My SRHI in Dynamic Meditation has jumped dramatically in only 3 days, as I mentioned before. This is a result of it being a “Continual Habit” - a task like posture, that should be spot checked repeatedly throughout the day.

Could this be applied to regular daily habits? I realize that the SRHI is meant to be a scale on habit formation. Does its accuracy go both ways? Can you hack the SRHI? That is to say if I manipulate aspects of the scale, does that in turn really result in a faster habit?

For example, a number of questions in the SRHI relate to feeling weird if you DON’T do a habit. Well, I can’t really tell that until I don’t do it. So I’ll mark undecided. If I do miss a habit or at least delay it one day, and I do feel weird, my score increases. And this has happened in the past. Would a DELIBERATE missed or delayed habit result in faster habit formation?

Similarly would doing a task like…flossing for example, be quickly formed if I spent the first week flossing every hour during the day? There a number of questions regarding doing a habit before you realize you’re doing it - would waking up and doing a task while still bleary help with this? Telling as many people as possible that I’m a flosser might boost identity questions (“This task is typically me”) - would it actually make the habit form faster?

With this dynamic meditation habit it’s not just about the score - it really is shocking how automatic this is becoming. Now this might be for another reason.

In a seminar I just watch on self help a speaker talked about meditation for pain and anxiety. The basic technique is to follow the anxiety and notice it - note its frequency, if it changes, its size, its texture, and if you keep up with this, it will start to diminish. This has worked with physical pain for me.

The point he made was that it’s an animal training thing. If you train an animal based on the basics - pain=bad, pleasure=good, you get results fast because that’s how we’re wired.

I’m in a profound sense doing this - if I can train myself to not go down paths of negativity in my head, I feel better. So, it’s not surprising that it’s a fast response to train.

So who knows if it would carryover to things like flossing, that don’t have such an immediate pleasure/pain result. This is something I’ll definitely have to try out.