24 Habits, Routines, and Rituals
What Is It?
Why Is It Important?
Understanding how to create healthy habits, routines, and rituals is important. They help build healthy behaviors and attitudes that lead to success. This is especially important during times of transition, such as the transition to graduate school.
More than 40% of what we do each day is a habit rather than a conscious decision. Habits allow us to use our energy and focus for other tasks.
Routines allow us to incorporate healthy habits we’ve built into a lifestyle! Building routine provides structure to our days.
Rituals are important because they are contribute to the spiritual, cultural, or social meaning of a persons identity and help reinforce the values and beliefs they may have (AOTA).
Tools You Can Use
How to help create healthy habits & routines:
- Click on the hotspots to read more.
Routine Building:
One way to create a routine is to use time blocking. Time blocking is a method of organizing your day into different blocks dedicated to different activities, events, etc.
To do this, block off specific times for everything that happens during your day. You can make it as specific or general as you would like. Here is an example:
It may be beneficial to use time blocking on your outlook calendar or on a physical planner.
To add your Canvas class calendar to your Outlook calendar, here is an article to help!
Rituals:
It is important to make time for the things that are important to us and contribute to our health.
Rituals vary from person to person. Making time for peaceful and meaningful activities each day is important. Here are some examples of what incorporating rituals can look like:
- Drinking your morning coffee outside in the sunshine
- Meditation
- Nature walks
- Reading at night
- Time to reflect in the evening while sitting outside