How to Build an Intuitive Routine

What is an Intuitive Routine?

 An intuitive routine is a routine, or a habitual action, that nourishes, supports and/or fulfills YOU. An intuitive routine is aligned to YOUR  unique way of moving through the world, your personal needs and desires, your energetic levels and your own personality. It is deeply personal and inherently mindful. 

The Benefits of Routine

In general, routines can provide structure to your day, reduce stress, cultivate daily habits of well being, improve your sleep, plant the seeds of long term fulfillment, improve your health and so much more (The Mental health Benefits of Having a Daily Routine). Routines have a lot of benefits that can help you more fully connect to yourself and the life you want to live.

How to Create a Routine

Routine building at its core is really habit building. I would bet that when you want to start something new you don’t just want to do it for a day or a week, you want to sustain the action, so it can build on itself and actually affect your life long term. 

 James Clear in his book, Atomic Habits, uses the following 4 stages of habit building:

• Cue (Starting the behavior)

• Craving (Motivation to act on the behavior)

• Response (Acting with ease)

• Reward (Finding satisfaction)

If you combine these 4 stages with mindfulness, you have a way to create habits that  are highly intuitive. This can help you to create sustainable routines that nourish, support and fulfill you in ways that are deeply personal and promote your own well being.

Building an Intuitive Routine in Three Steps

I’ve combined Clear’s stages of habit building with mindfulness principles to create the following three steps to intuitive routine building: 

1. Notice with embodied awareness (Cue/ Reward)

2. Build with intention (Cue/ Craving)

3. Commit through consistent and compassionate action (Response/ Reward)

How to Build a Routine you can Actually Stick to

 1) Notice with embodied awareness

Before you can build a routine, you need to know what you want to add, change or improve upon. Noticing with embodied awareness helps you feel into your body, your mind and your spirit for clues as to what is nourishing, supportive and fulfilling. 

Here are questions you can ask yourself as you tune in to the activities you do throughout your day. It might be helpful to write down what you are noticing to refer to later. 

• Does the activity energize or drain me? Would this activity be better at a different time of day or changed in some manner?

• Is this activity important to me?

• Does this activity add something to my life that I value or is meaningful to me?

• How does this activity feel in my body?

• How am I talking to myself while I am performing this activity?

• Is there something else I would like to do or need to do instead of this activity or in addition to this activity?

• How does this activity influence other people? How does it influence my mental and emotional states?

• Is this activity nourishing to me right now? Supportive? Fulfilling? Is there something I could change about it or replace it with that would be more nourishing, supportive or fulfilling?

Road blocks

As you tune into how you feel throughout your day you might notice attitudes and actions that are counter to building an intuitive routine:

Notice if any of the following come up for you: 

• Criticism: How you identify with different aspects of yourself or your behavior can influence what you notice.For example, you might need more rest in your day but criticize or punish yourself for not being productive. Furthermore, what feels nourishing, supportive and fulfilling is allowed to fluctuate based on your mood, the time of day, your hunger levels and external circumstances.

• Either/or Thinking: It is also important to remember that we are constantly influenced by the world around us. A lot of attitudes around routines are marked through a lens of white supremacy culture which speaks in absolutes, favoring either/ or thinking, quantity over quality and perfectionism. For example: Get up at 5:00 am or you won’t be productive or work out everyday at the gym or you won’t be pretty/healthy/fit. This method of routine building presents unrealistic and unattainable standards that make your worth conditional on what you do or do not do.

• Gravity Problems: Gravity problems coined by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans in their book Designing your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life are problems that you can’t do anything about. Some aspects of your life you can’t change such as systemic obstacles, familial commitments and time deficits. Gravity problems are best worked on through collective means such as through intersectional activism in the case of systemic oppression.

2) Building with Intention

Now that you know how your body and mind feel doing different activities. You can better pinpoint specific actions you want to add, change or improve upon that promote your own nourishment, support and fulfillment. Refer back to your notes from your mindful exploration of your daily life, are there any activities that stand out to you that you would like to turn into a more consistent routine?

 When you are ready, choose ONE activity to work with. Remember, to make something a habit it needs to be obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. One routine is less complex, more obvious, and easier to implement. 

The Why

As Clear suggested, habits that stick are grounded in motivation that is attractive. Creating an intention that is grounded in a deeper why, a why that calls to mind the potential created from adding this activity into your life, is not only attractive but extra purposeful. 

To find the “why”, or the driving force towards nourishment, support and/ or fulfillment, begin by thinking of the activity you want to add into your life, then ask yourself why this activity over all the other actions you could do is important. The more this importance connects to something greater than yourself, say the people in your life or your community, the more impactful it can be. Furthermore, aligning your actions with your values has been shown to help improve long term commitment. (Zhang)

You can combine your action and your “why” by creating an intention. An intention is broader than a goal and focuses not on a specific outcome but on the quality of action. You can write your intention in the following format:

I intend to _______________ so that _______________________.

3) Committing to Consistent and Compassionate Action

Now that you have your action and your deeper why, it is time to respond, or commit with consistency and compassion to your new routine you want to implement.

This stage requires compassion. You will not be perfect. You can’t be. You can’t commit to something 100% of the time. Life happens. Grant yourself some kindness. A lot of us have a really negative voice in our heads that is hypercritical of us, expects 110% standards and berates us when we inevitably fail at meeting these standards. These high expectations actually stop us from achieving our goals rather than support us (Perfectionism). Furthermore, going back to motivation. Self compassion of warmth, gentleness and kind words is a more powerful motivator than self criticism (Neff). 

To actually commit to your activity and turn it into a routine involves consistency, compassion and realistic expectations. It has to be sustainable. Writer Aimee Mcnee constantly talks about how showing up in manageable chunks builds trust within yourself. That trust is just one of the many rewards of committing to a habit. Such trust creates a positive feedback loop to keep going. 

 In this regard, commit to an achievable amount of time, effort, or intensity and then do it with compassionate consistency, showing up everyday or almost every day or as often as possible.

Important Considerations

While it is clear that when something is easier there is a greater chance you will be consistent, I want to note that everything including ease is a balance. You are trying to start something new which in itself is difficult. You will have to apply some effort at the beginning because your routine is not actually a habit yet. In that light, it isn’t something that feels completely and totally natural to do and unnatural not to do like brushing your teeth or flipping on a light switch. Normally it takes on average 66 days of consistent effort to turn something into a habit (Dean).

Long Term Effects

When you build an intuitive routine you are building a habit that…

• Is grounded in a deeper why personal to you

• Is Manageable and compassionate

• Promotes feelings of nourishment, support and fulfillment.

 These conditions all contribute to the necessary satisfaction (reward) needed to keep and sustain a routine long term that cultivates well being for you.