Break the Chains of Habit

From Rigid Routines to Mindful Rituals Abroad

Have you ever clung so tightly to your daily rituals that change began to feel daunting? What unexpected moments of freedom emerged when you let go of what “had” to be done?

This piece goes out to

Dawson Vandervort

who was kind enough to share his investment in the success of my immigrant adventure and wonder about what it would look like to start on his own. Share your experience with the transformative power of change in your own life…I’ll go first.

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It’s been a couple of weeks since I recapped my London trip, meaning it’s been a little over a month I’ve been back and, as the kids like to say, “ it’s gonna be May.” Since moving to The Netherlands, the visit with my mom was the divide between “getting acclimated as an immigrant” and “actually starting to live here,” whatever that means. If I’m being honest, things have felt a bit…squishy…and I’d like to explore why.

I’ve been busy juggling so many awesome ideas I want to chase while trying to figure out how to put bit of structure around the total freedom of living abroad without a traditional job. I haven’t been idle, by any means: I’ve written more short fiction, launched a new mystery serial, revised my website to embed my Substack (a feat that nearly broke me), and decided to level-up by doing a bit of “my own research” to supplement my memoir pieces. Still, none of that explains the almost listless feeling I’ve been facing now that we’re no longer “fresh off the boat” and are settling into the reality of life abroad.

As far as the spongy feeling goes, I’ve traced it back to my having to build a whole new life.

The Comfort and Constraint of Habit

Of course I was excited for the chance to start over somewhere else, but, as someone who LOVES him some habits, it’s been unsettling to say the least. I’m not alone in that feeling because, to some extent, all humans are creatures of habit—it’s a part of our nature. Psychologist Laura Green explains, “our cognitive system depends on the regularity of behavior to minimize mental effort, allowing for more efficient thought processes” (Green, 2021). We naturally gravitate toward repetitive actions to handle life’s mounting cognitive load…which, let’s face it, only grows heavier with the exponentially increasing insanity of the daily headlines.

I once heard that your brain barely registers habitual actions, except when something out of the ordinary happens—like how your commute is usually a blur except for that one time you nearly hit a deer. It’s funny how our own lives disappear in the morass of memory when deemed repetitive, unless you’re Marilu Henner I suppose. In my twenties, I lived in Oklahoma City and worked as much as I could in the arts, often juggling as many as seven jobs at once, including working in an industrial paint shop. Despite the salary of a starving artist (I think I made $7,500 in a good year) I always managed to eat, but I cannot for the life of me recall what. Knowing I must have done so, I have no memories of grocery shopping except for when my debit card declined.

This, as Ellen Langer would put it, exemplifies mindlessness: in performing familiar actions we become “oblivious to alternative ways of knowing and insensitive to context” (Langer, 2014). We settle into comfortable patterns where life is sorted into recognizable and repeatable things. Saving mental capacity through routine, we soon move from familiar into robotic. Still, as philosopher Martha Kelly notes, “habit, though often unnoticed in its persistence, shapes identity, forming the silent backdrop of our choices and experiences” (Kelly, 2020).

Before leaving the US, I had a strict morning routine: wake up, take my medication, meditate, and snuggle with the cat. After a few too many minutes lost to TikTok, I’d head out the door for a three-mile run (on the treadmill during the icy months). Setting the sweaty laundry on a timer, I’d shower, dress in clothes laid out the night before, and log on for my remote job. I ate the same morning meal almost invariably: a large cup of English Breakfast and a high-protein everything bagel roll, which I made from scratch every other weekend like clockwork.

Throughout the workday, I squeezed in more TikTok—sorry to my former colleagues—and kept on my two-year DuoLingo streak (the pressure to stay in the diamond level is real). My initial motivation to learn another language evolved from a pre-vacation study into a full-blown mission to see if I could. William and my dream of living in a different country meant language was going to be part of the equation at some point. Despite the time I spent with that weird little owl, I’m not sure how much skill I gained: no Dutch people have casually asked me if I am a duck. Well,

Sevgül Sümer Dielemans

’ husband did, but only after being prompted 😂

I was also taught to say that the size of my hands says nothing about the size of my other body parts.

When Routine Becomes a Cage

I’ve mentioned before that I was a rigid child—a shock to no one who knew me before I came out…or for fifteen years after that. Although I am becoming less rigid, I still breed my own constrictions, a habit I am now consciously trying to curb. For better or worse, I find a repeatable pattern comforting and cling to routines as a calming refuge from anxiety and uncertainty. Having always found solace in repetition, my response to stress has been to double down, developing stringent and overly prescriptive practices that walk the razor’s edge between habits that nourish and ones that deplete.

In my thirties, I worked my way up to department head in courseware and textbook operations at a major online university. My team’s responsibility for addressing crises ranged from broken links and scheduled platform upgrades to weather-related shipping delays and AWS DDoS attacks which made stress a constant companion. It was my first real office job: my career in the theatre was a lot more nudity, a lot less HR. I didn’t do a good job managing that pressure when I encountered it and, instead of recognizing what I was doing, I internalized it until it began to impact my sleep.

Drawing on my traditional coping mechanisms, I created what became known in our home as “the wind-down routine” (code for “I’m a jerk before bedtime”). I’d done the NYT Crossword for years before, a fun habit that morphed into an unyielding “must-do” as my fear of sleepless nights grew. Once I colored a picture on my iPad and slept well, so that activity had to become part of the routine. Same for the gratitude journaling and the monster-killing MMRPG. The refusal to be interrupted by William only deepened the absurdity of my increasingly elaborate nightly checklist. Eventually, I was spending nearly two hours each night on a quest for sleep that only pulled me further from the rest I was seeking.

In hindsight, it all sounds ridiculous, the same way many things do once their power over us has faded. As John Smith observes, “the very routines that once freed us from chaos can become chains, restricting our capacity for authentic, spontaneous engagement with life” (Smith, 2019). I clung to the shackles of my bedtime routine long after leaving that job and even after moving to another state…until I eventually allowed myself to experiment with letting elements go. To my great surprise, Will Shortz didn’t call to say he was disappointed in me the first time I skipped the puzzle…and I slept fine.

Wyna Liu, on the other hand, can suck it.

As it turns out, there is no amount of prescribed routine which can guarantee the same result. In fact, over reliance on regimen can leave us less resilient and less capable of embracing future change. Michael Dunne notes that “when routines become fixed and unchallenged by novelty, they diminish cognitive flexibility and adaptive thinking” (Dunne, 2022). From my personal experience, that is exactly what happens.

My struggles with anxiety came to a head in the summer of 2022. Tension that began during the first Trump administration erupted into a life-changing panic attack in the middle of the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. Sweating and heart racing, I genuinely thought I was dying…and instead of getting on the flight, we went to an urgent care because I needed a medical professional to confirm that I wasn’t. Armed with some benzos and a warning about celestially high blood pressure, William went on the family trip alone while I stayed home beneath a weighted blanket, desperately trying to figure out how to get back “under the whelm.”

Coming out of that was also the beginning of my mindfulness journey, an exceedingly difficult practice to adopt when your mind is primed for dizzying spirals of worry, but one that has paid incredible dividends. Through concerted effort, I slowly started to feel the effects and the fog of fear began to lift. I left the uncertainty of my startup job and, six months later, started writing my first novel, lending credence to Eckhart Tolle’s point that “habit can be a prison when it disconnects us from presence—the only moment where true freedom and creativity exist” (Tolle, 2018). Alongside anti-depressants, meditation gradually helped me ease the rigidity of my habits, even if I eventually fell into the trap of commoditizing meditation as a part of my daily routine.

So, maybe now the squishy feeling makes sense…

Transforming Habit into Ritual

Since returning from London, I’ve been struggling under the cognitive load of forging new habits in a new life in a new country where literally everything is at least a little different than it used to be. Like many writers describing life on foreign soil, I’m learning that adaptability is key, just as

Kimberly Anne

’s post Thriving Abroad reminds us: success in a new country requires embracing unpredictability rather than clinging to the old measures of stability. As William and I cross the three month mark, I’m trying to learn from my old pitfalls and realize that it’s up to me to make choices which will help me flourish.

In what I’m now calling my immigrant “hagelslag” (a Dutch term for breakfast-appropriate chocolate sprinkles), I’ve reiterated, as much for my benefit as yours, that I can’t control how things unfold, especially in this new chapter. As David Miller describes, “when we bring mindfulness to our habits, we transform them into rituals—inviting meaning and connection into our daily routines” (Miller, 2019). At one point in time, having no ability to ensure the same things happen each day would have made me viscerally uneasy; yet, the mindfulness lessons I’ve absorbed have empowered me to define the shape each one takes now that I’m working without the proverbial safety net.

Not all habits are detrimental, of course: when we first arrived in Rotterdam, absent my usual morning taking my anti-depressants first thing after coming downstairs meant I forgot to take them consistently for nearly a month. Now, settled in our home in The Hague, I’ve combined that practice with my daily ritual of making our bed, one that helps me cognitively transition from the laziness of morning into the rest of the day. Instead of baking it into rolls, I now eat my Greek yogurt with milk chocolate hagelslag sprinkles on top. I still start with a cuppa, though there must be something specifically added to Dutch water in order to ruin the taste of English Breakfast tea. I bought two huge boxes of Yorkshire back with me—security at St Pancras laughed when they searched my bag—and it does NOT taste the same, no matter what kind of suiker or koffiemelk I try.

Instead of forcing a session each morning, I savor some deep breathing without the pressure to maintain a streak on a meditation app. Guillermo, however, still requests his morning cuddles without fail…and we must obey our feline overlords. Even though every day is a language lesson living abroad, I enjoy a bit o’ Babbel and the endless TikTok scroll has been replaced by reading the inspiring writing on Substack. As flexible as my days have become, I’m finding I absolutely must carve out time for physical activity. Whether I’m wandering through the Haagse Bos (more on that soon!) or marching across town for errands, it’s become a highly meditative practice to focus on music and my footsteps.

Back in the US, we would do one massive pantry‐stuffing shop each week. Now that we don’t have a car, a full-size fridge, or an additional deep freezer in the basement that style of stocking up is no longer feasible. Following

Gregory Garretson

’s rules for being a good immigrant, I’m finding joy in the unpredictable and learning to love the differences of a new culture. Adapting to the Dutch practice of making frequent, smaller shopping trips and planning just a couple of meals at a time, I see how conditioned I was to saving everything for that one trip, even denying myself another mid-week. I am also no longer guilt-ridden over vegetables in the crisper when something changes between Saturday and Thursday.

No matter the country code, pizza always has my number…

Rather than measuring a day by ticking checkboxes, I’m deliberately reframing habits and routines through the lens of ritual in my new Dutch life. As Caroline Isham wisely states, “each mindful ritual acts as a portal through which the ordinary is elevated into the sacred, deepening our experience of self and spirit” (Isham, 2020). The activities that fill my time don’t have to repeat from one day to the next; what matters is holding space for meaningful parts within each one. Instead of valuing tasks by their completion, I’m focusing on the acts of breathing, enriching, and creating—finding they can sustain me, provided I focus more on why rather than what I’m doing.

In today’s world of instant results, building a personal brand takes time, and discouragement can creep in all too easily. As I grow my author business and push myself to write each day, I’ve been wrestling with the nagging feeling that I need a “regular job.” Part of me craves the structure of traditional work—the old itch for routine begging to be scratched—yet I remain enamored by the freedom to nurture my creative efforts, even if that means embracing an infinitely variable structure. There’s something to what I’m doing: writing is helping me see myself differently. Being an immigrant who gambled a lot of financial stability on building a new life, there’s a feeling that I should be employed, that a job working for someone else is somehow a guarantee of security and stability.

Feel free to disabuse me of the notion and help me hold out for a part-time gig at an English-speaking bookstore:

Moving abroad is like playing pickup sticks with your life: everything you once knew gets scattered, forcing you to relearn even the basics like how to spell your own name out loud. In your native language, you’re already miles ahead on the ingrained habit of what makes a syllable closed or open or how to visualize the standard units of measurement—I learned to think in inches, not centimeters. False cognates are a real trip: “even” remains an adverb in Dutch, but is translated as “just,” as in “recent” or “simply.” But the biggest mind-fuck of all is retraining myself to think of pants and glasses as singular objects, as in “where is my glasses?”

Now, I know what you’re thinking: didn’t this idiot understand that moving to another country would bring massive amounts of change? Of course I did, I just didn’t understand the scope before the novelty gave way to the everyday. Leaving home in any form challenges your sense of self, especially if routine has ever offered you haven. I am beginning to consciously break down the barriers that held me back in favor of more fluid rituals to help make meaning out of the raw potential around me. After all, we didn’t move across the ocean so everything would stay the same, we moved to become who we’re meant to be…even if it takes a while to figure out who that is and what he does all day.

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Bibliography

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• Green, Laura. “From Routine to Ritual: A Cognitive Transformation.” Journal of Open Cultural Studies, January 2023. Accessed April 24, 2025. https://openculturalstudies.org/articles/from-routine-to-ritual.

• —. “The Cognitive Benefits of Habitual Behavior.” Open Psychology Journal, May 10, 2021. Accessed April 28, 2025. https://openpsychjournal.org/articles/habitual-behavior-benefits.

• Isham, Caroline. “Ritual: The Pathway to Spiritual Transformation.” Gaia, February 2020. Accessed April 25, 2025. https://www.gaia.com/article/ritual-spiritual-transformation.

• Johnson, Emily. “How Your Brain Builds Habits to Save Energy.” Psychology Today, May 15, 2022. Accessed April 23, 2025. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-traces/202205/how-your-brain-builds-habits.

• —. “Rigid Routines: The Brain’s Innovation Blockade.” Psychology Today, June 10, 2022. Accessed April 24, 2025. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-traces/202206/rigid-routines.

• Kelly, Martha. “Ritual and the Reinvention of the Self.” Philosophy Now, September 2017. Accessed April 24, 2025. https://philosophynow.org/issues/162/Ritual_and_the_Reinvention_of_the_Self.

• —. “The Value of Habit.” Philosophy Now, June 2020. Accessed April 28, 2025. https://philosophynow.org/issues/130/The_Value_of_Habit.

• Langer, Ellen. Mindfulness. 25th Anniversary Edition. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2014.

• Miller, David. “Sacred Habits: Finding Spirituality in Everyday Routines.” Mindful, December 15, 2019. Accessed April 26, 2025. https://www.mindful.org/sacred-habits.

• Smith, John. “Freedom and Routine in Modern Life.” Philosophy Now, March 2019. Accessed April 27, 2025. https://philosophynow.org/issues/155/Freedom_and_Routine_in_Modern_Life.

• Tolle, Eckhart. “When Habit Becomes a Cage.” Eckhart Tolle TV, February 2018. Accessed April 25, 2025. https://eckharttolle.com/when-habit-becomes-a-cage.