We had 19 participants for the very first Ness Labs virtual meetup on April 3rd, 2020, which topic was “Habits, Routines, Rituals.” See below for the notes, broken down into different sections.
What’s the difference between habits, routines, and rituals?
- “A routine is something you logically plan on doing, for instance something you add to your calendar—I go to the gym three times a week, I’m committed to go to a class every Sunday, or everytime I’m in this neighborhood I’m going to visit my mum. A ritual is something that is sacred to you, in my case my rituals happen more on a weekly basis or a monthly cadence. It’s something that helps you come back to reality, or change your mindset. A habit may be, I have a habit of losing my pens, or a habit of losing my phone. On the flip side, if I wake up every morning at 5am for six months, it becomes a habit. Even if I don’t put the alarm on, I will still wake up at 5am out of habit. You don’t plan it, it’s a habit.”
- “A ritual could be: I never go to an important meeting before smoking a cigarette, or I never cycle ever without wearing that particular pair of gloves.”
- “A routine is more of a plan, deciding how you will do things, whereas a habit is something you do without giving it more thoughts. If you like playing games or watching TV, that could be a habit. Drinking water can be a habit. You don’t really think about it. Hopefully, for good routines, you can turn them into habits.”
- “You would say that someone has a smoking habit or a drinking habit, you wouldn’t say they have a smoking routine or a drinking routine.”
- “At the moment, people are stuck at home, the line between habits and routines is blurred.”
- “It’s important to make sure that stuff we do routinely doesn’t become a habit if we don’t want it to become a habit. Because habits are not always good.”
- “If you imagine that habits, routines, and rituals are on scale. The difference between them is the level of intentionality. Habits have very low levels of intentionality. You don’t think about them. It can be good, like brushing your teeth, or bad, like smoking. But it’s so automatic that habits are hard to break. Routines have higher levels of intentionality. You are planning on doing it, you want to do this. Good examples are making your bed and exercising, which stays a routine for many people, that you keep on repeating with the hope they will become habits. And the one with the highest levels of intentionality is rituals, as mentioned earlier, these are sacred. When you have a ritual, it has a lot of meaning, and you bring your whole self to that practice.”
- “There is also the level of complexity. Habits are simple actions, such as drinking water, or exercising. But routines are a set of actions, for example take notes, then start writing, etc. And praying is a ritual.”
- “Maybe that’s why some routines are so hard to turn into habits; because they’re more involved, there are several steps, and it’s harder to perform them without thinking.”
- “When I think about a routine, I think more of a sequence. For example, I include several things in my morning routine, such as journaling, stretching, reading. Or you have several exercises in an exercise routine.”
- “It probably helps if you define the steps of that routine beforehand, so you have less thinking to do once it’s time to actually perform that routine. Anything you can do to remove some of the friction is great.”
- “Maybe rituals are a way to hold onto something in chaotic environments; something you can go back to when you feel lost.”
The good and the bad of habits, routines, and rituals
- “Rituals can also be setting up your environment to be successful in your task. For example, setting up your desk, your work environment, so it helps you stay focused. Or athletes who listen to motivation music before an important game. It’s about setting up your environment for you to succeed.”
- “Some athletes do these rituals because they think that if they don’t they will have bad luck. They are almost prisoners of these rituals. You think that if you don’t do it something bad will happen to you. As we mentioned, smoking can also be a ritual.”
- “A ritual can be a superstition. It makes you feel better in the short term, but isn’t it better if you manage to free yourself from it in the short term?”
- “If there are bad habits and bad rituals, are there bad routines?”
- “Maybe routines can be bad in combination. For example, you wake up very early to exercise, and you stay up a bit late to read. Separately, they are harmless, but together, you may end up suffering from sleep deprivation.”
- “A ritual can be bad when it prevents you from achieving your goals. For example, I sometimes use a ritual as a way to procrastinate. I say to myself that my writing ritual requires me to sit down with a cup of hot chocolate, find the perfect spot, and all of that. That can be a ritual that ends up being dangerous for my writing.”
- “When it comes to bad routines, it’s mostly a question of bad beliefs. It’s not something that happens at the time you do it, it’s something that happens all the time. If you believe waking at 3am will solve all of your productivity problems, it’s not something you only believe at 3am, it’s something you believe at 3am, at 5am, at 10am—it’s something you believe all the time. And this bad belief is what caused you to switch to this routine. Whereas a bad habit, it’s automatic—you don’t control it.”
- “Routines require more mental energy and motivation, so you are more prone to procrastinate on them. So I try to keep them as simple as possible. Rituals on the other hand are more complex, when done right, they can be a way to elevate your mental state, but if they affect your workflow, it’s sometimes better to downgrade them to the level of routines.”
Intentional procrastination
- “Our brain has two ways to tackle a problem, the focused and the diffused mode. This is why we have shower thoughts. After spending lots of time trying to proactively come up with a solution to a problem, we quit. And then, suddenly, in the shower, we have a eureka moment. That’s the diffused mode of thinking at play. It’s important to have space for these diffused moments of thinking.”
- “Sometimes procrastination is a defence mechanism. We are trying to get away from a particular task.”
- “There are a couple of reasons why leaving a task and coming back to it later can be positive. It may also have to do with the fact that you move away from the space that you were in so you can look at it from a different perspective. It’s like having a second pair of eyes looking at what you’re trying to do.”
- “It’s important when you’re intentionally procrastinating to not do something that’s mentally taxing at the same time. Or even going on social media, that’s not intentional procrastination, because you’re engaged with the content. Whereas, if you’re taking a shower or going for a walk, your mind is not engaged.”
- “Multitasking is terrible. Because of the context switching cost, it may take a long time before we can get back in the flow.”
- “Procrastination is leaving something to the last minute. It’s better to work steadily on a project and take breaks as needed.”
- “Taking mindful breaks can be a form of intentional procrastination—intentional resting. Instead of forcing yourself to cram and working extra hard because we want to get results fast, it’s better to go slow and steady. Most of the big improvements we can make in our lives don’t happen overnight. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”