How falling off track was the best thing that happened to me this year.

Loss of routine is not the problem. Depending on it in the first place is.

Five months ago, I was the type of girl that to the outside looked super organized. I was part of those people who would wake up around 5am, work out every day, meal prep their lunch and manage to clean their room at least once a week.

I would read or study on my commute to university, plan my day before class, revise notes and material between classes and spend most of my day in the library preparing assignments or studying.

People used to think of me as having my life together — and I did, too.

My secret — I relied on routines.

Everything of the above had its fixed place in my daily routine. The cue for working out was my alarm in the morning. And so it went on. Showering, coffee, breakfast, leaving the house on time because I had to catch the train. The train was my next cue. Read, do homework, study. 30 minutes in which I had nothing else to do, much less anything to distract me. Due to the train schedule, I was always early for class, which gave me 20 minutes to plan my day.

I started relying on routines partly because I think I’ve always been on the consciences side of personality — most of my family is — and partly because I had to. When I first went to a school which required a three hour commute each day at 14, I had no other option that carving out cues and routines to make it work.

Routines became my secret weapon and life safer. They became my safe anchor points.

I relied on routines for everything.

After all, they enabled me to get a lot done without having to out a lot of effort into organizing myself.

I even relied on routine for my mental health. After struggling with mental health during my early teenage years, routines gave me the stability I needed to keep anxiety and chaos at bay. they kept me occupied. they provided me with endorphins. It felt good to cross checkmarks and get the endorphin rush from working out.

No matter what it came to, my routines would carry me through.

I felt good. I felt better than ever before.

On most days I felt like I had my life together.

And then, the pandemic happened.

To make a few things clear, I am living in one of the countries with the best healthcare and when we first went into lockdown, nobody had to fear losing their living, their job or their savings. I am not complaining here.

However, what I realized is that I was way too reliant on routines.

Within the next three months, my beloved structure crumbled apart.

Online classes made me keep my microphone and camera turned off and me sitting in front of it with unburnished hair and teeth. Being around my family most of the time — something I really enjoy — made me trade my rice-bean-tofu-greens-salad with spaghetti and soft baked cookies for lunch. My breaks went from grabbing a coffee in the cafeteria to scrolling mindlessly through my phone.

Right now, I struggle.

I haven´t felt this messy and unorganized for years. Moreover, I haven´t struggled this much mentally and emotionally for years. It´s summer, yet on some days I feel like I can´t get myself out of bed. Technically, I have more time, yet never have I done less for university than this semester.

What I realized is that there is a fine line between being organized and having a good routine

I was having a good routine. What I kept overlooking is that I never developed the sort of internal structure and drive that I needed to make them more than a quick fix.

What I realized is that my problem is not my loss of routine — it’s my dependence upon it in the first place

For an addict, sobriety and symptoms of withdrawal are not his real problem — his addiction is.

Routines are dangerous for the same reason why they work. They allow us to run on autopilot — to make decisions fast and without much pondering. I never had to think about what to have for lunch because I prepared it right away when I came home in the evening. I never had to wonder whether to work out or not because when my alarm went off, I knew it was the first thing to do.

Even if something helps us, as soon as we depend upon it to function normally it’s not good.

While looking super organized to the outside, I allowed myself to make decisions out of habit rather than in order to challenge myself or to learn something new. What I am realizing now is that my many routines sheltered me from addressing questions I should have asked myself way earlier.

My reliance on routines shows me how they all along have been a proxy to provide me with a structure I was unable to generate myself.

What do I want, really?

When reading is a priority to me why do I need the 30-minute train ride twice a day to stick to it?

When taking 20 minutes in the morning to plan and prepare for the day, why would I stop doing it when I no longer get to fill those 2o minutes before class?

Routines make it easy to get carried away by past decisions and keep running the program we always ran before. Losing my routine turned out for me as a point to turn inward and ask myself what I really want.

Sometimes, this is the hardest question. I used to think I knew more or less what I wanted. Now I need to take a step back and put in the work to make this decision.

Falling off our routine reveals the profound truth that we need to readjust occasionally. No plan is perfect, and no routine can save us from this realization.

What am I doing this for?

We tend to forget that routines are not the foundation we want believe them to be.

Routines mask the lack of reason for doing something in the first place. When the external structure that reinforces routine falls ways, we see what is important to us and what has simply been a habitual occupation.

While they give us consistency and stability, what they don´t is a sense of what we want or need to do.

Routines allow us to be more productive and to decide faster by repeating the same actions and thoughts and choosing the same options over and over again.

However, there is a fine line between doing things out of routine and doing them because of routine. When we do something because it is part of our routine rather than because it is important to us, readjusting has long been overdue.

Doing it for the wrong reasons

To realize that keeping up with my work for university was easier when I was able to discuss it in class than it was when working on it alone at home confronted me with the realization that it was still easier for me to work for external validation than for personal learning.

At the same time, it allowed me to realize what came so naturally that I can’t imagine stop doing. For example, I still exercise every morning simply because I love it, because it makes me feel good and because it restores my sanity.

Without a solid why, routines are just quick fixes and sooner or later, this will shine through.

Consistency as a proxy for productivity

Routines feel good because they measure progress by consistency. Each day we can mark an x in a calendar or a checkmark on our to-do list is a reward.

And while consistency is important, it does not guarantee improvement.

I can get up each day at 5 am to write and still not dare to hit publish. i can read every day for 30 minutes but that does not make me smarter unless I know how to work with the gained knowledge.

Moreover, it’s not the only way to measure progress. Sometimes real progress means breaking out of consistency. Breaking through old patterns. Pushing through old limits. Doing the extraordinary, the unusual. Having this hard conversation or taking the courage to show up as the person you really want to be.

Focusing on progress rather than outcome is easier said than done. But unless we know how we are going to do that sooner or later we always fall back on external measures — grades, numbers, likes, claps, compliments, tasks crossed through and ripped sticky notes.

The adversity that comes with the loss of routine reveals how easy it is to get lost in proxies for productivity without making any real progress.

You don´t need to abandon routine to take control over your decisions

With everything said, routines are not bad. The problem is that it’s easy to get lost in them and forget that they are just tools.

When routine becomes the reason rather than a helpful structure, it might be necessary to remember our why for having started in the first place.

When consistency becomes a measure for success rather than watching closely how we can improve, it might be necessary to rethink how we are going to measure progress.

When routine takes over our decisions, it might be necessary to reclaim our agency.

Falling off our routine makes us feel lost, but that does not mean that we need to jump right in as soon as possible.

The first step when we fell off our routines is not to restore them as soon as possible, but to pay attention to what that the situation can tell us about our relationship and dependence upon our routines.

Only then can we work on establishing a new, healthier approach to routines. The point is not to abandon routine, but to realize where we rely on them for something they can never provide.