Forget Finding Motivation: Build Routines

A large proportion of TikTok’s 34 million daily video uploads focus on daily activities and rituals: “get ready with me”, “outfit of the day”, “a day in the life”. Have we always been so obsessed with routine?

We eagerly scroll through these clips because they tap into an addictive mirror effect: routines and rituals are some of the most human behaviours, making them easy to relate to. We see someone else’s routine and feel a mix of comfort, comparison, and inspiration.

Whilst it’s never been so easy to learn about others’ routines, we’ve always used routines and rituals as ways to ground ourselves and shape our identities.

How it started

Routines are ancient. Take ancient Egypt: both men and women applied kohl (a dark eyeliner made of antimony or galena) each morning — not just for aesthetics, but for functional eye protection against sun, insects, and infection. Over time, those cosmetic habits became part of the ritualised daily order.

Transport ourselves to Ancient Rome, and we find routines and rituals attached to public baths: more than a place to get clean, they were civic and social centres, with meals and meetings wrapped into bathing. If a day of meetings at the baths isn’t an improvement on back-to-back teams calls, I don’t know what is.

The Romans’ social bathing culture echoes our recent obsession with wellness rituals: sauna clubs, daily cold plunges and curated “spa days” are modern rituals that channel the same impulse to cleanse, reflect, socialise, and reset on repeat.

Neuroscientists trace much of our habit and ritual formation to circuits involving the cortex and the basal ganglia. This means our brains use routines to build shortcuts. When you repeat an action often (everything from teeth-brushing to daily gym visits), it shifts from being an active choice to a semi-automatic mode. The brain “outsources” these repeated sequences to reduce mental work. Over time, those sequences become stable habits or routines.

Routines are fragile

On one hand, we’re told to break your routine, reinvent your mornings, shake things up. On the other, research suggests too much disruption can destabilise mental health. During COVID, disrupted daily routines were linked to greater depressive and anxiety symptoms across populations.

In fact, one study showed that people whose daily routines were more disrupted saw stronger rises in depressive and anxiety measures. More broadly, the WHO reported a 25% global increase in depression and anxiety during the first year of the pandemic, in large part due to everyday disruptions.

This doesn’t mean the best kinds of routines are rigid, eternal rules. It’s a delicate balance: enough stability to reduce friction, enough flexibility to evolve with your life.

Enjoying this? If you’re not yet a member of my weekly newsletter community, I invite you to join here.

Routines have superfans

Whilst routines are an important part of all of our lives, it follows that the more stress and ambiguity we experience, the more daily routines become the life rafts we cling to in stormy seas.

There is a direct correlation between conscientiousness and reliance on routines: conscientious people naturally order their lives with repeated behaviours and break down big goals into consistently attainable bite-sized chunks. They’re the superfans of everyday rituals. Less conscientious people find it easier to be spontaneous, depending less on rigid structure.

Similarly, people with high levels of decision-making responsibility often rely more heavily on routine. Decision fatigue is real: the more decisions you must make daily, the more your mental resources deplete. Some leaders, innovators and busy professionals deliberately adopt consistent and elaborate morning routines to reduce trivial decisions. Sometimes a person’s preference for routine can be spotted in their outfit choice: Steve Jobs’ famous black turtleneck, for example.

Busy, goal-driven brains depend even more on routine scaffolding. Your brain is better off when it doesn’t have to reinvent “What do I do next?” every few hours.

Why are we so routine-curious?

Part of our obsession with learning about others’ routines comes with the cultural lore that some routines are superior to others (think 5am Club, morning gym sessions, daily non-fiction reading rituals). 

But this is wildly misguided: a 5am wake up followed by a 10K run listening to a high-brow podcast will not be the right routine for everyone. Different brains, life phases, responsibilities and energy rhythms demand tailored routines. What stabilises one person might stress another. The smart approach: adapt a skeleton structure to your needs, without copying someone else’s blueprint.

Yet the process of figuring out the right routine for us makes these “get ready with me” videos even more compelling, especially for teens or people in moments of transition: they represent a rare opportunity to try on another person’s routine for size. “Is that me? Could that be me?”

Psychologists link this to vicarious self-projection: we imagine and simulate identities through media. Over time, such viewing subtly shapes our self-image and goals. In other words, these videos are not passive entertainment but participatory drafts of “you in progress”.

Beyond aspiration, routines are also a soothing form of pattern recognition. Watching repetitive, well-ordered actions (folding towels, layering makeup, pouring coffee) gives our brains a small dopamine hit from pattern recognition. It’s calming, even meditative, and lets our minds rest.

This mental rest means we might pay more attention and absorb more of the content from a “get ready with me” video than a standard TED talk or lecture, as we are more visually engaged. And this engagement also leads to greater social connection: there’s intimacy in being invited into someone’s morning routine.

Routines are powerful tools

Three ways routines are powerful tools to enhance our performance and wellbeing:

1) Routines sustain momentum

Routine lowers the friction of initiation: when your body and brain are primed (e.g. “wake, stretch, open my planner”), you don’t debate “Should I?” You just go. This feedback loop (cue, action, reward) is what helps sustain motivation over time. Some behavioural science models call this a “habit loop”. The more predictable the cue, the more likely you’ll respond even when enthusiasm is low. Once a repeated sequence is in motion, it draws you forward.

2) Routines build identity and connection

Routines don’t just do, they say who you are. When you habitually follow through, you internalise traits (“I’m someone who writes daily,” “I’m someone who pauses mid-afternoon to walk”). Those small acts accumulate into self-narrative. On the social side, shared routines bind groups. From weekly family dinners to friends who always meet on Friday evenings, these rituals create social cohesion, trust, reliability, and relational memory over time.

3) Routines reduce mental load and anxiety

Just as Steve Jobs and his turtlenecks illustrate, every choice we make — what to wear, what to eat, what to do next — eats cognitive energy. Routines turn many of those micro-decisions into defaults, freeing your working memory for unpredictable or creative tasks. Meanwhile, sequencing actions (e.g. “habit A then B then C”) reduces uncertainty, which lowers anxiety. Experimental work shows that people who follow ritualised sequences perform better in high-stress tasks and report lower stress — the ritual sequence gives the mind a scaffolding when chaos rises.

Routines are not constraints, they’re supportive scaffolding. They are the stable threads you wrap around the messy fabric of your life to make it more navigable.

Watch a “get ready with me” video for inspiration, borrow one micro move, try it for a week, and see whether your nervous system sighs a little less. If it does, that might be your starting point: not a rigid regimen, but a living routine you can grow with.

I hope you enjoyed this read! If you’re not yet a member of my weekly newsletter community, I invite you to join here.