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Surprise! We’re back with another fantastic routine guide. How to create an evening routine, a routine critical to your day; even more so, your tomorrow. Since La.Rue’s launch, these are the routine blogs you have seen: How to Create a Routine that Works for You; 5 Easy Ways to Change Your Routine; and Sunday Night Routine: Unwinding & Preparing for a Productive Week. All of these fantastic blogs have helped you design or restructure a routine in your life that is important to your day-to-day. Today on La.Rue, I want to talk about your evening routine and how you can optimize it for success. Our evening routine should be for winding down, relaxing, and mentally preparing ourselves for the day ahead. So when we take that portion of our day and design an enchanting routine that helps us achieve those end-of-day resolutions, we create space for a positive mindset.

Before we dive into the next portion of the blog, I first want to discuss why an evening routine is so important. The first major benefit of having an established evening routine is cutting down the time you’re wasting doing things that are unnecessary for your day. When we practice an evening routine, we set aside a dedicated piece of time every night to get certain things done; these are things we have decided we should do every night to benefit our minds, bodies, and sleep. In the same way our morning routine sets the tone for our day, our evening routine, is the final piece of punctuation. Remember, “The secret to your success is found in your daily routine.”

Start by Cutting Out Bad Habits

The best place to start when designing your own strategic night-time routine is by cutting out the bad habits. If you recognize you’re spending too much time doing one thing and need to cut back, i.e., spending time on your phone, watching tv, on youtube, etc., then start by cutting back on that time. Next, ask yourself what you’ve already implemented in a routine. Do you do these things every night? Are you doing these things some nights and skipping others? For example, your skincare/self-care routine should be something you practice every night. So, a bad habit might be that you’re practicing your good habits only sometimes. Start by examining what needs changing right now. As far as habits go, remember a great resource and tool you can always use is the La.Rue Habit Tracker to track the habits you’ve implemented or want to implement into your night-time routine.

Once you’ve cut the bad habits, you can decide what would be optimal for you to add to your routine to inspire calmness, happiness, and success. When we cut out the bad habits and start adding new, positive habits to our routines, we’re re-wiring our minds into a more productive thinker. Creating new habits and routines is like making an initial investment in ourselves. But, the longer we practice these habits, the longer we’re investing. This is an investment in our powers of positive thinking, our motivation to succeed, and our desire to trigger more positive investments in ourselves. The more we invest and work on ourselves, the more likely we are to live out successful and happy lives.

Affirmations in the Evening

There is one specific habit I think everyone should include in their evening routine that I would like to go over with you. A few weeks ago, I published the blog, Top 10 Positive Affirmations You Should Practice Daily. In this blog, I discuss the power of affirmations and their effect on our lives when practiced daily. Affirmations have been scientifically proven to manifest our inner-most desires for success, love, wealth, happiness, etc. Several studies conducted, including one out of Annenberg School for Communication, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Michigan and UCLA, on Self-Affirmation, found that by practicing affirmations or self-affirming, we are “rewarding” ourselves with the things in which we desire. 

A few weeks ago, I began working with a Mindset coach, Haley Hoffman Smith, who told me about the ThinkUp app. You can record, in your voice, yourself saying your affirmations and then listen to them on a loop while falling asleep. With calming background music and guided meditation beforehand, this incredible app will absolutely help you manifest your dreams. It has a yearly subscription price of $39.99, but I assure you, it’s worth every penny.

Implementing Your Evening Routine 

Alright, we’ve discussed the importance of establishing an evening routine, how to cut out the bad habits, and the power of affirmations. Now, like with all things on the blog, we need to implement the strategies. Start by outlining the ideal evening routine you’d like to end up with. Sit down and write out a timeline of your evening, starting at say 7 or 7:30 and write out what that night looks like right now. Then, write out what you want that evening to look like once you’ve implemented all the positive changes you’re looking to make. If I were to do this exercise, my routine would only look slightly different because I’ve been modifying my routine already for months. But, of course, there are things I still need and want to improve on.

So, once you’ve got your two schedules written out, the one you have now versus the one you’d like to have in, say, three months, start by picking two things you’re going to begin changing. Routines and habits have to be modified and changed with incremental changes over periods of time. If you dive in all at once, you’re more likely to fail at something and feel disappointed. But, if we start small, we create great change that becomes the motivating factor to continue making changes. Continue this process and keep adding new changes every few weeks or so once you feel like the new habit has become more routine. Eventually, you’ll see that over time, not just your entire routine has changed, but your mindset, motivation, and inspiration to keep making positive change.