Episode 209: How I Established My Current Evening Routine

29 Jan

It’s a new year I’ve decided that I need a lot more structure in my life. Today we’ll be going over what’s working for me with my evening routine, how I decided the structure of it all, and things I ask myself each night to make it work, including:

Why I decided I needed an evening routine
Questions I asked myself to decide where to start
Defining the chunk of my evening
How to feel relaxed, restored, and ready for the day ahead
The breakdown of my current evening routine & what's working

I'd love to hear more about YOUR evening routine. Come say hi at let me know on Instagram @sarahsteckler

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Transcript:

You are listening to episode 209 of the Mindful Productivity podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler. And this week, I'm going to be talking to you about how I established my current evening routine. I'll be going over why I decided I finally needed to revamp and actually have an evening routine, the questions I asked myself to decide on where to start, how I defined my evening and what that time chunk really looked like, and then all the different ways I wanted to feel, and finally, my actual evening routine. My hope is that this episode will give you some ideas for structuring or revamping your own evening routine. So let's go ahead and get into it. Welcome to the Mindful Productivity podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler, and this is the place to be to live a more mindful and productive life. If you're ready to turn daily chaos into calm and start your days with intention, then get ready to join me as we dive deep into mindful living and personal productivity. It's time to connect with your true self so you can live the life you want to live. And it all starts now. Welcome back to the podcast, friends.

It's a brand new year at the time of this recording, and I've decided that I need a lot more structure in my life. We recently moved states. Well, recently, we moved last year. We moved states. We're always moving because my husband's in the military. And ever since the pandemic, too, I've just felt like my life has been complete chaos. There have been a lot of not so positive habits that have seeped into my daily life, my weekly routines, things that I really wasn't choosing to do intentionally. I just found myself doing. So I really wanted to buckle down and decide to change my life and to do something different. And a lot of times when we're thinking about habits that we want to change, it can be really tempting to want to change everything at once. And a lot of times I would want to change my morning first because that's the beginning of the day. But I actually decided this time around to start from the evening and work backwards a little bit and ask myself, what are the things that you could be doing in the evening to improve your sleep, to get up in the morning, and to ultimately make your life easier and more fun?

What would make your life more fun? What would make you want to get out of bed every morning? So here's a little bit about how I decided to structure all of it and the things that I wanted to start asking myself every night to make these things work. So this episode will be broken down into, I think, five main sections. And the first one is why I decided that I needed an evening routine. And I'm so curious to see what resonates with you and if any of these are reasons maybe you want to come back to an evening routine or just start one yourself. So the first thing was that I really noticed that I was feeling extra sad and low and off in the evenings. Once it got dark, I noticed that I would go into this tailspin and I was ruminating a lot and just coming up with all these reasons why things were bad. And side note, I heard something on TikTok while back. I think it was actually from a Reddit thread. It was reposted. So I don't know where the original source is from. But someone said something like... It was like something that you've learned throughout your life that has been really helpful.

And it was, don't analyze your life after 9:00 PM. And that really resonated with me. And maybe it's not the evening for you. Maybe it's the morning when you might have anxiety. Maybe there's a time of day that just tends to be rough. But I was like, oh, that's really great. Turn it off after 9:00 PM. There's reason you need to be going into your life history after 9:00 PM. But anyway, I had noticed that I started feeling extra low and sad. And I have a history of depression and all these things. So I was aware of that. But I was like, it feels more than normal. And then my default, because of that, started to become doomscrolling on TikTok until those ads come up that are like, hey, are you scrolling instead of sleeping? And you're like, no. And you keep scrolling. So I noticed that was happening. I also noticed I was wanting to pick up TikTok and just doomscroll because I started noticing this aha moment. Oh, I'm doing this because I actually feel lonely and I'm seeking connection. And I'm away from my family and stuff like that. Those are normal things I'm going through.

But I was like, doomscrolling on TikTok until way too late at night is not really helping you. And then I really also started noticing, I'm being so real with you guys today. I was starting to feel I'm almost hung over in the mornings from lack of sleep. I was waking up with headaches because I wasn't sleeping as well. I mean, we also had a gas leak last year, which didn't help with all of that. And that's another story. I probably won't go into all the details of that. But I was just noticing more and more that my lack of sleep and my lack of bedtime routine wasn't helping, right? When you're so tired or you just have had pieced together sleep or you wake up with a headache, you feel super exhausted. It was messing with my overall bedtime and my circadian rhythm. And it just wasn't making me feel like my professional Sarah self. I didn't like it. And that lack of sleep was also cascading me into other habits and territories that I did not like. So the excessive doomscrolling wasn't helping with that. And then it also led to more door-dashing than I would prefer.

And I was ordering things that were really not making me feel good. And I was noticing, I mean, I had I was just having these moments. There was a series of weeks where I was getting indigestion and all these things that normally I don't experience. And I was like, I'm getting older, but this is ridiculous, right? And I was making these excuses like, well, I'm really hungry, but I'm too tired to cook. And then I was wondering why the food budget was so tight because I was door-dashing, all these things, right? I was taking lots of random naps, the brain fog and fatigue. And then ultimately, I just had this moment. I was like, I don't like who I am during the day. I don't like it. I was extra moody. I was impatient with my dog Bella. There was all these things that just compiled. And it was this moment where I was like, I don't like this. I don't like any of this. So then I was like, okay, well Where do you want to start? I knew I wanted to start with an evening routine. I knew I wanted to stop the TikTok doomscrolling and all of that.

So I asked myself a series of questions, right? And my coaching background helped with that. But I was like, Sarah, how do you want to feel in the morning? And what will get you there? And I really started thinking about that. And I started considering what my mornings had been like recently. They'd been tough. My alarm would go off or my dog would wake me up. And I did not want to get... No part of me wanted to exist in that moment. I was tremendously tired and just upset that I was awake, right? And I was like, I don't want to feel that way in the morning. I'd love to feel refreshed in the morning. I'd love to feel like I got enough sleep, right? Or at least a minimum amount of sleep, you know? And what will get you there. And so I started thinking of how many hours of sleep I would need, and then what time I would need to go to bed if I wanted to get up at a certain time in the morning. All those logistical questions that you ask yourself, how many hours of sleep would be ideal, and then how many hours of sleep would be realistic.

And that really helped me get real with myself. And I also asked myself, what helps you calm down? What helps you settle in? What helps you fall asleep? And what doesn't? And I can tell you right now that being on my phone doesn't. It was so bad at one point. I was scrolling on TikTok so much. I don't know if you've ever had this happen. It almost felt like I couldn't stop. I'd be so tired and it almost felt like, well, I'm already really in this right now. What's another 20 minutes? And there were actually a couple of times when I noticed my eyes were super dry because you don't blink as often when you're on your phone and you're supposed to blink, I can't remember how many times per minute. And I was like, wow. It was just this moment. It wasn't making me feel good and I didn't like it. And I also had a lot of FOMO for some reason, not being on TikTok, because sometimes you hear news stories break faster on there than other places. Anyway, it was just this real, real moment. This podcast is not just about giving up TikTok, but that's partly what I'm working on.

It's just really reducing my time being plugged in to social media, what have you. And then I also asked myself, what things can you do at the end of the day to set yourself up for a great morning? Tonight, for an example, I'm recording this podcast in the evening tonight, and I was about to, leave to the kitchen and I saw the pile of dishes in the sink and I was like, I mean, you could do that tomorrow, right? But then I saw that the Vitamix was in the sink because I'd made this cheese sauce thing for dinner and it was just in there. And I was like, that's going to really piss you off. If you have to get up in the morning and clean the Vitamix to make your smoothie, that's not going to be a fun way to start your day. So clean it. So I ended up cleaning the Vitamix and getting it ready for my smoothie for the next day, right? And then I ended up cleaning the whole And I was like, this is great. It didn't even take that long. So it was like 10 minutes of my time.

Is the kitchen sparkling clean? No. Is the sink empty? Yes. Great. Perfect. Fabulous. The next thing, so now we're moving into phase three this evening routine breakdown, but is really defining what your evening is, really having a time chunk. And I'm someone that has a really hard time managing time and understanding time. And so giving myself a visual can be helpful. So if you have a planner that has time blocks or even just writing chunks of time out, something like that can be really, really helpful. But I asked myself, what part of the day was the evening? When did the evening officially begin? And for me, this was going to be 5:00 PM, because 5:00 PM is usually when I'm ready to either start dinner or eat dinner. A full transparency, sometimes I start cooking dinner at 4:30. I I am a grandmother at heart, the future where I can go to Denny's and eat dinner at 4:00 PM is coming, and I am so ready for it when that day comes. Give me 4:00 PM dinners. But 5:00 PM was the time when I was like, yes, that's going to be the start of my evening.

And I also needed to decide when was the end of the evening, right? When did I want to be closing my eyes? Right now, that's around 10:00 PM. Am I really strict with that? No. Again, this is a work in progress, right? But 10:00 PM. So that gave me five hours, five hours of evening time. In that five hours or whatever amount of time you give yourself, you got to ask yourself, what do I want to have happen? So I was like, okay, I know a couple of things. I want to cook and eat dinner. I want to have the kitchen clean for the next day. I wanted to have time to relax and take a bath because baths are life for me. Going to bed and just feeling clean. Like, yes. I was telling someone while back, there's something about having a clean scalp. This is so weird. There's something about it. If I have a clean scalp, I have no anxiety, I have no worries in the world. I'm so relaxed So having a bath at night, if I can do that, that's pristine living. And I also wanted to read. And I also knew that there were things I had to do.

So they weren't just once, right? But I knew I had to... I need to take my dog out for her nightly little walk and poop. She's a Bulldog, so it's not really a big walk. It's more just like she wants to poop in front of the neighbor's houses. Okay. I needed to put our cat, Dublin, to bed and change her cat box. We have a cat that screams bloody murder in the morning. So she now actually sleeps in my husband's gaming room. It's where he plays video games and stuff. She has a little cat box in there in a bed and we tuck her in at night and she's actually stopped screaming. She used to scream, but we couldn't hear her. And so that's been the solution. And this is also, a side note, an evening routine I'm creating now that my husband is currently deployed. So this is a huge shift for me, too. So things that normally my husband would do in the evening, now I have to do all of it. So I'm also adjusting and thinking about all those things. And there's going to be seasons of your life where your routines will need to change.

If you have kids, things are going to change as they get older, all those things. If you have if you don't, whatever. So give yourself permission. So play with this. It doesn't have to be... You're not writing it in stone. You're setting something up and you're going to experiment with it. That's our big word, it's experimentation. So other things I wanted to set the pet food out ahead of time. It's literally just me putting the cans on the counters so that if I'm tired in the morning, I'm not like, where's the food? It's like it's right in front of me. I can take care of it. And then I also wanted to do... I do a house check at night where I go around, lock up the house, turn off the lights, make sure everything things secure, blah, blah, blah. Those are things I wanted to do. And then I also knew, because I love alliteration and I love my little acronyms, even though this isn't really an acronym, I knew that there was three main things that I wanted to identify and have with my evening. And I knew that those things were I wanted to feel relaxed, I wanted to feel restored, and I wanted to feel ready for the next day.

So breaking those down, maybe they will inspire you. Feeling relaxed meant that I was going to have a nightly bath because feeling relaxed also for me is what are the body cues? What are the things that are going to physically remind your body that we're getting ready for sleep? We're getting ready for bed. And for me, that was the bath. So I knew that that was something like a non-negotiable that I wanted to do. And also I have collected over the years, like any time, like it's my birthday or Christmas, we have stockings or anything, my husband will always get me tons of bath stuff. And I always tell him, never not get me bath stuff. I always want more bath stuff. I love baths. I probably take more baths than a child. I love them. So please always get me more things. So I have a huge collection of face masks, bath bombs Any of those things. The Bath and Body Works shower gel stuff that I use all of that. I love it all. But for a long time, I kept saving. I was like, I'm going to save it for a special occasion.

I was like, what? Use it. So now I go all out. I light a essential oil candle in there. I use a fight face mask every time. Sometimes I use a bath bomb because I'm running low now, actually. I think I only have 10 left. And I give myself 30 full minutes to sink into that bath. I don't know if that's a long time or a short time for a bath. Also, super random, weird question, and I feel like I'm going to be in the minority on this, but every time I see a movie where somebody draws somebody a bath, they let the whole bath fill up and then they get into it. And I'm like, what? I am weird. I turn the bath water on, get it hot, right? I let any cold water that starts, I let that drain, turn the water on hot, get the suds going. I get in the tub right away. It is cheek to the bottom of the tub. I don't let... I get in there and I let it fill up around me. I don't know. I'm weird. I want to know if I'm the only one that does that.

Cheek to tub. And I get going. And I love it because then I I want to feel the water fill up around me. It's super warm. And then I'm in there for 30 minutes. So anyway, that is way more information that you need to know. But I love my baths, and that is part of feeling relaxed. In terms of feeling restored, I knew that I needed something. I needed something to declutter my brain, and I needed time to decompress. And so I'll get into that when I get into my evening routine and what I do. But feeling restored for me meant decluttering and then having time to read, to decompress, to not be in my head so much. And then feeling ready for the next day just means that I feel prepared. I want to wake up in the morning and I want there to be a clear path to the things I want to do. I love my daily walk in the morning and I have a treadmill inside, which was the best decision I've made. I actually moved my treadmill that weighs like 400 pounds. How much does it weigh? I feel like I'm over-exaggerating.

Maybe it weighs 200. It's probably 200 pounds of steel. But I actually moved it by myself from the garage to the living room where we have AC. I don't know how I did it. I have no idea how it moved it. My neighbor even walked by and she was like, do you need help? And I was like, no. And she was like, okay, you do. But okay. And she's like, I'm going to go around the block. But if you're here when I get back, I'm helping you. And that just made me move it even faster. Oh, my God. Talking I'm talking to people. But so I got it in the house and now it's in there. Where was I even going with this? Feeling ready means that you wake up in the morning and there's just a clear path for your day. So that meant clearing the kitchen. It doesn't have to be perfect, but the Vitamix needs to be ready so you can make your smoothie. Don't have shit on the floor so that you can walk in there. Basic things. Those were my things. Now we get to, finally, my actual evening routine.

And It's pretty simple. It's not going to be mind-blowing, so don't get too excited. But these are the things I'm currently doing that are helping me. And they've created these pillars to my evening that help me calm down, feel nourished, close the kitchen. And that's helpful for me too, because I close the kitchen and then I know, Hey, you're done eating for the night. And that's just helpful for me to have certain decisions made. To know that my body is going to feel relaxed, that I'm going to start to feel restored, that my brain can start calming down, all those things. So 5:00 PM hits, right? And this is when I'm cooking and eating. So I give myself a full hour, full transparency. Sometimes I do start cooking at 4:30 if I'm famished. But 5:00 PM hits and I'm eating dinner, I'm either sitting out on the patio with my dog or I'm sitting with Bella and I'm watching a show. And that's my time to just eat and watch TV. That's what I do. I love it. I try not to be on my phone during that time. And I really eat my food slowly and really take it in.

And I love it. I love that time so much. 6:00 PM hits and I get up and I put my dish in the sink and I tidy up and clean the kitchen. If I'm lucky and I've been doing that consistently, then this really doesn't take much time at all. So I give myself a full 30 minutes from 6:00 to 6:30 to do this. So if the kitchen's not super messy, even if it is, it doesn't take me more than 15 minutes to load the dishwasher and get it going. This is also time where I may throw in some extra laundry. I may vacuum real quick or change the sheets on the bedding if I need to. It's this half an hour of time where it's like, Clean the kitchen and tidy up. Not a big deal, but that keeps the house going throughout the week. 6:30 PM rolls around This doesn't always happen like clockwork because my Bulldog is very fussy and throws a fit and refuses to poop. I don't know what it is. She doesn't want to go out and poop, even though I know she needs to poop. It's a whole ordeal.

But 6:30 rolls around. And for whatever reason, I don't know if you guys have dogs that do this, we have a fence backyard for the first time, actually, since we've had Bella in my marriage, since we've lived all these places, we have a backyard. It's fantastic. But My dog will poop outside in the backyard all day. This dog poops a lot. And she'll go out in the backyard. But night time hits and she's got to poop out front. And I pick up all the poop in the backyard just about every day. But whatever it is, she's got to be lined up with the north nodes or something out front. She will not go in the back. So we go out front, we do a walk, all that good stuff. Then the goal, and I just started doing this. So this specific night time routine has been pretty solid with me now for about two weeks. And this new thing I started doing was my doctor told me, and then I was reading, too, it can be really helpful to move your body after a meal, especially dinner. And I used to do this, but I was like, why I want to make this an intention.

So 6:50-ish hits and I just jump on my treadmill for a quick 10 minute walk. I walk at like half an incline or a one incline. I'm walking slow at like 2.2 miles per hour. I just hop on there. Sometimes I blast a little techno or just or just turn on the TV. But 10 minutes, not a big deal. We're not trying to do a workout here. We're just walking for 10 minutes. And what I find that does is not only does it make me feel less bloated and less lethargic after dinner, because sometimes I'll have, if I have a heavier meal, I'll be like, I'm so tired, I don't even want to take a bath. I'm so tired, I don't even want to read. That It just helps me. It feels like my food digests better. And it also just declutters my brain. So because I can notice in the evening, that's when I have that natural tendency for my brain to start like, they're going to have all these thoughts. Remember when you were five years old and you liked ponies and you did that? It's just like everything in the world. I never liked ponies.

I don't know why I said that. Everything in the world just starts coming at me in the evening. And I'm like, no. It's like, remember about everything you've ever been sad about in your life and all the ways you've been a failure and everything that could go wrong. And I'm like, no, no, no. And so the walk really helps with that, tremendously. So highly recommend just a quick 10 minute walk. It could even be five. And it could be, it also could just be something different if you don't have a treadmill in your house or you can't walk outside. It could even just be like, hey, after dinner, I give myself 15 minutes, whatever, to actually digest the food. And then I go do a couple of jumping jacks or I do some yoga Anything. Loving that, really loving that. So then I do that 10 minute walk, got my heart rate up a little bit, and now it's bath time. So 07:00 PM hits, it's bath time. We've talked about how much I love those. And then I'm in there for about 30 minutes And then that's me time. So usually around that time, I'll brush my teeth, all that good stuff.

I will also then usually go back into the kitchen and take... I've been taking my magnesium glycinate at night. I really love that. I do want to try the spray. I don't know if that's anecdotal, if that actually does anything, but I've heard that some people enjoy the magnesium spray on the bottom of your feet before you go to bed. It can help. I don't know. But I take magnesium. I also make myself a cup of tea. Lately, I've been loving chamomile at night, sometimes pepper mint. Make myself a cup of tea and I shut down the kitchen. So I turn off the lights. I get the pet food out, ready to go for the next morning. And 7:30 30 to 8:30 is just me time. So it's time, whatever I want to do. If I want to come back into my office and do a little journaling and planning, if I want to get in bed with Bella, which normally she convinces me to do because she It's just a potato, baby. I'll watch a show or something. If I am playing a game on my Switch or something, it's just me time. Whatever that hour is, it's just free time to do whatever you want.

There's not a set rule about phone or screen time, but I have been trying to not be on social media and instead actually do something. Then from 8:30 until 10:00. And in fact, ideally, I'm trying to go to bed at 9:30. But right now it's 10:00. That's what we're working with. 8:30 hits and then it's your reading. So no more screen time, no more TV. Get your book out, whatever book you're reading. And and start reading and enjoy it. Give yourself, I give myself an hour to read. And then the goal, right, is that 9:30, 10:00 PM, that's when it lights out. So that's when I close my eyes. And one thing I struggled with for the longest time, and I feel like this is just a recent development, within the past few years. I don't know if it's a pandemic thing or what, but I noticed that if I didn't fall asleep within the first five minutes, because my husband, he'll just close his eyes and just He's asleep. That's it. Like, bless him. Lucky you. But I have never been able to fall asleep like that. So it usually takes me a while.

I usually have to just lay there and then eventually, right, I doze off. But for a long time, my husband would fall asleep and I'd be like, I'm still awake. And then I'd pick up my phone and be like, well, maybe I'll just look at something real quick. No. So I've really been making an effort that I just have to lie there until I fall asleep. But I have been noticing that doing all these things, taking a bath, all those things help me just tell my body, you're getting ready for sleep. And it's really, really helped. And I think all these things that I do and Stopping eating in a certain time, I think helps too. It just I don't feel... If I eat, if I have a snack around Christmas time, I was having a little couple of pieces of chocolate or something before bed, right before I went to sleep, that would keep me up. So I noticed eating and then giving myself a few hours to not eat before bed really helps me fall asleep easier. And then the bath and feeling clean and feeling warm, all those things really, really help.

So don't underestimate the power of trying these things, even if they're not brand new ideas or you've done them before. And doing them, there's something about doing them at the same time every night that just feels really reassuring. It reminds me of when I was little and I would do similar things. And then I'd be like, okay, cool, it's time for bed. There's just something nice about having that routine, having that regularity, especially in times where sometimes the world feels like... The older you get, it feels like there's less and less within your scope of control. So it's nice to have something that you can just fall back on. So I hope this episode was helpful in giving you some ideas for establishing or revamping your own evening routine. I'd I'd love to hear what you do for your evening routine. You can come say hi on Instagram. I'm at Sarah Steckler. And drop me a comment, send me a DM. I'd love to hear what you do, or if you have any other tips for me, or if you related to any of the weird things I said today. So thank you so much for listening to the podcast.

As usual, you can always find more resources over on the blog, Sarahsteckler. Com. And I hope that you keep listening and tune in next week as well. So see you then. Bye bye.