What daily rituals do you already have? How do they make your life easier?
Rituals are powerful because they automate our behavior and decrease the "activiation energy" required to accomplish a task. In other words, they make it easier and less brain-intensive to get things done. Think of a ritual as a routine -- you have a ritual for brushing your teeth, you have a ritual for making your morning coffee, you have a ritual for fixing your normal breakfast. If you're like me, you have to make a routine of these early morning tasks because there's not a lot of cognitive "cycles" to go around first thing in the morning. If I didn't have a script to run, I might never get out the door. Consider brushing you teeth: you don't have to think about it; you just reach for the toothpaste and do your thing, just like you've done a million times before. Rituals are all about taking decision making out of the picture. Removing the need to make decisions can be powerful for a lot of reasons. It short circuits anxiety & reduces cognitive load.
![//www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/article-inline-half/public/field_blog_entry_images/512px-Coffeee_img451.jpg?itok=UCsz99i7 "//www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons")
I recommend that my clients use rituals as powerful tools in many situations.
For example, those of you with a fear-of-writing (very common among "dissertating" clients)—try creating a writing ritual so that your cognitive baggage can't get between you and those first words. A writing ritual might look like this: fix a cup of tea, open computer, pull out notes from yesterday, compose first sentence on scrap paper, type in first sentence, and you're started!
MORNING RITUALS CREATE PEACE IN THE A.M.
My clients with ADHD often have trouble getting out of the door in the morning. Here again, there's the double whammy of attentional deficits and early morning brain fog. Try creating rituals for particularly sticky parts of the morning routine. Write them down. Think of what hurdles might get in the way (or observe a few mornings in a row and watch for which hurdles pop up) & then imagine what smooth sailing might look like? Break down your Perfect Smooth Morning into tiny steps. Write them down. Follow them to a "T" for 3 or 4 weeks and see if that small part of the morning doesn't get a little smoother. A ritual I just added for myself is putting together my workbag the night before. You've heard this tip in the past, I'm sure. But now I set it by the front door with my keys and shoes. This might also be old hat. But I add one more step: I create a little pile of everything that needs to leave the house with me right there by the front door. As I'm putting the house to bed the night before I often remember library books that need to be returned, grocery lists that need to be consulted, etc. If these aren't in my pile the night before there's little chance I'll remember them in the morning. Notice, my morning routine became a night time routine. That'll often happen, especially for those of us who aren't morning people!
What are the sticky parts of your day? Your morning? What rituals can you make to help those sticky parts run more smoothly? What can you move to the night before to front load your morning success?
