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. 

Dynamic Meditation Revisited Part II

So basically, I can skip certain portions because for me, fixed meditation is a superhabit. I believe that I can also skip the part where I JUST observe my emotional states starting at 20 minutes. Way back in Brazil I did this and executed techniques in Step 10 - The Arising and Quelling of Negative Emotion.

My problem was that it wasn’t sustainable. I did Step 11 - Expansion - I did all at once, monitoring, quelling and executing techniques, recording, and doing it all day. That was exhausting, and though I felt amazing, I couldn’t continue doing it.

With that in mind I’m going to form a habit of 20 minutes of happiness. I’m going to record it and time it. I’m sure I’ll experience bleed over. 

It’s confusing because before I set the habit as “immediately counteracting arising negative emotion” which screwed with the SRHI. I had a false rise because I was doing the action so many times during a day. It would not be as drastic because I’ll only be starting with 20 minutes.

It’s a dicey thing. I can think of it as a daily 20 minute practice, and expand, or I can view it as a series of individual practices. I think I’m going to do the former, simply because I tried the latter before and my other habits - writing, exercising, etc, have habitualized and expanded well so far.

I did a little bit of it today - what I forgot was that for many things a formal technique isn’t really necessary. It’s almost like it’s the observation and the redirection of the flow of my mind that is necessary. I have no doubt that the individual techniques I practiced in fixed meditation will be necessary - but it’s as though they give me a basic grounding to flex a muscle I never knew I had - the muscle of choosing the course of negativity or the course of satisfied happiness. Doing it today I felt the same wild hilarity - the feeling of cheating at the test of life and laughing - that I felt long ago in Brazil when I first attempted it.

It’s flexing that muscle and observing negativity as it arises that’s key. And it was shocking how minute and integral things like pessimism and tension/worry for no reason are to my moment to moment experience.

Restructuring Habits

Although my super habits are down cold, my two non-habits - eating and work are pretty much in shambles. I’m not worried about either though - once I get into the zone in eating it gets consistent fast. And with work it’s understandable - I haven’t worked the last week for the holidays and that absence is affecting my SRHI score.

More worthy of discussion is the plateau I find myself in superhabits.

Writing is about to change. I want to alternate between writing and editing, and I’ve started doing this to good affect. I’m also considering adding another day of pitching and one day of blogging on the weekends.

I need to memorize the SRHI to continue on with record keeping, but it’s not that serious of an issue.

Lastly, I’ve plateaued in bodyweight exercises. I’ve started doing the one arm pushup progression against the wall, but it’s not that difficult and I’m not sure if I’m doing it correctly. Other exercises are stalling - my dragon lifts are pretty much the same right now and my bridges aren’t necessarily improving. 

I realize with this that though it feels like I’m flailing, it really hasn’t been that long. It just sort’ve feels like a long time because it’s the holidays and I’ve been traveling and relaxing because of it - the holiday effect. But I would like to throw more stuff into the mix - maybe start lower body exercises or whatnot. 

I’d like to start implementing my fixed meditation plan as I outlined in my book. It basically consists of practicing multiple arenas of meditation classifications. I’ve started doing a it a little bit but I want to make it cyclical - changing it up every day. 

This cycling idea started with bodyweight training and has seemed to just leak over to all my superhabits. I’m curious how it works. I’m wondering if it’s a good way to bust past a plateau. But I also think it’s completely like cheating. Up until the superhabit formed I’m normally doing one task - usually in Tiny Habit form. But once the “slot” coalesces not only does the actual amount of one task grow, but I can get several tasks for the price of one.

I’m ideally not just writing, I’m using the slot of writing to write, pitch, blog, and edit. I’ll see how it goes, but if it goes well things are about to get really interesting, and either way I’m going to welcome the changes.

Graph Day! Graphs of 3 Habits

You might have noticed that I didn’t blog yesterday - my internet was out so I had to do it all offline. But as I went to log it in I went ahead and logged all my travel data into my spreadsheet. Since I had all the numbers, and since my bodyweight exercise is, at least according to the numbers, a habit, I thought I’d do another series of graphs. I omitted eating since I didn’t start recording it from the beginning.

I don’t have time to analyze them today but will do so soon.

X is number of days, y is the SRHI from 12-84.

Record Keeping

Fixed Meditation

Bodyweight Exercises