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”. We want to escape routine however we need to build daily habits that we want to love and not try to escape to become successful. Author and motivational speaker, Brian Tracy says, “Good habits are hard to form but easy to live with. Bad habits are easy to form but hard to live with.”. Building a habit does not mean doing what others do, what works for others may not work for you and you need to build your habits the way you find your passion.

Repeatedly watching the same movie, TV episodes, or reading the same story or book will become boring at a certain point, however, reading a new book makes a non-boring daily routine. Moreover, if you don’t like reading consider listening to podcasts or audiobooks. If seeing patients becomes boring consider seeing new patients by specializing or adding a new activity to your practice. The goal would be to discover new frontiers and widen your horizons or tackle old experiences in new ways. A study about recapturing the “First-Time” Experience through Unconventional Consumption Methods revealed that consuming familiar things in new ways can disrupt adaptation and revitalize enjoyment. Unconventional methods invite an immersive “first-time” perspective on the consumption object. Participants better enjoyed the same familiar food, drink, and video, simply when re-experiencing the entity via unusual means for example eating popcorn using chopsticks vs. hands. The study concludes that before abandoning once-enjoyable entities, knowing to consume old things in new ways (vs. attaining new things altogether) might temporarily restore enjoyment and postpone wasteful replacement.