INTRO TO THE REQUISITE ROUTINES

Many of us drift through life, spending the bulk of our one shot at it on earth in a state of chaos and chronic ignorance that recapitulates generation after generation. We need chaos for there to be order, but we don't want chaos to dominate our lives. Chaos is the natural state. Entropy is always increasing. Chaos takes no work. Order takes active effort. We need to know how to create order.

Order is created through structure.

We get trapped in mental and physical clutter that builds up in our minds and life through lack of structure and routine. We get bogged down by thoughts, ideas, questions, to-dos, time management, relationship management, career management etc. this lack of mental liberty leads to feelings of anxiety, stress, and other strong negative mental states that can be crippling.

If we don't clean our house, it will get dirty and cluttered. Similarly, if we don't clean our mind, it will get dirty and cluttered. Let's say the house is dirty and all of the sudden there's a terrible smell. You can't find the source of the smell because of the clutter and mess. Not only do we now have a problem, we can't even identify the problem (which is 50% of the solution). If we can't identify the problem, we can't find the solution. Sounds terrible right? Sad thing is we let this happen inside our own heads... We can combat this through proper preparation and productive solutions.

Enter a structured routine

Structure is created via a schedule, a schedule is comprised of routine. Structure through routine is a preventative measure that will keep us from reaching this point. Let's zoom out. Most people think schedule and imagine one day at a time with a bunch of different things on the calendar at different times throughout the day. This is not what a schedule is. A schedule provides a skeleton for you to place your routines into so you can then fill in the minor details knowing the major items have been covered. This needs to be flexible as priorities can shift day to day and even from one hour to the next.

We often get stuck in a state of stress brought on by school assignments, work projects, relationship issues, health issues—there tends to be a feeling of permanence with many of these, as if the feeling is there to stay. But this doesn't have to be the case. Whatever issue it is that we're dealing with in our life, having scheduled routines in place will allow you to identify the problem and deal with it calmly and swiftly. It's like a cleaning crew that comes in regularly to clean the house. Take the same scenario as before with the terrible unidentifiable smell, but now add the cleaning crew. We probably won't have the issue of the terrible smell, but if something does happen to come up, we'll be able to easily identify the problem and then come up with a solution instead of having to clean our entire house by ourselves first before even being able to tackle the problem.

People often ask me how I seem to never stress, how I maintain a positive outlook in all situations. I gave up trying to control the things that I cannot. I switched my focus to organizing and structuring only the things that I can control. One more time: I gave up trying to control the things that I cannot. I switched my focus to organizing and structuring only the things that I can control (a.k.a Stoicism).  The only things we can control are our thoughts and actions. That's it. Most people are far from in control of these things which leads to feelings of having no control over your life. It's like trying to come up with a solution to an undefined, ambiguous problem. Impossible.

You can live stress free

By understanding and taking control of these items (our thoughts and actions), we can find how to manage our stress response in a positive way. We can, and probably do, often lie to ourselves. We try to convince ourselves that we're fine or that stress is normal, everybody feels this way sometimes, and if everybody feels it, it must be okay. This mindset will only lead to cognitive dissonance and eventually catch up to us. It's just ignorance to the issues and how to solve them. If you're stressed, that's fine, just accept the fact that you're in control of it. It's like a really difficult theoretical physics equation: you'll look at it and go "it's okay that I can't solve it because who could?" Except there is a solution. It's a matter of whether or not it's worth it to you to figure out how to solve it. And we can only do that if we know what the problem is and have done the preparatory work to able to solve it.

So, what do we do about this? 

Welcome to what I like to call the requisite routines. Requisite for what you might ask: requisite for living a purposeful, fulfilling, wholistic life. They are the building blocks of your schedule and therefore the building blocks of structure (order) in your life. There are five requisite routines: sleep, food, exercise, leisure, and career. If you want to put your best foot forward in all that you do, to look back and say "I did a damn good job trying to make the most of myself in this life," then these routines are requisite. Life is about encountering problems/adversity and then coming up with a solution/overcoming it. We can not do this to our fullest extent unless we have these items in place. 

I am almost done with a short e-book that I wrote about these requisite routines. It will be available soon... ish.

~ Bonde