7 Simple, Fun, and Stupid Ideas to Break Your Current Pattern

For better or worse, our lives are often dictated by daily routines and patterns that are difficult to break.

If these patterns are mostly filled with positive thoughts, emotions, habits, and relationships, then you’ll continue to naturally experience happiness and success in your life.

And if these patterns are mostly filled with negative thoughts, emotions, habits, and relationships, then you’ll continue to naturally experience depression and failure in your life.

The problem is that these routines can be incredibly sticky and really hard to change. So when they are negative, it feels like something we can never climb out of. Change feels impossible.

We repeat our patterns so often that it becomes wired in our brains – every morning we wake up and our brains boot up the same “neural software” that motivates us to make the same exact choices day-in and day-out. In a way, we’re all hypnotized.

The truth is a lot of people don’t make many conscious choices throughout their day, they merely follow their current pattern – which doesn’t take any extra thinking or effort. We choose to eat the same chicken sandwich for lunch every day, because that’s what we’ve always done.

To break our current pattern, often times even the smallest of changes can become a catalyst for personal transformation. They teach us that change is possible, even if it’s something relatively small, silly, or meaningless.

Here are small ways to break your current pattern:

• Brush your teeth with your other hand.
• Try a new hobby you have zero experience with.
• Invent a new word and use it in a conversation by the end of the day.
• Go to a new restaurant you’ve never been to before.
• Move from one room to the next without touching the floor (“ground is lava”).
• Put a unique twist on an ordinary activity (such as eating popcorn with chopsticks or dancing while doing chores).
• Pick up a random book at the library and start reading it.
• Hang out with a new friend you just met.
• Try a completely new type of food or cuisine you’ve never had before.
• Have a random person recommend you a new movie, book, or song to check out (when you let people make choices for you, that can also be an interesting way to switch things up).
• Try playing a sport with your non-dominant hand.
• Lay upside down and pretend that’s how the world is oriented (imagine yourself walking on the ceiling).
• Choose an everyday object and invent a new use for it, such as a shoe or paperclip (a type of divergent thinking).
• Have fun and pretend to be someone else for an hour.
• Do the opposite of what you would normally do in a situation (if there’s no harm or risk).
• Do a familiar task with a beginner’s mind, where you pretend to be doing it for the very first time (think like an alien or newborn).
• Try not speaking for an entire hour (or day).

These are super small (and sometimes silly) changes, but they can help bring you out of “automatic mode.”

It can be liberating to do something different simply because you can – you prove to yourself that you still have power and free will.

Any little change that snaps you out of your current pattern can be a nice wake-up call. Psychology research shows that “openness to new experiences” in general can help make individuals more adaptable and flexible in a changing world.

The film Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) touches on this concept in a very existentialist and sci-fi way.

Throughout the movie, characters can jump into different universes within the “multiverse,” but to achieve that they first need to do some bizarre action as a “jumping point.” For example: wearing their shoes backwards, or licking a chair, or saying “I love you” to a random character.

The actions are completely nonsensical – but because they are so random, they open up the door to new possibilities and universes. In the movie (and perhaps in the real world too), one could say…

Every act of free will creates a new universe.

Perhaps that is too philosophical, but it can also be inspiring.

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