The Science of Self-Help

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Sandbagging

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I was talking to Lydia Schrandt  and she came up with this brilliant solution to making it through the “danger zone.”

We were discussing how easy the first months were in eating clean compared to any other diet or regiment we’ve been on. The key to her was that we just didn’t care. We entered into it not caring, so her suggestion to me was - maybe if you did the same thing it would work with other habits.

The problem is intentionality - how do you deliberately NOT care? 

Her recent solution (we’ve been talking a bout this a lot) is what she dubbed sandbagging

Start one habit you care about. At the same time, start two more habits that you don’t care about. It doesn’t matter what they are. Do them all with the normal protocol - recording, etc. When the main habit gets into the danger zone, drop the other two completely.

She used to work with hot air balloons, hence the term. I think of it in terms of Dragon Ball Z, where the characters all train with weighted shirts and artificially high gravity. Once they lose the shirt and get back to earth, they can fight faster and fly higher…much like the balloon.

Habits seem to cause indentions like weight on us, and it doesn’t seem to matter how small the habit is - it just gets tiring carrying it over a long period of time. 

This is something I’ll have to experiment with in the future. I could potentially do this with my eating habit by dropping my burpee habit. But that doesn’t quite sit well with me. In any case I’ll have to decide what  my protocol is when it comes to eating these next three months - it’s already gotten hard, and I’ll be traveling extensively throughout Brazil to see the World Cup, which will test this habit to the maximum degree.