Why Life Changes Make Everyday Routines Harder (And What to Do About It)

Have you ever felt like you used to be good at this “adulting” thing, and now you just aren’t?

Maybe your morning routine ran like clockwork until you moved apartments. Or until the baby arrived. Or until you started college, or moved in with your partner. 

Suddenly the things that used to just happen take real effort, and it’s easy to decide something is wrong with you.

Here’s the reframe: it’s probably not you. It’s your environment.

Your habits were relying on your surroundings

Habits are largely unconscious actions driven by environmental cues. You walk up to the sink, see your toothbrush, and start brushing without a single decision.

Routines are different. They’re conscious and intention-driven. You walk up to the sink and choose to floss first, then brush.

Habits run on cues from your environment. 

Routines run on conscious thought. 

When your environment changes, the cues disappear, and the habits that depended on them often disappear too. 

To rebuild a habit, you need to start with rebuilding your routines. Habits form most reliably when you repeat that routine in a consistent context: the same time, the same place, the same cues, again and again. The new environment gives you a fresh chance to build those cues on purpose.

Where coaching comes in

You already know how to build habits that work for you. The challenge is that your old ones were so automatic you can’t say what made them work. You just know they did.

That’s where self-reflection-focused coaching helps. Together, we dig into your old habits and figure out which specific pieces that did the heavy lifting, especially the environmental pieces. 

In practice, we look at:

• Breaking down the habit you want to rebuild into its small pieces
• Spotting which parts of your old environment made it work
• Start by building routines that can build into habits based on your life circumstances 

If you’ve been blaming yourself since your last big change, let’s look at your environment instead.