After returning from my trips to Colorado and Kansas City, I have found myself tossing and turning in the sheets of me bed each night. Some aspect of travel was aiding in the demolition of my ability to sleep. I had previously been a sound sleeper. My skull touched the inviting pillow and BOOM! My eyes were glued shut like a bad application of false lashes. Conversely, in the past few weeks, I have been bright eyed and bushy tailed as the nights grow dim. I even realized I was becoming fearful of demonic presences lurking in the shadows, as if I were a five-year-old child once again. This was very infuriating as my arduous work schedule demanded a full night’s rest. I did a bit of research to attempt to remedy this exhausting issue. It seemed to boil down to one simple solution I have known all my life, but failed to take into consideration in this matter: the daily routine. You have to train yourself how and when to sleep.

This means choosing a bedtime, doing activities to wind you down, staying in dim lighting, changing into a form of pajamas, and for heaven’s sake, don’t get sucked down the YouTube wormhole. How could I have missed it! I have always had a routine up until this point in my life. It was propelled by alarm clocks rudely awakening me for class and my parents’ strict guidelines of in bed by ten on school nights while under their reign. I maintained these hours of sleeping into college because it was a habit at that point. When I was traveling around, however, my daily routine was non existent. It is no surprise my body was mystified about when to become tired and when to wake in the morning.

Not only this, but my mood was like a children’s park, chocked-full of swings and incessant teeter tottering. As I submerged further into my research, I came to the conclusion that most successful business leaders are heavily dependent on the daily routine, not for just sleep, but for many aspects of their achievements. What constitutes a life is the summation of each day; therefore, each day you must make headway. You don’t create a successful business in bursts of few and far between productive moments. You prosper from daily achievements generating momentum towards the ultimate goal.

Without proper sleep and good health, goal-oriented progress falls to the back burner. With my full plate of skills to learn, relationships to build, and a side of writings to scrawl, rest and wellbeing were knacks I desperately needed to master. Luckily, routines can be effective in these areas. The main point to touch on here is timing. Your body is in a rhythm and runs on a 24-hour internal clock. It is important to adhere to a bedtime and wake time each day, so your body knows when to release hormones, such as melatonin, acetylcholine, and adenosine that allow you to feel tired versus alert. Along with this, while sleeping you pass through various sleep stages

This means that if you are being awakened by an alarm clock before having completed a full sleep cycle, you will likely feel irritable and disoriented upon rising. If you wake up on your own naturally, you will feel well rested and alert upon rising. This means ditching the alarm clock; or using it only as a backup in the case where your body’s cycle fails you. Nobody wants to experience the dreaded sprint into work with pants left unzipped and a nappy head of hair, not cute. One of the more impressive abilities of the human body is its internal alarm clock. If you tell your brain to wake up at a certain time, given the proper amount of sleep, it will wake you up at nearly that exact time.

This is even more fail proof if that time is the same each day. Lastly, try to eat meals on a routine basis. This teaches your body when to become hungry and prevents overindulging in unnecessary food. Correspondingly, your metabolic processes such as digestion and appetite run on a 24-hour cycle. This means at certain times of day your body can better process meals for energy rather than storing them as fat and raising your cholesterol. Eating at scheduled times daily is simple and your reflection will offer you a big backwards thumbs up.

The next reason for the routine lifestyle is orienting your life to achieve goals. Motivation and willpower are short lived. Just ask any local gym that receives thousands of new memberships around January 1st and an equivalent amount of cancelations around February 1st. What is long term if not willpower: habits. Positive habit forming goes hand and hand with self discipline. According to Jim Rohn, “discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.” To create good habits, you must do the same things at the same time each and every day. For me this ideally would look like: waking up at 8am, making my bed, working out, preparing breakfast and coffee, knocking out a lesson in Italian, daily hygienic maintenance, then beginning my workday. Later on, around 8:30 at night, cleaning up the house, writing for an hour, shower/bath, reading my current book of choice, and heading to bed by 11pm

This allows me to achieve some of my goals such as learning Italian, working on my blog, and carving out a defined six pack, incrementally in the time I have before and after my workday. People like Steve Jobs, who wore the same black turtleneck, denim jeans, and New Balance tennis shoes every day of his adult life, understood the importance of eliminating unnecessary decisions in his day to day. There is a phenomenon we experience as humans called decision fatigue. This causes our decision making skills to deteriorate over the course of making many choices in succession. Routines eliminate the need to plan and instantly put you into action because there are no decisions to make. You get out of bed and right off the bat know what to do and how to do it, thus falling into a state of flow. When you do the same things regularly it results in superior efficiency. This builds not only momentum, but a strong sense of control over your life.

Without a daily routine people tend to feel stressed out, nervous, and overwhelmed with seemingly unattainable goals. The routine gives you an action plan with little to no thought on your part. Some may say that a routine makes your life monotonous and boring, but the truth is that structure feels good. It allows us to free up time to spend having fun with loved ones, without the to-do list nagging in the back of your head. In the coming months I would like to make it my goal to solidify a stricter daily routine similar to the one I listed previously. I will personally assess if Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerburg, Barack Obama, and Arianna Huffington’s opinions on the power of routine behavior holds up when applied to my own life. What can a daily routine do for you?