Make Habits Happen-My Evening Routine

The Challenge for May is: making your Evening Routine set you up for Success

What a great way to celebrate this new spring weather with a spring challenge. Let’s see if we can’t improve our lives by making our evenings work for us and not against us. Let’s re-think our Evening Routine.

The importance of Routines

Routines really do have a major impact on our lives and sense of well-being. I’m always amazed at how much better I can feel, how much more productive I can be, when I’m more intentional with my routines. I invariably end up doing things out of habit that don’t serve me well. Every once in a while, especially when I’m feeling anxious, I need to re-think my habits. Let’s start with the evenings. What am I doing that isn’t serving me? What can I do that will help?

Let’s do this Together

Samantha from Happily a Housewife over on YouTube and Instagram challenged her community to share what goes into making new habits. I agree wholeheartedly with her premise that sharing how we get to the new habit is as important as sharing what our fabulous new habit is. Let’s share using her new hashtag #makehabitshappen. Samantha is also working on this with Kimmy from She’s in Her Apron, also from YouTube. I’ve already shared this morning on my Instagram account
( https://www.instagram.com/p/Bw7CsRalvRe/ ) about how setting up my PM made my mornings so much better. I hope you will share too.

How do you want to feel?

Spring time is always synonymous with growth and change. With this May challenge, I found it hard to just pick a way to change my evening routine without first thinking about my mornings. I was inspired by the people I knew of who walked after supper. However, I knew I couldn’t do that, so maybe I could walk in the mornings. So, I needed to think about what I want my mornings to be like? More specifically, how do I want to feel in the morning? How do I want to feel when I start my day?

Once I had figured out that I want to feel energized, I needed to think about what I could do to make that happen. For me, the simplest way to feel energized is to get my body moving outdoors. Again, ideally, I would incorporate a walk into my evening routine too, but that’s not feasible for me now with the little ones. Next question was, how could I make a morning walk happen by modifying my evening routine?

Getting outside

If I was going to get some time to walk outside and reach my goal of feeling energized by being outdoors moving around with my toddler, I had to plan for it. Re-thinking my evening routine made the morning changes more possible. Now, I shower in the evening. This is something I am not naturally inclined to want to do. Despite all the findings that a warm bath or shower also helps with sleep, I resist this habit. I don’t want to do anything after the kids are asleep, let alone ‘waste’ 15 minutes in the shower when I could be crocheting, planning or watching something fun on TV or YouTube.

Here’s the thing about habits though, one change almost always forces us to change other things too. I knew I was never going to feel like going for a walk in the neighborhood if I hadn’t showered the night before. There is a limit to how awful I want to look when I bump into my neighbors.

It’s been two days, so I’ll let you know at the end of the month how this goes, but so far so good. I made it out this morning. I enjoyed the fresh air and tagged along for some toddler exploring. In order to make it a challenge for myself, I’ve also decided to find one beautiful thing to take note of on our walks and adventures. Today, the bright yellow Daffodils and beautiful tree bark made the cut. I posted the pictures over on Instagram, so take a look at them there:
https://www.instagram.com/babiesandbookcases/?hl=en