Why an evening routine is the best idea for creatives

I feel like most creative people tend to have their best ideas and flow state moments in the evenings and at night. That can be great a couple times a month, but it shouldn‘t be normal for our health’s sake. The way to solve that is by creating an evening routine. I already talked about morning routines in episode 3, but I wanted to go further on the evening routines I mentioned there and why an evening routine is the best idea for creatives.

Boundaries

The first part of an evening routine is setting yourself a time limit for work. Mine is 8pm, I won‘t work after 8pm unless I‘m absolutely having some breakthrough moment stuff happening. Having this time limit helps you relax and keeps you from being constantly „on“ which I talked about in the episode about toxic productivity.

What else should be part of an evening routine for it to be actually helpful and helping us mentally? For one you might want to have a sleep time and stop looking at your phone an hour beforehand. I also struggle with this, but it helps having app blocks activated so you can‘t open certain apps during a specific time. I actually use two apps when I‘m in one of my hardcore social media phases. It also helps deleting apps that eat up too much of your time. TikTok is banned from my phone and Instagram has a time limit.

Evening activities

Now that we‘ve set those boundaries, we can actually look at evening activities. Depending on when you eat, dinner could still be on that list, but I think that‘s a given.
Next thing would maybe be a relaxing drink like tea, milk and honey or warm water. No joke, warm water can actually help you calm down.
Now, with an actual evening routine it gets about 10 times easier to not forget your skin care routine, it also becomes easier to have a 5 minute tidy up in the evening and never have a messy space again and it becomes easier to push yourself to read more books.

Long term effects

Including those three things can make such a major difference when you look at them in the long term. A habit of skin care will help you in 10-20 years and beyond. Creating a habit of tidying will help you with not getting overwhelmed by your environment for the rest of your life. A habit of reading more books cultivates more relaxation in the evening and depending on what you read either teaches you new things or builds your fantasy.
Meditation and self-hypnosis can also help immensely right before sleep with actually getting tired and falling asleep quickly.

You see, there are quite a few habits you can include into your evening routine that help create rest when you deserve it the most.
It takes your creative overthinking brain and calms it down enough to actually rest and prevent burnout. That‘s why you need routine when everything else in your life is anything but routine.
In case you want to track your habits to implement them you should check out the habit trackers in my freebie library that you can access my joining my newsletter squad here:

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Why an evening routine is the best idea for creatives by Rabea