Inspiration and Life
What Makes up Your Life?
You can reprogram your life
Everyone has countless patterns, routines, and habits in their lives, most of them unnoticed. If you are interested in learning more about yourself, let’s look at how these three affect who you are, what you do, and the results of your life.
Patterns
“To understand is to perceive patterns.” Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997)
Most of us pay little attention to the many patterns in everyday life. Are patterns good or bad? Do they matter that much in the end? Yes, yes, and yes!
Patterns come in a wide variety, both good and bad, and significantly affect our lives. Why do we pay so little attention to them? Why indeed!
While you can technically say patterns, routines, and habits are synonymous, I prefer to differentiate each, reserving patterns as those things that cover larger areas of life over time.
A few patterns in life include:
- Sleep patterns
- Eating patterns
- Health patterns
- Relationship patterns
- Speech patterns
- Spiritual patterns
- Learning patterns
- Rest patterns
And the list goes on.
To find opportunities in your life’s patterns, you must first see them. When you can see them, you can begin doing something about them. After all, it would be difficult to work on something you’re unaware of, wouldn’t it?
As you begin noticing a pattern, name it to make it real. Let’s look at a pattern that affects everyone — sleep.
How does your sleep pattern affect your life? To say significantly would be an understatement. When you establish a good sleep pattern for your body, every day becomes a better day. If you ignore, misuse, or abuse your sleep pattern, the potential for many bad days exists, not to mention poor health.
Another pattern we all share is our eating pattern. When you pay attention to it, you have the potential to maintain some control over it. But look out if you ignore it and stuff your mouth with anything whenever you want.
Simply put, the more you pay attention to the patterns in your life, the more you can influence them for your good. The less attention you give them, the greater the chance they will work against you.
“Finding patterns is the essence of wisdom.” Dennis Prager (1948-present)
Routines
“The secret of your future is hidden in your daily routine[s].” Mike Murdock (1946-present)
Unlike larger patterns, routines are behaviors that are repeated frequently. A few typical routines include:
- Work
- Lunch
- Office
- Morning
- Workout
- Family
- Church
- Health
- Nightly
- Weekend
- Yard care
And the list goes on.
While patterns happen over time and require little thought, the immediacy of a routine requires you to give them thought if it is to be effective. An interesting thing about routines is they can have subroutines. A few of these include:
- A workout routine can include running, biking, swimming, and lifting subroutines.
- A nightly routine may have subroutines of having dinner, watching television, reading, and going to bed.
- A work routine may have subroutines of checking email, attending meetings, making phone calls, water cooler talk, lunch, attending to last-minute details, and heading to the car.
Habits
“We are the sum of our actions, and therefore our habits make all the difference.” Aristotle (284–322 BC)
Habits tend to be very short-term and occur far more often than routines. In fact, routines typically have several habits within each of them.
One thing every habit has in common is they contain a four-step repeatable sequence of cue, craving, response, and reward. Unlike routines which we are generally conscious of, habits are primarily automatic and carried out unconsciously.
Let’s look at the part habits play in routines.
- For your office routine, you can have habits such as turning on your computer, grabbing a cup of coffee, checking email, popping in to speak with someone, going to the same place for lunch, calling home once a day, touching base with your boss, etc.
- For your health routine, you may have habits such as stretching, running the same route, monitoring your stats such as distance, speed, heart rate, and so on, cooldown, more stretching, all the while listening to music or a podcast.
- For your weekday morning routine, you can have habits such as exercising, showering, eating, drinking coffee, reading, getting dressed, making sure the house is secure before leaving, etc.,
Final thoughts
To summarize, our lives are the outcome of our life patterns. Routines serve our life patterns, while thoughts and habits serve our routines.
“When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit — unless you find new routines — the pattern will unfold automatically.” Charles Duhigg (1974-present)
Have you noticed how similar working with patterns, routines, and habits is to programming? They make up the program that runs your life!
If you are familiar with programming, one line of bad or buggy code can render a program useless. Bugs like this occur not only in software but also in life. Why not work on creating or rewriting some of the code that runs your life? How? By addressing some of your habits and routines? Change out some of your old code (habits), add new routines and subroutines, and alter the course of your life!
Why not become a life programmer? You have the best test platform in the world — yourself!
LinkedIn |Twitter| Medium| UncommonSense| AmazonAuthorPage | Parlor
Bill Abbate Leadership Writer and Editor in ILLUMINATION
Thank you for reading this article! If you enjoyed it, please check out the others below!