If you feel like you’re stuck in a Groundhog Day rut then you aren’t alone. That movie is iconic precisely because it’s so relatable – we’ve all experienced moments in our lives when the days have run into one another. Routine is safe, after all, and safety is undeniably appealing.
However, experts believe that trying new things regularly can have a notable positive impact on our lives. In fact, studies on mice have previously revealed that navigating new experiences and environments can quite literally change our brain chemistry.
You’re not a mouse, but broadening your horizons could still have a notable impact, especially if you embrace change regularly. Trying small new things daily can have particular plus points that you might not expect.
Of course, this isn’t to say that you should relocate daily, or leave your job every five minutes. But, something as simple as embracing a new skill, or even doing something different during your morning routine might just give you a brand new outlook.
Don’t believe us? Here are five surprising benefits to trying something new every single day.
Gaining Confidence
If you only try to step outside of your comfort zone every few months, each time will feel like a major leap. This can require a lot of energy, and will likely see you slipping back into old routines because they’re easier. By comparison, embracing regular change on even a small scale can see you gaining notable confidence.
Let’s say you start small, with a new cereal in the morning, or taking a walk when you would usually spend half an hour in front of the television. These minor changes could probably help you feel pretty good, giving you the confidence to try other new things, like learning to knit or sew. When you’re still riding off the back of that success, you might find you have the confidence to sign up for proper classes or join an evening course.
The regularity of these changes, and the positive impact they can have in the short-term, will soon see you embracing change as an opportunity, rather than something to fear. What’s more, your confidence will soar, meaning you can embrace these changes without needing half of the energy and positive self-talk that you required to make even one change in your past life.
Keeping Your Brain Fresh
In a lot of ways, a routine can be great for our brains. For instance, sleep schedules can be invaluable for brain health, while the calming influence of a reliable evening routine can reduce the risk of issues like stress.
However, when you’re always doing the same things, there’s also a risk that you’ll stop learning. And, that’s a sure way to switch off to what’s going on around you.
By comparison, embracing something new every single day is sure to keep your brain fresh, particularly if that new thing is skill or learning-based. Learning a new craft can be especially great for this, as it may require thought processes and engagement that you’ve not used since school.
Or, if you don’t fancy such a heavy learning process one day, why not play a new game? Games like chess and mahjong provide proven cognitive benefits, which you can enjoy from the moment you start learning to play.
By engaging your brain in these ways, you can find new passions, and also potentially offset risks like cognitive decline in later life.
Overcoming Failure
If you’re trying something new every single day, you’ll probably fail a fair amount along the way. This failure could be frustrating, but it’ll inevitably serve just as vital a learning purpose as your successes.
After all, learning to fail is key to being more willing to take risks. Equally, the more regularly they happen, the more able you’ll feel to take key lessons from each failure in a way you might not be able to otherwise. That’s because, if you don’t try new things often, even minor failures could come as such a blow that you’re left entirely unwilling to even think about the whole event.
More regular failures will sting a lot less, especially if you start with small changes. Let’s say you try a new recipe one day. If you burn it, you can simply get takeout. The stakes are also low enough that you’ll probably be able to laugh at the failure and work out where you went wrong along the way. Just like that, you’ve embraced failure as part of the process, and learned a lesson that will improve your cooking skills in the long run!
Discovering Yourself
Most of us spend our younger years discovering a lot about the types of people we are, and the things we enjoy doing. Once we realise those things, we can build a far more comfortable and well-suited life for ourselves. But, once we’ve achieved that goal, the discovery stages of life end for many of us.
This is a real shame, and it can have a significantly detrimental impact considering that we all continue to grow as people throughout our lives. It may be that you stick to a hobby like reading because it was what you liked when you were younger, but what if that same hobby doesn’t suit your life now that you’re a parent? You’ll keep piling pressure on yourself to do that thing you no longer enjoy, and feel heavy failure when you don’t get around to it.
This negative cycle is often responsible for hitting a wall in our lives, but trying new daily activities could be a great way around it. After all, this is a unique opportunity to try out the things you’re most interested in as your life stands right now. Equally, this fast-fire way of testing out activities like new hobbies or classes can quickly reveal what you don’t enjoy, even if it’s something you wanted to do at some earlier stage.
Continuing to try new things in this way can also ensure that you’re constantly discovering new things about yourself, and making lifestyle adjustments in light of that.
Embracing Possibility
It’s also worth noting that regularly trying new things can see you embracing possibilities in a way that can only stand to improve your life.
Too often in adulthood, we state that we ‘could never learn a new language’ or ‘would never know how to start making a quilt’. And, because we believe in those impossible narratives, we never even try to do those things, no matter whether we would like to or not.
Committing to trying one new thing every day makes it far more likely that you’ll at least try to learn a word or two of another language, or get to grips with a few quilting techniques at last. And, once you’ve done that, you might start seeing that those seemingly impossible goals aren’t so far out of reach after all.
The benefit of setting a daily goal for trying new things especially lies in the fact that it breaks big tasks down into small chunks, proving time and again that even the most out-of-reach goals can be entirely achievable if we put our minds to it.
Takeaway
Trying something new every day might sound exhausting right now, but once you’re in the habit, it’s a surprisingly good routine to have. What’s more, you don’t need to go big. Simply commit to, say, learning one new word tomorrow, and see where it takes you!
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