How to Reincorporate Challenges as Raised Daily Minimums (Beginning Habit Periodization)

This past month I completed a 30 day No Alcohol Challenge. It was great, I learned a lot, but now what?

Lydia reported seeing that many people, after completing a Whole Life Challenge, went back to bad eating as normal. I found the same case during my No Bread Challenge.

Back in the day I feel many people assumed that after 30 Days you’d get a habit that you could extend indefinitely. We know that’s not true. Nowadays, challenges are supposed to do something - but what? If we don’t harness them, we might as well have not done them in the first place.

The role of a challenge, for me, isn’t to jump start initial change. It’s to extend an already established small habit. If there are three vectors to long-term change - willpower to start the habit daily, habit to extend it and make it automatic, and the grit or deliberate practice needed to push past skill plateaus and increase intensity - then challenges belong to the third vector. Unfortunately this is the vector I know the least about.

I do know that there is a certain amount of …looseness or roominess… I feel mentally when it comes to the idea of ignoring alcohol at a bar with friends. There is a similar sort of freedom with my 8 week progressive HIIT challenge - it’s becoming easier to visualize myself trying something like Crossfit.

And I’ve successfully fumbled into progressive minimums for rowing - I started with HIITs twice a week for 8 weeks, and now I’m doing the entire challenge again 3 times a week. HIITs are now in my program to stay. What is the best way to do this with alcohol?

Lydia is adhering to a once a week drinking rule. I’m thinking of something more gradual, a twice a week drinking rule. It becomes really weird in this case because A) I didn’t have an established drinking habit and B) I don’t know how to concretely record a NON habit, especially one that’s so sporadic.

I’ve also been researching what’s at the heart of all of this - periodization. I’ve mostly been able to look at weight lifting, and it gets confusing very fast - there’s linear, non-linear, and newer undulating models of progression. And the thing that’s challenging - but good - is that it’s based on years of progress - microcycles, mesocycles, macrocycles, quadrennial cycles.

I asked Lydia how Crossfit did it, and she said it was a 6-10 week cycle dedicated either to endurance or power, and that it was based on percentages of a max. And that reminded me of my time in weightlifting where people talk about various programs - Strong Man, 5 X 5, Russian Volume, etc.

My main concern is HOW they came up with these formulas of when and how much to drop down to. For example, if I do NaNoWriMo, I’m writing at least 1600 words a day. Afterwards, do I drop down to 50%? 60 %? If I drop down too low it results in fewer gains over time. If I don’t drop low enough I run the risk of blowing myself out. I have no idea how you’d even begin to calculate that with a large set of athletes, never mind using only myself across multiple skills. It’s something I definitely have to dive into because it’s where all the fruition of my habits comes to.

And how much of this crosses over to other skills? There’s a lot of research to be done.

Time of Day and Habits

Again, talking to Lydia, and she’s stopped really recording or thinking about recording her exercise. She’s been doing Crossfit, which she really likes, but because of the change in schedules (sometimes it’s earlier than other days) she doesn’t feel like it’s, what BJ Fogg calls, crispy.

That is to say, there’s not a specific trigger immediately followed by an action.

I have had this for all of my really solid and quickly developed habits. But what I’ve noticed is that when an action achieves superhabit status, that crispiness doesn’t really matter.

If I don’t have time or the will to do something in the morning, like writing or exercising, I do it later. I get that “something’s missing” or “my day’s incomplete” vibe that seems to be the hallmark of a well inculcated habit.

Think about brushing your teeth - it’s not really a big deal if I don’t do it immediately as soon as I wake up, or immediately after eating. But I feel something’s missing, and daily consistency is still achieved.

It might well be that a great protocol to follow is start out by constructing a really “crispy” habit - and once it’s a superhabit, play around with it, or use that freedom to evolve it.

I do want to check out crossfit. If I like it, my bodyweight schedule will be in flux, but that’s a great thing - it gives me more of a workout, and since I’ve already developed a superhabit, what I’m hoping is that it also keeps consistency. I’m hoping that if I have a day where I don’t do an exercise in my room, I’ll have that “wait something’s missing” itch that’s scratched later on by a gym or crossfit workout.

This freedom also will hopefully allow me to bust through plateaus. 

Slacking and Superhabits

The last few weeks I’ve gotten the impression that I’ve been floating through many of my fully formed superhabits.

A lot of this has to do with my bouts of sickness and travel, where I have to slack deliberately in order to sustain the habit.

But now that I’m good, there’s been a slump. Specifically:
Fixed Meditation
I’m doing basic meditations. Relaxation, visualizations - these would have been difficult a while ago, but I need to PUSH. Bring UP bad emotions, then quell them. OR do some advanced stuff, like TUMMO. OR start doing what I don’t like to do, like single pointed meditation. OR do Vipassana for time. 

Bodyweight Exercises
I’ve been on type writer pushups - that’s awesome. But I’ll do 3, and stop. I can do reps like I did today - and it HURT. I should be used to that pain. I need a better cycle - I’ve started doing bulgarian split squats and that’s good. I need to push my bridges. I dropped my dragon flag progression because I don’t have a good stable spot, but that’s no excuse - I gotta solve that problem. And I HAVE to do what I hate, tabatas.

Writing
I’m totally slacking on the actual writing part of my cycle. I need to get back into that mentality of doing a first draft - like I can do no wrong. And then the next day NEEDS to be editing to a polished submittable piece. If I can get that cycle down, a HUGE weight will be lifted, because pitching is easy for me. So maybe I should just focus on that - forget everything else - first draft, then edit. again and again rinse and repeat.

Eating
I’ve been letting things slip here. But I don’t care as much - FINALLY it’s just coalesced into a habit. If I can keep it like that, I’m happy, and I can clean it up later.

Conclusion - this is something I’m going to have to constantly be aware of. Plateaus are a part of this business. Sometimes it may take something special to shake things up. Maybe I should do crossfit. Maybe I should drop everything and do writing/editing for a month. Maybe I should do a month of single pointed meditation. There is definitely a huge benefit to doing something like my No Bread challenge.