Routine and Interruption—Measuring the Loss

Routines play a vital role in daily life.

Injuries, treatment, symptoms, etc. are huge interruptions. Interruption breaks routines.

It’s essential to understand what routines do for us so we can understand what’s lost when injury interrupts them.

Routines serve several important functions. They help reduce cognitive load, regulate emotion and support identify/self-worth.

Routines Reduce Cognitive Load

Every decision requires mental effort. When certain actions become routine, the brain no longer has to repeatedly decide what to do next.

If someone has a fixed morning routine, they don't spend mental energy deciding when to shower, what order to do things in, or when to leave the house. This preserves cognitive resources for more important decisions.

Psychologists refer to this as reducing "decision fatigue."

Routines Regulate Anxiety

Anxiety thrives on uncertainty.

Predictable sequences of behavior can reduce physiological arousal because the brain learns what to expect. In effect, routines function as a psychological "anchor."

This is why children often insist on bedtime rituals and why adults frequently develop rituals around work, exercise, travel, or sleep.

Routines Support Self-Worth

Many routines are actually expressions of who we believe ourselves to be.

Examples:

* The person who reads every morning sees themselves as a learner.

* The runner who trains at 6 a.m. sees themselves as an athlete.

* The lawyer who reviews tomorrow's calendar before leaving the office sees themselves as organized and responsible.

Over time, routines become evidence supporting a person's self-worth.

Routines evolve from what we do into who we are.

Injury makes many routines impossible. And the elimination of routine makes everything so much harder. It’s like a feedback loop.

An injury makes it difficult to exercise. Exercise stops. So does the dopamine that comes with it. Depression sets in. Depression reduces motivation. Exercise becomes a memory rather than a routine.

The same can be said about sleep, doing the laundry, etc.

These all seem like relatively small ticket items. But that’s just because we live in a social-media driven world of performance.

People don’t live like the vignettes they create on Instagram. They live by moving from one routine for another and finding joy in small, repeatable experiences.

When these experiences are taken away they suffer a tremendous loss and frequently feel like they’ve plunged into a death spiral.