Think of yourself as the patient. Your chief complaints include the same routine, the same vacations, the same everything. Your symptoms include days that are the same, vacations that are technically different locations but functionally the same trip, year after year, a vague sense that “someday” you’ll do something different, maybe right after this next busy season, and difficulty remembering the last time you thought about anything other than work, errands, and the next thing on the calendar.

This condition is common. It’s also quietly expensive. Not in dollars but in perspective. This sort of routine blindness doesn’t hurt physically, which is what makes it dangerous. You don’t notice what you’re not seeing.

When you do something different from your norm and get out of your routine you suddenly feel better. Nothing about your trip to somewhere new and doing things out of your “same old” travel routine is medicinal on paper. But something happens anyway – maybe you found new activities you love or even, gasp, disconnected from work long enough to notice the size of the world again.

Then you came home and rewrote your own prescription for the future including different kinds of vacations and different family trips. Not because the one new location you just went to is magic but because distance from the routine is what created the space to think clearly about what you actually want and need. The active ingredient is disruption.

You want to do this before you burnout, not after. Don’t look to the future or wait for retirement to do this because that date in your head has a way of moving, and you may never reach it. It you don’t break out of your routine now, the opportunities you lose are shared memories and a clearer sense of your own priorities. Try to break out of the same old same old and then repeat doing so as often as you can.