Tom Brady is a paragon of human excellence, a fact driven home by his recent tenth Super Bowl appearance at the age of 43. He’s achieved a level of professional success few could ever even imagine, and while it’s become fairly routine to heap praise on the future Hall-of-Famer, his unparalleled accomplishments as a football player beg the question: how does he do it?

The answer is quite simple, particularly if Aristotle’s assessment of excellence– that preeminence is not a singular act, but the habitual repetition of actions– is correct. Tom Brady, like the vast majority of personally and professionally prosperous people, owes the lion’s share of credit to an almost automatic set of routines.

The potent power of routines– at a physiological and practical level– cannot be overstated. While the professional achievements of the greatest football player of all time may be out of reach for most humans, the rewards one can reap from developing– and sticking with– a consistent routine are remarkable.

Some benefits of established routines:

1. Enhances prioritization – As Charles Hummel noted, routines allow us to focus solely on the most essential tasks at hand. They reduce the mental energy expended on unimportant or irrelevant topics– from the past or future– allowing our brain to focus on what truly matters.
2. Increases your attention span – Routines reduce the risk of becoming sidetracked, or losing your train of thought, outside of the present moment.
3. Lessens your worry – Following a set of routines can help regulate your nervous system, particularly limiting the time spent in a ‘fight-or-flight’ freeze. By reducing the level of uncertainty in your day-to-day life, your brain will produce a feeling of predictability, that lessens one’s discomfort with the unknown.
4. Maximizes mental bandwidth – Setting routines ensures your brain’s limited mental faculties can focus on what’s important. For instance, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman ate the same dessert for fifty years– chocolate ice cream– eternally removing that potentially challenging choice from his brain’s agenda.
5. Improves brain power – Routines help reduce the baggage from our brain’s emotional center, increasing your energy levels, ability to relate to others, and decision making. By creating and following routines, our brains are also freed to learn new tasks.

Routines help simplify our mental processes, ensuring we spend our precious mental energy on matters of importance. The little habits one can begin– that will eventually crystallize in an instinctual manner– don’t have to be daunting, and implementing incremental change into your daily schedule doesn’t need to be earth shattering.

But putting in the short-term work, to increase your chances of long-term success, is a crucial component of priming your mind and body. Just like the underlying foundation of a house, our mind and body needs to be primed, and prepared, before we can pursue a path towards fulfillment, and establishing healthy routines is a key part of that process.

Some effective routines that anyone (including a Super Bowl or Nobel Prize winner) can follow:

• A set bedtime and sleep schedule – The positive benefits of consistently obtaining a good night’s sleep are staggering. There’s a reason we spend ⅓ of our lives sleeping, after all.
• Eating meals at the same time every day
• Exercising within a set workout window
• Staying hydrated from morning to night
• Morning meditation – Practicing meditation consistently increases your ability to live in the present, and focus on the beauty of everyday life. A meditative routine ensures you don’t miss the forest for the trees in life.

Anyone can prime their brain and pursue a life of fulfillment– guided by their values– if they free up the mental bandwidth to do so. The foundations for finding fulfillment are found within the seemingly mundane maneuvers of a daily routine, and if the repetition of routine is good enough for Tom Brady, it’s clearly good for any one of us.

Additional Resources:

Rewire Your Brain With Exercise

Tom Brady’s Super Bowl Workout Routine