Regimen: The science of forming a healthy executive routine

“Watch your thoughts, they become words; Watch your words, they become actions …,” cautioned Lao Tzu — and so on until your actions become you, and ultimately, decide your destiny. This is wisdom we’ve known for millennia. Aristotle echoed similarly: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act but a habit.” (These are of course translations.)

Yet many of us still struggle to form healthy regimens that keep us balanced and practicing the acts we know are beneficial to us. We know the restorative power of sleep but forgo it to hit a deadline. We know to eat healthy but, underslept, succumb to processed foods that then erode our desire to work out. We know we deserve kindness. But then act as our own sharpest critic.

Please keep in mind that what we share is in good faith, and we want to provide an important caveat to leaders reading: social determinants of health — the environment, systems, socio-economic conditions, and access to certain resources, including time, etc. — also play a role in the options you end up choosing. As you continue to read our STRIVE Course, be compassionate with yourself and make realistic choices grounded in what is achievable and sustainable. Author of Atomic Habits James Clear champions the 1% improvement rule and often touts in his advice that the power of consistency is important for making progress and repetition is often more important than perfection.

If there were one universal regimen ideal for all people, this would be a short chapter. But all bodies and minds are unique, so building that routine for yourself is part of the work. This is the structure — recall the two “motions” of the vision-setting process — to keep you on task.

Knowledge then isn’t very helpful unless we can apply it in our daily lives, is it? Implementation matters — that’s the regimen, or the schedules, habits, and routines that bring our desires into reality.

Sometimes to add structure, you must deconstruct existing patterns to build new systems that benefit you and your goals. In this chapter, we’ll also discuss how what you don’t do is just as important as what you do. True, regimen-building effectiveness is about allocating our most precious, finite resource: time. You’ll learn to craft a regimen that actually functions and fits your work life.

You will learn to put yourself in situations where willpower matters less, because you’re so well set up to succeed. These tips range from the simple act of delegating the “thinking” to a checklist, to much more complex strategies.

Throughout, Exos experts provide practical tips for turning your ambitions across all the different chapters into daily habits.

TLDR on regimen

There is a difference between habits, which are automatic responses to environmental triggers, and routines, which require intentional effort and conscious repetition. While habits are easier to form, routines demand self-control and sustained focus, but they can eventually become second nature.

Your brain's reward centers play a crucial role in establishing routines and by associating positive actions with rewards — like enjoying a good meal after exercise — you can make routine formation more enjoyable and sustainable. Environmental triggers and chaining positive habits together to reinforce desired behaviors plays a critical role in the formation of a new regimen. To successfully build a routine, you must understand your true motivations, set clear goals, and gradually phase in new practices. Ultimately, the routines that stick are the ones that also align with your values and are realistic enough to maintain consistently.

The science behind forming strong regimens

What’s the difference between a habit and a routine? It all comes down to the difference between waking to your alarm and taking time to do your stretches. Waking to your alarm is considered a habit because it starts with an environmental trigger—something prompts you, and you react, often unconsciously. As with eating, or additive substances like nicotine. You act on compulsion and the habit forms with little effort.

Whereas routines lack a trigger. Routines are you prompting your environment—you knowing that stretching is good for you, and rather than shuffling off to make coffee, taking a morning moment to warm up your muscles. Routines can pass into the realm of “unconscious competence,” where they require little thought, but not without significant, upfront, intentional effort. And a routine can never reach the fully automatic level of habit, which operate on a neurological level.

But routines are within our control, which is what matters. Routines are among your most powerful regimen tools.

How can we form routines? The answer is complicated and understudied because monitoring them is logistically difficult; subjects have too much else going on in their lives for scientists to conduct a sufficiently randomized control trial. But here’s what we know: Routines often start as habits, and emanate from the same areas of the brain — the parietal, frontal, and temporal lobes which are involved in focus, and the prefrontal cortex which is involved in impulse control and self-regulation. People with more activity there (presumably, developed through repeated use), are better at forming and breaking habits. They also have more activity in the striatus, a region deep in the center of the brain in the basal ganglia. Activity there coincides with “habit-making and breaking,” and suggests people with greater capacity there are able to form or dissolve well-worn mental grooves.

Which is to say, routines are a mind game. Practicing the self-control necessary to get yourself through that early, ugly period where the activity is uncomfortable (recall negative signals) and you aren’t any good yet requires real effort.

You can ease that effort through a number of ways. One is creating your one routine-forming habit by activating your reward brain’s centers, known as your mesolimbic system. Your reward centers exist in those same areas of the brain associated with self-regulation and habit. When you perceive a reward, they flood the relevant receptors with dopamine.

The science here is complex, but at its simplest, here’s what can fire your reward centers:

• • Enjoyable food
  • Good smells
  • Pleasant sounds
  • Light
  • Exercise
  • Stretching
  • Physical touch
  • Praise
  • Success

That last item is very important. We know lots about what hijacks our reward centers thanks to research into slot machines and into social media platforms, whose designers famously modeled them after slot machines. (It is no accident your social notifications icon is the last thing on the page to load.) And you can use that to your advantage. You can create artificial “rewards” that, like flashing lights and sounds, light up those reward centers just the same as tasty food.

When you align positive actions with psychological rewards, you’re programming your brain to seek that as a habit, which can form into a routine where the trigger is no longer necessary.

A few simple examples:

• Using incense to signal it’s time to wind down for bed
• Getting to check a box after doing your daily vision meditation
• Rewarding yourself after exercise with a tasty meal

So if it’s so easy, why then do so many diets fail and workout fads fail to produce results? Why do 50% of medical patients not adhere to their long-term plan? A few reasons. One is they often lack a habit-forming trigger. The routine alone requires too much focused attention. As the difficulty increases, we fall prey to our basest instincts and our “ghosts in the machine” emerge, and that creates stress, exhaustion, irritability, impatience, and anxiousness. And in that state, we do whatever gives us the fastest dopamine hit and that tends to be the quick, unhealthy, preexisting habit.

In these slumps, our mindset slouches to fit our condition and we come to think we are not in control. This degrades our willpower further, and people fall into a hole from which escaping grows increasingly difficult.

But there is another reason. And that is that habit-forming routines also only last so long. If you’re lucky and the routine sticks, but it’s associated with the reward, that’ll be a much shallower motivation than if you discovered, in that process, the true love of that activity. That’s where vision, self-regulation, and meditation can help. Willpower can get you to pick up tennis. The dopamine rush of competing with friends can kickstart the habit. But ultimately, you’ll have to find something you love about the pursuit of tennis for itself. Which doesn’t always happen.

So here’s what you can do to make it easier to form those routines:

• Chain healthy routines and habits together.
• Create a wall of environmental conditions full of triggers so your positive behaviors reinforce other positive behaviors.
• Create habits around every piece of the STRIVE curriculum so your eating supports your training supports your vision.

Good routines can become a regimen, and pay dividends. If you’re set yourself up to stick to the schedule you know keeps you healthy, and that becomes routine, you’ll have no choice but to develop healthier boundaries. You’ll have to trust others to do parts of the work because you know you can’t sacrifice your routine or it all crumbles. Which is good news for your revenue—research by Gallup finds CEOs who excel in delegating generate 33% higher revenue. Freeing yourself frees others and makes for a much more productive company machine.

Wisdom and interventions for building a regimen 

Build a routine that you can actually stick to, which means building it in pieces. You’ll want to phase into the first part of it, create environmental triggers that activate your reward centers and make the habit do the work, and then chain that routine with other routines.

How to build a regimen plan

Consider what’s important to you

What’s going to drive you to power through forming the routine?

Psychological drivers: Do you know beyond doubt your reason for wanting this activity, and does it feel true to you?

• • What’s your vision?
  • What are your values?
  • What are your goals?
  • What are your motivations?

Performance capacity: Do you want to reach a higher level of performance in that activity?

• • What are you capable of when it comes to your
    • Mindset, Nutrition, Movement, and Recovery

Functional state: Do you want to function at a higher level in your work?

An example game plan to STRIVE for

Create a training plan for yourself (recall, no two people are the same — part of the value here is building your own).

Here's an example of a game plan, but be sure to create your own based on your personal needs and goals.