Creating a Successful Evening Routine

By Sam Stieler

There's a lot of talk out there about establishing positive, effective routines, and how they can change your life. Establishing routines makes a lot of sense.

After all, a lot of us waste a lot of time and energy every day thinking about and making decisions that can be made into automatic decisions. When you create a routine, you decide all of those little things ahead of time and free up your mental and emotional energy to work with other, more important things. For instance, a lot of people set morning routines so that they can start their day clearly. This can include deciding exactly when you're going to wake up every day, what you're going to do first thing every morning, what you're going to eat every morning, etc. While morning routines are pretty well known and widely recommended, setting an evening routine can be just as helpful.

The last half hour or hour of your day is a great time to re-center yourself and make sure you are ready and excited for the oncoming day. There are a number of things you can incorporate into your evening routine, including the following:

1) Plan your meals for the following day. This is crucial for people who follow restricted diets or who are trying to establish healthy eating habits. If we want to eat a certain way but find ourselves slipping often, it's usually because we haven't made the new diet easy and inevitable. For instance, if you want to make your meals and stop eating fast food, than it helps if those meals are already pre-made before you are ready to eat. In the moment it's a lot easier to simply go out and grab something from Wendy's than it is to sit down and prepare a meal. If the meal is already prepared, you run out of excuses and make it even easier to stick to the plan than it is to go out and wait in line at Wendy's.

2) Setting clear goals for the next day is another good habit. Some people don't like to set goals right before bed as they feel like it sets your mind on things other than relaxation. I know that if I don't know what I'm going to be doing the next day than I have a tendency to stay up at night worrying about those things. By explicitly and clearly setting what I'm going to work on the next day, I know I feel relieved and like it's taken care of, allowing me to relax and stop thinking about those things. And in the cases that I do think about those things, it's generally with a level of pleasant excitement and not anxiousness.

3) Clean your living space. This is a great idea, as it ensures that you wake up to a certain level of order and beauty every day. There are few worse ways to start your day than to wake up to a mess. Getting out of bed and finding everything in order is a great way to ensure that your day goes smoothly. Furthermore, in Feng Shui clutter creates negative and anxious energy, and prevents the flow of smooth energy, so there are potential metaphysical reasons for keeping your space clean as well, helping to ensure a night of relaxed and rejuvenating energy.

About the Author:

Sam has been writing articles for over 4 years. Come read some of his most recent articles, including one on buying shoe shine kits and another about kiwi shoe products.