I’ve been reading lately about how astronauts live, and the thing that has stayed with me isn’t the gear or the spacewalks. It’s the schedule.
A standard day on the International Space Station, as the European Space Agency lays it out, begins with about an hour of “post-sleep time” and a planning conference, then 6.5 hours of work split between experiments, repairs and what is unglamorously called “housekeeping.” One hour is held for the midday meal. Two and a half are strictly scheduled for exercise. Then dinner, a little free time, an evening planning conference, and 8.5 hours scheduled for sleep. The whole day is laid out for them.
You’d think I’d read that and feel claustrophobic. Instead I caught myself slightly envious. The astronaut doesn’t have to wonder when to eat, or whether to skip the workout, or whether to take a meeting that morning, or any of the small daily negotiations the rest of us run on loop. Someone has already decided. The day is there. They just have to do it.
This is the part of routine I have come to think of as a quiet freedom — not freedom from rules, but freedom from having to make small decisions constantly.
My own routine is much looser than the ISS timeline, but it is a routine, and I’ve arrived at it after a lot of false starts. I write from home in the morning, when my brain is most useful for the work that actually matters. I go out for lunch. In the afternoon I work from a coffee shop — usually two different ones, with a walk between them when I finish a block. I workout at home in the evening. I’ve tried other configurations: gym mornings, no-routine days, working straight through, working from one fixed place. This one is the least friction. The day mostly happens to itself.
What that buys me is concentration. The mornings are reliably mine for the cognitive work that’s hardest to fit in once a day starts pulling at you. By the time I leave the house I’ve already done the part of the day I’m most likely to skip. The afternoon, by then, can be a bit more elastic, and the walks between cafes function less as breaks and more as a way to put down one task before I pick up the next. I notice the difference most when I don’t have it.
I’m not making a unique observation. UCLA Health puts it bluntly: “Following the same schedule day-in and day-out may seem like a boring way to live. But having a daily routine may be the thing your mental health has been missing.” Their piece collects a fair amount of research on the point: people with structured routines tend to report lower levels of anxiety and depression than people without them, and consistent sleep and wake times in particular are linked, in a 2025 study they cite, to a 38% lower risk of depression and a 33% lower risk of anxiety in regular sleepers compared to irregular ones.
The line from that same piece I keep coming back to, though, is less about anxiety and more about how routine works in practice. A predictable rhythm, the article says, “removes the burden of decision-making — as well as the pressure and guilt that often go with it.” That is the entire pitch in one sentence. The energy you would otherwise spend on hundreds of small choices is redirected onto the work, the people and the things you actually wanted to do something about today.
I’m not a psychologist; I just have a writer’s stake in this. Writers run on energy and attention. If I burn an hour of either on deciding where to work, what to eat, whether today is a workout day and which deadline to start with, that hour comes out of the same finite pool I would have used to write. Routine is, for me, mostly a way of refusing to spend energy on questions that don’t deserve it.
The astronaut case is the same instinct, taken to its limit. ESA’s page on daily life in orbit notes that astronauts “work and sleep to fixed schedules that match these ancient rhythms. Any other arrangement would soon have crews living in a state of permanent jet lag.” The schedule isn’t an indignity imposed on them. It’s a tool for keeping them functional in an environment that would otherwise unspool them.
I want to be honest about the other side of this. I think like many people, I like routine but I can’t always stick to one. When I travel, or when a busy stretch in the week eats the schedule, the structure goes. The first few days off it I’m usually fine; the body and the work both have some give. Past a certain point, though, the wheels come off. Sleep slips. Workouts slip. Eating becomes random. The work suffers last, in a way that’s almost worse, because by the time I notice the output is bad I’ve already been off the rails for a while. The fact that I’ve gone through many versions of routine over the years isn’t a sign that I’ve cracked it. It’s a sign that I keep losing it and rebuilding it.
That is part of what makes the freedom quiet, I think. It isn’t dramatic. You don’t notice routine the way you notice an exciting new project or a good holiday. It’s the boring underneath. But when it’s there, the day asks less of you, and that frees up the part of you that gets to choose what to spend the day on. When it’s gone, you spend the day choosing instead, and “choosing” sounds free but it isn’t, particularly. It is mostly being pulled around by whatever wants you next.
The point isn’t to plan every minute of your life. The ISS schedule works because there is one job to do up there and no other reason for anyone to be on board. Earth is messier. Other people exist. But the principle the astronauts are working with — that a body and a brain produce more, and feel better, when the day has a shape — is the same one I keep coming back to with my own work. Get the morning right. Eat at roughly the same time. Move. Sleep at the same time most nights. Leave room for the day to surprise you, but don’t make the basics negotiable.
The freedom is in not having to negotiate them.
