Zoom Out From Your Routine for Perspective
Written by Kirsten Ahrendt
The routines of our day-to-day lives often limit our actions, landscapes, and interactions – with other humans, foreign landscapes, as well as new experiences. Staying in those routines can shrink our worlds and consequently our lives down to seemingly microscopic scales of existence. While a 10-day sojourn into the wild isn’t accessible or feasible for everyone, here’s some tips for zooming your focus back-out and SCALING UP your world from micro to macro. Lordy knows we could all use a breath of fresh (new) air as 2020 closes out.
Incorporate something NEW every week.
This does NOT have to be fitness based. This is about expanding our experiences, which in turn will expand our health. Here’s some ideas:
- Walk around a new neighborhood in your town.Â
- Pick up a new habit – draw, sing, bike, learn a choreographed dance, rollerblade, photography, bake, meditate.Â
- Designate at least 1 day a week WITH ZERO screen time (phone, computer, etc). and see what you fill it with!
- Try a beer at a different brewery every weekend (if you’re into beer, #socialdistanceprotocols).
- Read a book in an outdoor location.Â
- Go on walking dates instead of sitting dates.Â
- Get up 1 hour earlier rather than staying up 1 hour later
Seek out something that scares you.
Self explanatory, here. Put yourself out there, make a fool, push your boundaries of comfort, get quiet and alone if you fear that. Get loud and crazy if that’s not your norm. Do the opposite of your routine and just see how it makes you feel.
Focus on a NEW element of an existing feature in your life.
If you don’t have time to add something new in your routine, bring the NEW to your routine by simply shifting your focus.
- Workout every day? Try switching entirely to dumbbells instead of barbells, or nasal breathing instead of mouth breathing, or require 10:00 of every session for stretching or post-session down-regulating. Just bring in one new element to focus on!Â
- Like to cook? Make every Thursday a vegetarian day!
- Love to hike? Try bringing a friend that’s never gone, or perhaps try solo hiking (#tellafriendwhereyouregoing).
In the end, routines are great – our super-computer brains use them to simplify and expedite tasks, saving us energy in the long run to evolve and solve more complex issues. But as much as our brains love routine, they also thrive on NEW! So give your brain a breath of fresh air this month and ZOOM out from your routine!