Kinder, Patienter, Honester: Accomplishing Meaningful Change with Routines, Part 1

What’s the next action for “be a kinder person”?

After years of being a caregiver for someone with a debilitating neurological illness, the stress had taken its toll. I was unhappy with my life in a number of ways and I didn’t know how to deal with them. From day to day I:

• felt the emotional burden of watching someone suffer, knowing there was a limit to how much I could help.
• didn’t handle conflict well. I would get inappropriately angry with some people and would just roll over for others.
• was unable to relax. When trying to relax I felt like I needed to work and vice versa.
• was constantly low on energy.
• wasn’t being honest about my wants and needs.
• felt like I was’t making progress on my side projects.
• felt like I wasn’t making any progress in becoming the person I wanted to be.

All during this time I tried again and again to address these issues. I would meditate, run, write in a journal, try to talk to people, throw chicken bones. However, my attempts were scattered, and even if something helped I wasn’t able to stick with it.

I tried to get a hold of my life and my attempts to achieve balance using the Getting Things Done
system, and though it was helpful, it’s simply not designed for the emotional/psychological issues I needed to address – and am still addressing, though more successfully.

Of all the self-help books I’ve read (and I’ve read many), none give you the tools to permanently integrate their advice into your daily existence. So Steve Pavlina’s book, Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth, recommends journaling every day. Fantastic idea! Only… do I do that before or after I’m done reading his book? Because I’m reading his book every day as well, and there are a lot of other books I want to read, and also I’m trying to meditate and breathe and deal with life.

After re-enacting this scenario innumerable times (they say that insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results, right?) I’ve muddled my way into a system to actually accomplish meaningful change. It has helped me, and I hope it will help you. I also hope you will tell me about your experiences with it so that it can be improved.

Changing Yourself is a Different Kind of Project

What I’ve discovered is that you can’t treat matters of your inner life the same way you treat other projects. That’s right: dealing with your emotions is not the same as having a garage sale. Learning to be honest about your needs and set better boundaries is not the same kind of project as putting together a TPS report. (though if you’d like to tell me how they are the same, please do). The endless stream of personal productivity tips available won’t help.

No, sir. Accomplishing meaningful change takes time. More than that, it requires you to consistently address your issues from day to day, week to week. It requires continuity from day to day, so that you can constantly build on what you’ve already accomplished. And it requires a stable environment, where both normal life and emergencies are handled while leaving you time to take care of yourself.

A Case Study in Fail

To see what I mean, here’s an example from my own life of trying to change and fail, fail, failing. As I mentioned above, I’ve been (and am) a caregiver for someone with Lyme disease. Because of her Lyme, Su often can’t find the right words for what she wants to say. She also is very susceptible to feeling frustrated and angry. The result is that she can often say things that are hurtful to me. Eventually I started to react by getting very angry and either holding my anger in and exploding later, or just saying hurtful things back immediately. Both reactions resulted in pain and stress for both of us.

Time after time I would tell myself, “I need to stop reacting that way. There’s no reason for it – she doesn’t mean to say things that way, and even if she did, it doesn’t do anyone any good to get angry back.” But when I would try to address the issue, here’s what would happen:

• When I thought about addressing the issue, most of the time I wouldn’t even try because I felt like there was no way I could follow through. Because my life lacked stability, I didn’t have enough confidence to even try.
• When I did actually manage to try, my attempts were scattered. I would sit and mentally rehearse reacting positively for two nights in a row, and then just stop. My attempts lacked consistency.
• Then perhaps a month or two later I would start again, and have no memory of what I’d done before and what had worked. I had to start over because I lacked continuity.

What Actually Worked: Creating and Following Routines

To create the stability, consistency, and continuity I needed to change, I defined a set of daily routines. Here’s a routine for a typical work day:

• 7:00am – 7:10am feed cats
• 7:10am – 7:30am eat
• 7:30am – 8:00am exercise
• 8:00am – 8:30am meditate
• 8:30am – 12:00pm work
• 12:00pm – 12:30pm eat
• 12:30pm – 4:30pm work
• 4:30pm – 5:30pm personal project
• 5:30pm – 6:30pm personal
• 6:30pm – 9:30pm anything
• 9:30pm – 10:00pm read

Once I defined my routines I felt very motivated because I could see that I was giving myself time for my responsibilities, my wants, and my needs. My stress went down because I saw that I didn’t have to worry that I wasn’t spending enough time working, and I also saw that I was giving myself space to relax.

Once I started actually following my routines, I felt phenomenal. Before, I would often forget to eat and as a result my energy would plummet. Once I started eating at regular times my level of energy stabilized (and I became less of a zombie and more of a human).  I also gave myself time to exercise in the morning, and that made my body feel energized and “fresh” throughout the day. So, on a physical level I did much better, and that contributed to my overall well-being.

Routines, by their very nature, create stability. With my routines in place, I felt better able to handle stress. If I was having a hard time with work, I could better endure because I knew that I would stop working at 4:30 and wouldn’t have to think about work for the rest of the day. It was easier to deal with Su’s illness because I had time set aside specifically for talking to her about her needs and for taking care of her. She didn’t need to interrupt me as much throughout the day while I was trying to work or concentrate.

Routines also create consistency. Every day I was meditating at the same time and working and  addressing my personal concerns. The consistency with which I did these activities allowed me to focus on them fully and to have confidence that I was doing them well, and improving from day to day.

For continuity, I kept various journals. When I’m done working every day, I try to make a note of what I’ve done and what I need to do next. I also try to keep track of what I need to learn. For my personal life, I’ll often print out a word or phrase for what I want to work on that week. For example, I’ve printed out “Don’t take hostility personally” to remind myself not to remain detached from someone else’s negative emotions. Then, every day, I’ll write about my experience trying to do that. Having daily routines in place helps keep things fresh in memory, which is instrumental for continuity.

I’m not entirely pleased with my system for achieving continuity, though, and have been looking for new ideas. I’ve also started working on some software that would help me in this area :)

So, defining daily routines has been the basic practice that’s provided me with the stability, consistency, and continuity that I need to grow as a person. My routines address my physical and emotional needs by defining times for exercise and reflection. I also now have time to work regularly on my personal projects (like this one! this one right here!) The result is that I feel a ton better and I’m accomplishing more.

One of these accomplishments is an iphone/itouch app, Control Time, which helps you create routines. There’s a marketing page for it which gives more reasons for why routines are helpful. Even though it’s written in marketing-ese, I tried to make it entertaining and useful. You can also check out Control Time in the app store.

One last note about routines – an unexpected consequence of trying to follow the same routines week by week is that I’ve had to change my relationship to time. If you don’t change your relationship to time, following a daily routine WILL DESTROY YOU. What I mean is, it’ll be nerve-wracking because you end up feeling like you don’t have enough time for anything. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk about how to not be destroyed by time when you change your relationship to it.

To close, here’s a passage from a Mary Oliver book, A Poetry Handbook, that arrived just today which is surprisingly and happily relevant:

If Romeo and Juliet had made appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet — one of the other lagging, or afraid, or busy elsewhere — there would have been no romance, no passion, none of the drama for which we remember and celebrate them. Writing a poem is not so different — it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Or, they make appointments with each other but are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens.

The part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem — a heart of a star as opposed to the shape of a star, let us say — exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: no unconscious, not conscious, but cautious. It learns quickly what sort of courtship it is going to be. Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine. It waits, it watches. If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself — soon it begins to arrive when you do. But if you are only there sometimes and are frequently late or inattentive, it will appear fleetingly, or it will not appear at all.

Why should it? It can wait. It can stay silent a lifetime. Who know anyway what it is, that wild, silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live? But we do know this: if it is going to enter into a passionate relationship and speak what is in its own portion of your mind, the other responsible and purposeful part of you had better be a Romeo. It doesn’t matter if risk is somewhere close by — risk is always hovering somewhere. But it won’t involve itself with anything less than a perfect seriousness.