How to make your routine life interesting?

One of my Secrets of Adulthood is “What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.” But it’s easy to kid myself about what I do every day, as part during my usual routine, and what I do once in a while.

If I’m not careful, I can convince myself of statements like: “Most days, I go to the gym.” “I eat lots of fruits and vegetables every day.” “I rarely show my exasperation to my daughters.” A reason my Resolutions Chartactually looks like – not what I think it looks like, or what I wish it looked like. When I see on my chart that I haven’t really been getting enough exercise, I can make sure to head to the gym. has helped my happiness is that it keeps me honest about what my daily routine

Just as I have daily routines, I have weekly routines, holiday routines, yearly routines. I ask myself: do they boost my happiness, or not?

I’m a huge fan of Christopher Alexander’s strange, brilliant writing, and I was struck by a passage from his book, The Timeless Way of Building:

Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, going to bed again. There are a few more.
There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. Look at your own life and you will find the same. It is shocking at first, to see that there are so few patterns of events open to me.
Not that I want more of them. But when I see how very few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t.

Think about the patterns of your life, about the daily routines that shape your existence. How’s your morning? Could you tweak your morning routine, to make it a bit more pleasant? (For example, here are 6 tips for keeping school-day mornings calm and cheery). How about lunch? Your last hour before bedtime? Your Saturday afternoon, your Sunday evening? Your routine when you’re feeling blue or lonely?

By identifying these patterns, and acknowledging their power to shape our lives, we're better able to set the patterns in ways that boost happiness. A friend of mine realized that one pattern in her life was an extremely irritating commute. Every day, she had a horrible trip, and every day, she was surprised by how bad it was and how much it affected her mood. When she acknowledged this, she decided to try to change the experience, by listening to audiobooks in the car -- an activity she loves. That small change in the pattern of her life made a huge difference in her daily happiness. 

Daily life with no changes can be a real boredom, It is always healthy to break your routines by doing some interesting and funny things. Below are some different 10 ways one can use to break the routine life...”

1. Beautiful way of breaking the routine is to walk barefoot in the grass.

2. Share a luscious bar of chocolate with someone special (bonus: dark chocolate, consumed in moderation gives you health-boosting flavonoids).

3. Steal a few moments of guilt -free daydreaming as you sit in a boring class/conference. What an romantic way of breaking routine.

4. Tuck a rolling pin under your bed. just before climbing between the sheets, roll your feet gently along the pin for a mini massage. Or keep one in your office drawer to use when working.

5. ‘Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body,’ said Oliver Wendell Holmes. Listen to the love theme from Out Of Africa with your sweetheart on a moonlit night. Or dig out a copy of Raphael’s Bolero. Wait for the sun to go down. Push the CD into your system. If you are living somewhere along the sea, take a glass of chilled wine and let Bolero seep into your consciousness as the wine slowly spirals its way through you and will break your routine way of feeling life.

6. In the bedroom, surround yourself with comforting, on-hand objects that please the mind. A basket filled with your favorite books. A bowl of smooth river pebbles for you to run your finger over. A cuddly stuffed toy.

7. Pamper your taste buds and your senses by adding colour and flavour to your olive oil. Take a bunch of fresh herbs. Say, rosemary, basil or tarragon. Bruise them with a rolling pin to release their flavours. Now add the herbs to your oil, and refrigerate the bottle. It takes about a week for the flavors salad next weekend! This herbed oil is also wonderful as a marinade or a dip for crusty bread. Can’t believe such herbs can help us break some boredom routine.

8. At least in a day, disconnect yourself from the routine world. Switch off your cell phone. Ignore the telephone. Go offline. Be off-limits. In those moments, do what you feel like: have a luxurious bath, nurture your lawn or cook a good dinner. When you get back to the world, you fill like humming and happy that your broke the routine life.

9. Shoes off, then flop, like a ragdoll in bed for a long time after a long day.

10. Treat your skin to a refreshing rose water spritz for an instantly alive, wake-me-up feeling. So I hope that there will no place for routine in your life!