How (and Why) to Stick to Your Routines While Traveling
When you’re on vacation, sticking to your daily routine can be a challenge. Vacations are, indeed, the time to try new things. However, it can be helpful to stick as closely as possible to your normal routine.
The Benefits of Sticking to Your Routine
Travel is beneficial in many ways—especially when you go with an open mind and a good level of adaptability. However, it requires a lot of change, which makes it difficult to maintain your habits. The moment you leave the comfort of your home, you turn over your control to the excitement of being somewhere new. More often than not, this contributes to poor decision making. How many times have you spent half your vacation eating junk food? Do you usually complete your everyday to-do list while living it up on a tropical island or at a ski resort?
It happens to the best of us. After all, vacations should be enjoyable. It’s a chance to kick back, relax, and forget about the stress we often deal with at work or in our daily life. But that doesn’t mean we have to throw our everyday routine out the window as soon as we leave.
Routines keep us grounded and help us with time management. They can also improve our health by helping us handle stress and achieve our goals.
When you’re in a new and exciting environment, though, your perspective about your habits can change. Things like exercising, eating wholesome meals, meditating, updating your journal, or reading suddenly feel like chores.
The good news is, it doesn’t have to be that way. All it takes to maintain your healthy habits while you travel is a spoonful of organization and a drop of commitment.
How to Maintain Habits While Traveling
Minimizing the differences between your everyday life and your travel schedule is key to staying healthy, productive, and motivated to maintain your habits. The more organized you are, the easier it will be.
Every successful trip begins with a good plan. When you schedule the activities you want to do on your trip, try to carve out some time for you to engage in one of your daily rituals. For instance, if you know you’ll probably be out and about every day after 10 a.m., try to wake up a few hours earlier, so you can meditate, exercise, or do some writing before breakfast. If you already do that at home, it won’t be hard for you to stick to that habit.
To make things easier, try to stay at hotels that have gyms and are near health food stores, juice bars, or co-working spaces. It’ll save you the time of finding ways to maintain your routine after you get there.
