Struggling to maintain my routine when I travel

I tend to feel overwhelmed when I don’t have a routine, but I also tend to fill my time and headspace with distractions when I’m overwhelmed. This leads to me struggling with creating a healthy and mindful routine when my routine is broken, such as when I’m travelling. I end up filling my headspace with distractions, such as mindlessly browsing social media for hours on end, which I default on as my new routine. This perpetuates the feeling of overwhelm, because it prevents me from having the headspace to create a healthy routine—or go back to my previous routine that was broken.

I’ve been trying to think of ways to get back on track as soon as possible when my routine is broken, but this is not an easy task. Even as I’m writing this, I’m struggling to get back into my routine and into being productive. When I have an established routine, I feel I can function on autopilot, and my life feels smooth and automatic. But getting there often feels like it requires a gargantuan amount of executive function.

I often get stuck in “either/or” thinking: I’m either in my routine, or I’m out of my routine. So when I’m out of my routine, I tend to think of my task as one big task—to get back into my routine—rather than a bunch of small tasks that together comprise my routine. This adds to the feeling of needing a gargantuan amount of executive function to get back into my routine.

Additionally, when I know that my routine is going to be broken again soon, I tend to feel defeated, and thus not bother. Why put in all that effort to rebuild my routine when I’m going to be travelling again soon and thus going to have to put in the same amount of effort to rebuild my routine all over again?

The problem, though, is that I travel and move around a lot. So if the feeling that I’ll have to reestablish my routine demotivates me from establishing my routine, I will simply not have my routine at any point in time. And this creates a conflict between my need to travel around and my need to have a routine. I need to constantly be on the move, to constantly have novelty in my life, but I can’t let that hinder my need for a routine.

So what is the solution?

If I had a solution, I wouldn’t be writing this. Because this isn’t a guide on how to overcome executive dysfunction in the face of needing to establish a routine. It’s an attempt to think through my experiences and try to construct a possible solution—something that might or might not work. So the solution is a work in progress. Even the pieces that bring it together are a work in progress. Because I’m sure that my thought process is missing something. But something is better than nothing. Even finding a solution to my executive dysfunction—I have to think about it as a series of tasks of trial and error, rather than one big task. I don’t need to have the perfect solution, as long as I’m working towards improving.

The solution I’m thinking of right now is to reframe my constant travel and moving around. Rather than thinking of it as an obstacle to maintaining my routine, I can think of it as being my routine.

This thought, of course, in and of itself is only a thought. It’s not an action. The issue does not get magically fixed by a mere thought. But this thought can act as the basis of what I can do to prevent my routine from getting constantly thrown off. To making travelling and moving around a true part of my routine, I need to establish it as such mentally and stop giving it the power to disrupt my routine.

If travelling and moving around is a constant in my life, then it is literally part of my routine. So why does it feel like a constant disruption, rather than just a constant? Perhaps it’s the executive function required to prepare to travel. Preparing to travel gives me a lot of anxiety, to the point that it disrupts my routine a week or more before my trip. And this is part of the cause: the preparation disrupts my routine, before the trip itself actually does. So I fall off my routine before I even go anywhere, and in my anxious state I end up forming a new, anxiety-based routine, which means I already have this anxiety-based routine to default on after I move.

What I need to do, then, is minimize the amount of disruption preparing to travel causes my routine. And the good thing is that, since I travel a lot, I already have a routine established around preparing to travel. I even have a checklist saved of the things that I need to pack. This saves me from having to think about what I need to pack, and therefore helps minimize the anxiety I usually get from being afraid that I might forget something.

I’ve also found that I tend to feel less anxious when I don’t start packing too soon. Perhaps this is ironic (doesn’t preparation help prevent anxiety?), but starting to pack puts me in the headspace of a change about to occur, and as such starting to pack too soon can make the transition period feel long. Being prepared beforehand—such as having a pre-written checklist—allows me to start thinking about packing later and thus shortens the transition period.

I tend to think of my travel transitions as transitions and accentuate that. What I mean is that I do a lot of tasks right before travelling, and think of my trip as a new start. So on the days before my trip, I not only pack, but also groom and go to the barber and do other tasks that make me feel fresh. While I enjoy the feeling of being fresh, there is no reason for it to coincide with travelling. Adding those tasks to my to-do list has the double effect of not only giving me more tasks to do before travelling, thus increasing my anxiety and requiring more executive function from me, but also mentally making the transition more pronounced. This on/off approach to transitions makes it very apparent that what I’m experiencing is a transition, and thus disrupts my routine. Even the fact that I need to do these extra tasks disrupts my routine: instead of performing my routine tasks, I neglect my routine and expend energy performing these other tasks in a time slot other than their routine time slot. For example, instead of going to the barber when I actually need to go to the barber (which would be after travelling and going to the new place), I go before I actually need to go, just to go before I travel.

The ironic thing is that I do these tasks to reduce the amount of tasks I need to do when I go to a new place—for example, I feel anxious looking for a new barber when I’m in a new place, and want to postpone it for as long as possible, so I go to the barber right before travelling—but the cumulative effect this has is the opposite. I end up having too many tasks as part of my transition. As such, to minimize my transition anxiety, I need to accept the anxiety of having to perform these tasks perhaps soon after I arrive to a new place. This can reduce the feeling of transitioning. It can also have the effect of maintaining my routine: If I perform a task every five weeks, but because of my transition, I perform it on the third week after the last time (right before travelling), this throws off my transition. But if I keep it till I’ve arrived to the place, I can perform it on the fifth week after performing it last. This creates a sense of continuity in my routine.

Continuity reduces disruption in my routine and thus the feeling of transitioning. So the best way to minimize the feeling of transitioning is to reduce the number of tasks I associate with preparing to travel, and instead keep as much of my routine as possible. This makes it easier to continue my routine wherever I go, because it still has the momentum to keep going and does not need the executive function of rebuilding my routine.