Do Routines Drain Meaning From Life? Heintzelman and King's Experience-Sampling Studies

Do routines make a life feel flatter, or do they hold it together? The best-known experience-sampling work on that question points to the second: in studies by Samantha Heintzelman and Laura King, people reported more meaning in life during moments when what they were doing matched their usual routine. That is a finding about meaning, though, and the same papers say little about whether a week feels exciting.

What the two studies measured

Heintzelman and King’s 2019 paper, “Routines and Meaning in Life,” appeared in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (volume 45, issue 5). It reports two studies. In the first, 317 people completed measures of how much they like routine and how meaningful they find life, and the two were positively related. In the second, 85 people were sampled repeatedly through ordinary days, giving 2,590 episodes. Each episode recorded how closely the current activity followed a typical routine and how meaningful life felt right then. The closer a moment sat to routine, the higher the momentary sense of meaning.

The authors’ framing is that meaning tends to come from structure and coherence, and a routine is a mundane, everywhere-present source of both. I only had access to the abstract and the bibliographic record, so details such as how routine was worded on the questionnaire are outside what I can report.

A follow-up by Mohideen and Heintzelman, “Routines and Meaning in Life: Does Activity Content or Context Matter?”, ran in the same journal in 2023 (volume 49, issue 7). One obvious objection to the 2019 result is that routine activities might simply be the meaningful ones: family dinner, a commute to a job you value. The follow-up tested that with two experience-sampling studies (93 people with 1,512 episodes, and 97 people with 1,629 episodes). Routine enactment still related to momentary meaning after accounting for other meaningful features of the activity such as relationships, goals and helping others. The second study ran during the COVID-19 pandemic, when routines were widely disrupted, and the link was stronger there, holding after controlling for perceived chaos, mood and anxiety.

Meaning is not the same thing as excitement

A person can feel a Tuesday was meaningful and still describe it as dull. These papers measured the first and did not set out to measure the second. If your complaint is “nothing ever happens,” a finding that routine goes with meaning does not answer it, and it does not tell you that a rut is fine.

What it does challenge is a common assumption in advice about livelier living: that structure is the enemy and the cure is to scrap the schedule. The data here lean the other way. Moments that followed the person’s own pattern felt, on average, more meaningful, even when other features of the moment were accounted for.

The novelty side has its own evidence

The case for newness is real, and it rests on different ground. A 2010 review by Düzel, Bunzeck, Guitart-Masip and Düzel in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews (volume 34, pages 660-669) pulls together human and animal work suggesting that dopamine signalling from the midbrain strengthens hippocampal plasticity for novel events and gives actions a motivational push. The authors propose a framework they call NOMAD and suggest that staying mobile and exploring new environments might slow age-related memory decline. That last part is a proposal in a review article, not a trial result, and it concerns memory, not mood.

Memory is where novelty shows up most clearly in everyday life, too. A year of identical weeks leaves few landmarks, which is the territory of the holiday paradox. Newness helps you remember a stretch of time as long and full. Routine, on the evidence above, helps a given moment feel as though it counts. Those are separate payoffs, so nothing forces a choice.

A 21-day diary study of 97 students by Kashdan and Steger (2007) points the same way from another side: it found curious days carried meaning forward while merely pleasant days did not, which the post on curiosity versus pleasant days goes through in detail. Curiosity can live inside a steady frame.

What a sensible split might look like

This is my reading, not a finding from any study cited here. If routine supports meaning and novelty supports memory and engagement, one workable arrangement is to keep a few fixed anchors and let the rest vary. Same wake time, same first twenty minutes, then a different route, a different person to call, a restaurant you haven’t tried. The anchors give moments their place in your pattern; the variation gives the week something to remember.

It also helps to separate a routine you perform with attention from one you merely run on autopilot. The distinction is covered in ritual versus routine, and none of the studies above tested it, so treat it as a hypothesis.

Where DontSnooze fits

A fixed wake time is the easiest anchor to name and one of the hardest to keep alone. In DontSnooze you record a short video when the alarm fires, friends in your group see it, and a missed window sends a random camera-roll photo to them instead; the steps are in how DontSnooze works. Whether that kind of anchor adds meaning to a day has not been studied, so it is a way of keeping the schedule, not a proven way of feeling more alive.

Limits of this evidence

• Both papers are correlational. Meaning and routine were measured together, and the direction could run either way, or both could track something else such as stable days or stable mood.
• The 2019 abstract says the roles of boredom, novelty and individual and situational differences are open questions. The authors do not claim routine suits everyone.
• Self-reported momentary meaning is one number per episode; it cannot tell you why a moment felt meaningful.
• I read abstracts and publication records, not full texts, so sample makeup, effect sizes and exact questionnaire wording are not reported here.
• The Düzel review is a theoretical synthesis, and the aging proposal in it is a hypothesis; I did not find a trial in what I read showing that exploring new places slows memory decline.

Quick answers on routines and excitement

Should I get rid of novelty and keep everything the same? Nothing in these studies says so. They measured meaning in life, not excitement or fun, and they looked at how typical an activity was for a person, not at what happens when novelty is added. The 2019 paper itself flags boredom and novelty as open questions. A reasonable reading is that routine and novelty answer different needs.

Did the studies show that routines cause meaning? No. Both papers are correlational: they link how routine a moment was with how meaningful it felt in that same moment, or a person’s liking for routine with their meaning scores. The 2019 abstract describes routines as a “source” of meaning, which is the authors’ interpretation, and nobody was assigned to have more or fewer routines in the studies described here.

Who were the participants and where were the studies published? Heintzelman and King (2019) is in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, volume 45, issue 5, pages 688-699, with 317 people in Study 1 and 85 people (2,590 episodes) in Study 2. Mohideen and Heintzelman is in the same journal, volume 49, issue 7, pages 987-999, with 93 and 97 people. The abstracts I read do not describe who the participants were, so I can’t say how well they represent anyone in particular.