Building a Sustainable and Healthy Daily Routine

While a healthy daily routine is not something that happens overnight or simply falls on your lap, you have the power to create and maintain it.

Using excerpts from the book, Personality isn’t Permanent by Benjamin A. Hardy, this article will help you build a routine that you can reliably depend on and benefit from. 

How to Build a Sustainable and Healthy Daily Routine:

Change Your Mindset

You get to decide who you are committed to being and becoming. Who you become is a choice which only you can make. Once you acknowledge that, you can take ownership of your life and the decisions you make in your everyday agendas. There is no limit to the goals you can set for yourself. In fact, it is believed that doing so will give you a better sense of personal confidence. The kind of confidence that comes from making progress towards goals that are far bigger than your present capabilities. 

In Personality isn’t Permanent, there is the concept of an MTP or a Massively Transformative Purpose. This imparts that you have a purpose so big and inspiring that pursuing it transforms your entire life — from your small mundane choices to your huge life-altering decisions. You are the only one who selects and chooses that purpose. You invest your life in it. This means changing yourself for it and improving the world through it. 

It is not wishful thinking to decide that you want to create a better future for yourself. You can choose to distinguish your present self from your future self. They are not the same person. It is important that this picture of yourself, the vision you have is specific. The more detailed your vision is, the clearer your path will be, and the more potent your motivation will become. Dr. Hardy says that your future self is an acquired taste. You have to learn to want and value what you don’t currently want. For context, if your future self is healthier and more sustainable, you need to learn to want to be healthier and more sustainable.

Try to stop thinking about how your past routine worked for or against you. You cannot change the past. You can only discover and better understand who you are and who you will be. You can refuse to be defined by the past. The past, or your past, in particular, does not need to be the ultimate predictor of who you are. Your behavior does not need to be consistent with who you have been, because, again, you can change. Acquire this mindset of being intentional about who you are becoming and where you are leading to.

Managing your mind and following this newfound perspective can help you move forward and act with boldness and intention—not limiting yourself to who you were or who you have been. You live by creation and design rather than default and passivity. You can think of it as being responsible for your success or having personal agency over your habits.

Draw Inspiration

One of the perks of being very incredibly well-connected with the rest of the world is that you have access to a multitude of inspirational resources. Depending on what the goal you have set for yourself is, you can rely on other people to help you. Your capacity to decide which habits to include in your daily routine is limited by your context and knowledge. This means that it is imperative that you continue expanding your context and your knowledge.

Meet new people who share the same goals and ask them what advice they can give or what habits they recommend. Other than that, read books. Many neuroscientists, writers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals have published books about habit-building. There is bound to be more than one resource that should be able to guide you. Reading biographies is also one way of opening yourself up to new views in terms of philosophy, psychology, economics, and the like. 

Constantly exposing yourself to new ways of doing will not always just show you what works for you, but also what doesn’t. This does not have to be a bad thing. That’s just how life works sometimes. It still is important to move further than personal experiences when it comes to drawing inspiration.

Consider Net Zero Living

Now that we’ve discussed our internal dialogue and conditions, we can move to our environment—the part of our lives that essentially surrounds us. Living sustainably is a lifestyle. It is grown through incorporating good habits that consciously acknowledge the amount of energy being used, having eco-friendly products, and even switching up where you purchase the food that you eat. 

The concept of sustainability might seem confusing, but to address the elephant in the room, the answer is yes. Having a sustainable daily routine does mean a routine that you can see yourself maintaining in the long-term. Although, having a sustainable daily routine also means living in a way that reduces the negative impact of your lifestyle on the environment. This means that you continuously strive to reduce your own carbon footprint and ensure that natural resources and wildlife are not depleted or compromised.

Time and time again, you will hear people remind you to save energy and save water. The basic principle is, if something is not in use, turn it off. Always. Taking it even further, you can also begin using renewable energy. 

Next, you may also want to grow your own produce—given that you will not be using pesticides that are pollutants. An alternative to this is buying fair trade products. These are produced and sold by companies that have committed themselves to fair and sustainable practices in production and distribution.

Another habit to incorporate in net zero living is passing up on driving in order to reduce gas emissions. Encouraging yourself and others to walk or bike to different places not only saves the environment, it also serves as a good form of exercise for your overall health and fitness. More than that, if you have items at home or clothes in your closet that you know you no longer need, please try donating them. This reduces clutter in your home and reduces waste (when thrown away). On the other hand, if you actually need to purchase more things, it really helps to choose products that are socially responsible. For instance, if you were to bike to your workplace and needed sunglasses for the ride, you can opt to buy sustainably grown North American Walnut sunglasses, as opposed to sunglasses made of plastic or bamboo. 

It might seem daunting to think about what building a healthy and sustainable daily routine means. Take comfort in knowing that anyone who has ever done something great with their life has had to transform themselves and their habits from who they were to who they became. As Victor Frankl once said, choose one’s way. The most fundamental aspect of your humanity is your ability to make choices, stand by them, and see them through. 

Every single day, be certain that you will maintain your vision with faith and hope. Take courageous steps in that direction, even when you fall off from your routine every now and then. With each step forward, your confidence will increase. Confidence is built through acts of courage and commitment. Giving this to yourself is one of the best decisions you will ever make.