An attempt to verify a quotation and find its originator took me down a rabbit hole. Though unsuccessful in my pursuit, I emerged unscathed and now well aware of another quotation.

“You must break the pattern today, or the loop will repeat tomorrow.”

According to AI, this saying has developed into a “popular motivational and psychological mantra” frequently found on Facebook and Instagram and is “widely attributed” to comedian, artist, and podcaster Ramin Nazer, who supposedly posted it on social media in March 2021.

I say supposedly because AI neglected to mention Nazer one day later. Instead, it now claimed the quotation “does not have a single, verifiable author [but] originates from a viral mindset and self-improvement meme that became widely popular across platforms like Instagram and TikTok beginning in late 2025.”

This discrepancy’s why you always need to question AI. This article’s about why you need to question the aforementioned quotation.

For while you’re sure to find numerous posts praising the saying’s ability to motivate and lists of the healthy changes it’s helped people make, let’s not forget that there are times when it’s best for your health to keep patterns in place. For loops to repeat again and again and again.

Now you may be as wary of me as I am of AI, so here’s a bit of science that supports that last statement. It’s a study performed by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and published by JAMA Network Open online on May 7 that found “stronger and more regular [rest-activity] rhythms” lead to less “epigenetic age acceleration in middle-aged and older adults” while greater fragmentation and “greater day-to-day timing variability” of them led to more.

Simply stated — the way the researchers might’ve written it if they posted their findings on social media instead of published them in a prestigious journal — if you live life according to your circadian clock, you’ll find yourself looking and feeling younger.

The circadian clock is the name given to the body’s natural rest-activity rhythms (RARs). It works on what’s very close to a 24-hour cycle and affects sleep, body temperature, hormone release, appetite, and digestion.

It affects all these functions positively if you live your life in accordance with the clock. So much so that doing so appears to have an anti-aging effect.

At least that’s the conclusion the Johns Hopkins researchers made once they applied four ways of estimating biological age to data from 207 middle-aged and older adults who took part in the long-running and ongoing Baltimore Epidemiologic Catchment Area cohort study. The data came from seven consecutive days in which the participants had worn actigraphs, a wristwatch-like device designed to continuously track and record body movements, for at least seven consecutive days.

Just to be clear: Your biological age is not the same as your chronological age. Whereas chronological age is merely the number of years you’ve been alive, your biological age represents how you age in comparison to how people typically do.

So having a biological age of 55 when your chronological age is 65 means you’ve somehow managed to decelerate the aging process. It’s this sort of deceleration in the aging process that the Johns Hopkins researchers found in the participants who more regularly follow the body’s natural rest-activity rhythms.

They explain their finding in the paper’s conclusion with some hard-to-follow research-speak: “Higher strength and stability of circadian RARs were associated with lower acceleration of epigenetic age, whereas greater irregularity and more variable activity timing were associated with greater acceleration.”

So what in the world should this gobbledygook get you to do? According to the study’s lead author, Chunyu Liu, it would include “maintaining a consistent sleep and wake schedule, getting daylight exposure during the day, staying physically active, reducing prolonged sedentary time, and avoiding highly irregular sleep or activity patterns.”

Or as Liu first explains to Medical News Today in their article about the study, “Keep daily routines as regular as possible.” It’s the same advice I gave to a good friend not so long ago.

He’s encountering a bit of a health problem. He’s especially concerned about it since his doctor can’t determine its cause.

In our back-and-forth about it, he confessed to me that there a few of those seemingly etched-in-stone rules for good health he doesn’t follow to a tee. I told him that was true for me, too, and shared with him a belief I hold, a belief supported in part by the Johns Hopkins study.

That the body is amazingly adaptable. That consistency in the doing is often more important than what’s being done.

In other words, but not Nazer’s or even AI’s, if you don’t break the pattern, the loop will repeat tomorrow.