I bet you’ve seen a handful, maybe a couple dozen, of articles and studies discussing how important it is to have a routine. The body craves homeostasis, regularity, of which routine plays a huge role. It comes into play for sleeping, for eating, when we want to do all sorts of things, and how we feel about each of those things in turn.

If you work out every day at 7am, and then miss a day, you feel “off” because your routine has been compromised. If you usually lie down in bed around 11pm, but don’t go down until midnight, you feel unstable because the regularity you depend on for proper functioning has been disturbed.

This is, I believe, the third post I’ve written about our vacation this week. But then, all advice is autobiographical, so what else would you expect? Vacation’s this weird thing, right. You need it, because you desperately need to take breaks from your routine, but in breaking from your routine you throw everything off.

Take me. I’ve only spent a few hours today reading and writing, and I’ve spent zero time on Text Request. Yesterday I did even less! And it feels so bland, so melancholy. My body and my mind don’t quite know what to do. There’s a disconnect between what I’ve been teaching them (the regularity I’ve instilled), and what I’m currently putting them through. I’m outside of my routine, and I’m off balance.

When we break our routines, even if it’s for great reasons, we’re throwing ourselves off balance. And we notice this! It’s rather obvious, then, how important routines are. Without them, we’d spend our days in chaos. We’d have no discipline to do the things we know we need to do for our health, our careers, and our families. Without that kind of regulation, we’re unable to do much of anything we want, much less achieve our goals. We desperately need routine.