Experiment on Sandbagging and Travel: Part I

Hypothesis: Artificially stressing the system by increasing willpower/endurance thresholds through upping all daily minimums a few days before traveling will ensure an excess of energy to accomplish normal daily minimums.

I tested this by:
1) Upping daily minimums of major habits 4 days before I traveled.  I wrote more, I meditated more, and I rowed more.
I had to ensure that the system was stressed, and I believe it was - I was irritable, and I was utterly exhausted 1 day into the experiment. I didn’t have time to do everything the day before I left, but I did all my habits on Saturday which I also don’t normally do. I continued to be irritable, highly emotional, and exhausted on Sunday. When I started traveling all the emotional energy stressors seemed to drop away.

2) Observing myself when I was at the destination. I was situated in a hotel, taken around the island of Aruba for various excursions and food, but mostly I was in a conference room for the majority of my stay. From a habit standpoint this meant that I had time, I had stability, and I had a workout center.

My log (interspersed with pics from Aruba):

Day 1 - Travel
Day 930 Record Keeping DID NOT DO
Day 902 Fixed Meditation 30 Minutes on plane
Day 776 Writing scamp on plane, 1021 words
Day 316 Rowing DID NOT DO
Day 57 Mobility/Stretching DID NOT DO

Food: Also made some really good food choices despite being on a plane. No sweets, opted out of rice, chose chicken instead of pasta. When we got to the resort, ordered relatively clean food, calamari, caesar salad, chowder

Day 2 - First day of the conference
Day 931 Record Keeping - DID NOT DO
Day 903 Fixed Meditation - 30 Minutes in the conference
Day 777 Writing  - Did some writing, but didn’t record it
Day 317 Rowing  - Went for about an hour walk
Day 58 Mobility/Stretching  - DID NOT DO

Food: Lunch, Cuban place, ordered fish, beans, rice, and plantains.
Dinner, a buffet and I made all clean choices

Day 3 - Second day of conference
Day 932 Record Keeping - DID NOT DO
Day 904 Fixed Meditation - DID NOT DO
Day 778 Writing  - DID NOT DO
Day 318 Rowing  - HIIT, 20 min, 30s:15s, on elliptical
Day 59 Mobility/Stretching  - couch stretch, 2 minutes each side

Food: Breakfast, all clean choices. Lunch, AMAZING control - Caesar salad and ate around the croutons, had Lydia offering me the dessert several times, said no to it. Dinner, ate grilled mahi mahi, so also clean. Really amazing control with food this day.

Day 4 - Excursion Day
Day 933 Record Keeping - DID NOT DO
Day 905 Fixed Meditation - DID NOT DO
Day 779 Writing  - DID NOT DO
Day 319 Rowing  - LISS, 40 min, on recumbant bike
Day 60 Mobility/Stretching - couch stretch, 2 minutes each side

Food: Breakfast, clean, Lunch, buffet, made all clean choices. Dinner was a fancier place with lots of little croquettes for appetizers, I ate them. Main dish was all shellfish, relatively clean. Ok control here, still pretty good.

Day 5 - Travel
Day 934 Record Keeping - DID NOT DO
Day 906 Fixed Meditation - DID NOT DO
Day 780 Writing  - DID NOT DO
Day 320 Rowing  - DID NOT DO
Day 61 Mobility/Stretching - DID NOT DO

Food, Horrendous control - no time for breakfast (early wakeup), 10 hour layover in Miami, ate Mexican. Across the 9 hour flight from Miami back to Spain I didn’t eat anything, I was sleeping. Got  back here and ordered Indian with all the fried starters and naan bread.

Alcohol for all days was out the window. I was deliberate about it, and I had PR people shoving complementary drinks in my face for the duration of my time their, as per usual.

Photocred: lab notebook by Calsidyrose, all other pics by me and my insta account
 

Eternal Recurrence of the Habit Former’s Soul

A few days ago I was bemoaning my lack of social connections in this city. I am, or used to be, a very social person, and I miss having a solid community after a few years of hopping around from place to place. Now that I’m in a city I love, it’s just not happening.

This wasn’t a normal frustration based simply on not having friends. It was about feeling behaviorally undercut - that I couldn’t develop those connections because I had so many other things to work on that should have been taken care of already.

Then I had a weird sense of deja vu, a sensation I’ve been experiencing more and more during the course of this project - I had felt that particular set of emotions before. When I was in Brazil, slowly and painfully developing my recording habit, I bemoaned the fact that working out and trying to get in shape just wasn’t happening.

Since summer has officially begun in Barcelona and the siren call of the outdoors is singing loudly to me, I recently bemoaned why I can’t already just be an outdoor person. I’ve sensed that feeling  - the undercutting - when waking up late, feeling rushed, and knowing that I should have already become a morning person. It’s a weird sense of guilt of not already doing something, like when I feel like I’m not being enough of a traveler here in Europe. I’m working on things, I know, but the guilt wells up when I see people coming for a week and really soaking up the culture in a way I’m not ready to do yet.

But when I set that feeling aside and work on nailing the small behaviors I get somewhere. When I run around from one pull to the next I make absolutely no progress.

Suddenly I felt really happy - I’m nailing my eating, which I bemoaned before. I’m nailing working out, which I also bemoaned before. I have no doubt I will get around to mastering the shift to becoming a morning person, and outdoors person, and eventually a social person again. 

But this time around, I will bring all my other habits to socializing - it won’t be staying up late nights, or eating whatever, and having friends with whoever happens to be nearby just because it’s convenient. It will be me becoming the specific type of social person I want to be. 

That’s a place I’ve never been before.

photocred: Stairwell by mark, chess pawn by Ahd Photography

An Identity Approach to Alcohol - Part I

Intro

At several points in this project I’ve dabbled with the idea of giving up alcohol completely. This point reared its head again a few nights ago when I came back home after drinking more than I usually do for an outing. I managed to make a pepperoni mushroom and blue cheese pizza with a herbs de provence crust from scratch, which was funny, messy, and also not at all in my eating plan. I woke up late. I was slow and less than optimal with some of my habits. I almost completely forgot to do one. I had a hangover and drank coke to make myself feel better.

Of course drinking “too much” for me isn’t really an accurate description. Nowadays if I go out my limit is usually one drink, maybe two. Anything more and I’ll start to feel it in the morning. I had a few extra at a nearby craft beer place nearby, so I wasn’t exactly smashing windows and starting fights.But the more I think of it the more I realize that drinking alcohol is a very subtle habit that sinisterly winds itself, much like eating, through many parts of my life in an often detrimental manner for my purposes of self change. 

A Tangled Web of Identity

In moving towards an identity model of self improvement, I’m seeing interconnections between certain habits, and the futility of trying to treat them piecemeal rather than as a matrix. One subtle winding of alcohol starts with my social life. When I meet up with people it’s usually at a bar, especially abroad when I don’t know that many people very well.

This all usually occurs at night, often precluding morning activities with morning people. Morning people tend to be outdoor or active, and it’s hard to get the gumption to get out when you’re sleeping the last night off.

This is about percentages. Of course there are hard partiers that go on morning hikes. But is it as likely? My intuition says no. If I’m shifting a paradigm, drinking seems to be, upon analysis, very much like eating in its impact on other behaviors.

Future Projections

How does alcohol affect me as a developing person going into the future? Socializing as a skill should be done without alcohol, according to all the social dynamics gurus. Financial control would advocate lowering expenditures, a complete eating habit would advocate dropping most types of alcohol, advanced meditation starts set meditation periods onwards to life in general, which requires full time control. And again, in general the movement should include the types of people I associate with, namely migrating to ones that have more control of their lives, not less.

wine glass by Alex Ranaldi, knots by Olivier ROUX, human evolution by Bryan Wright

Towards an Identity Model of Habits: Part III

I don’t believe that this identity-centric model in anyway replaces the older model. I still think you can use the basics of habit formation to train in specific behaviors. But the behaviors I’d focus on would be different. Let’s look at some of my initial ideas:

Social Identity

Definitely the most popular idea is to redefine yourself as, say, a vegetarian. James did this – he established with everyone he knew that he didn’t eat meat. And this almost forced him, via social pressures, to keep up the behavior.

Here’s why I’m very hesitant about this approach. It’s so changeable. You change friends, breakup, move, and your social network is wiped out. You see this with high school athletes – they’re expected to go to practice by their peers, teachers, coaches, and parents. But once they go to college, their identity shifts, and it turns out they never really established that habit to begin with. Hello Freshman 15.

I don’t think we need to toss this out completely. I just think it shouldn’t be relied upon in this manner. There is a potential of forming virtual communities and identities that may have, oddly enough, more lasting forms of identity as opposed to changing social circles.

Barcelona, where I’m based now, has quite a few health and fitness communities. What I was most intrigued by were communities about getting together to go out to restaurants that served “healthy” food.  In particular there was a paleo community (I can’t find it now) that was organized around potlucks and restaurants with whole food. What an amazing idea considering the huge difficulty in eating right is the social pressure. You often feel relegated to either being utterly miserable or living a monastic existence prepping everything alone at home.

As an aside I was trying to find out if there were online social sites like Facebook specifically for clean eating and found a Paleo dating site and even a Low Carb Cruise! So I guess you can take identity as far as you like nowadays.

Certifications

There is something very identity-driven about having a formal designation given to you by an institution. Complete your yoga teacher training and you are a certified yoga instructor, whether or not you’d consider yourself a full master or not.

A friend of mine back in China was really into kettlebells and wanted to become a trainer. I just found out that Mark Sisson is offering a Primal Blueprint Expert Certification. I think the only danger is erring on the side of endless certifications instead of real progress, which I believe can occur.

Affirmations

If social identity has flaws because it relies on other people, then why not move to hammering your identity changes with your own mantras?

I experimented with affirmations several years ago before I got into habits. So my affirmations naturally only lasted a few weeks. But I did feel really good about the whole process at the time.

Nevertheless, I’m very skeptical as to if they actually work. According to a metastudy on the subject they do appear to work for changing health related behaviors. I’m STILL skeptical, and will do an entire post delving into it in the future.

All or Nothing and Pavel’s Greasing the Groove

Many of these large habits are all or nothing. James is a vegetarian all the time, not just on weekdays. So far I’ve been very consistent about keeping my habits and superhabits to the weekdays, and made what I still think is a wise decision to take the weekends off. But it may be that habits I want to be larger (megahabits? ha!), and that have identity characteristics over more changing situations need to be working all the time.

Greasing the groove might work to hurry the process up. Instead of starting once a day, do the behavior multiple times a day all the time. This obviously may or may not be easy to do depending the behavior.

Counterintuitively Small Habits

Every time I went through a large cycle of clean eating, I came away with a few small behaviors that stuck. I drink my coffee black. I ignore bread when it’s set on the table at a restaurant. I do not drink soft drinks.

These are automatic and there’s not emotional waffling about these behaviors. So maybe the best way to deal with changes is to start with a focus on the small rather than the large.

I experimented with this for a few weeks. I brainstormed a list of really small behaviors that have to do with clean eating:

-Regularly going to the grocery store

-Stocking up on clean basics.

-Planning our meals for the day/week

I selected “stocking up on clean basics” and made it even simpler – every morning as soon as I got up I went through a kitchen and pantry checklist for basics so that if things got busy I’d have options for food at home.

I have done this without the full treatment – no recording, no formal implementation intention. I had a big long break in between for travel, but the week and a half that I did this, it seemed to work really well. And the side effect was that I naturally went to the store and ate pretty well.

I just researched identity based habits and, of course, James Clear has an article on it where he also advocates making small wins and breaking down bigger behaviors in order to become “that” kind of person.

Quantified Self

My buddy james started his move to being vegetarian by using a food tracker. The quantified self seems like a great way to prove to yourself that you have indeed changed. Things like the flash diet definitely helped me in my 30 day no bread challenge, and seemed to provide a buttressing effect similar to a social group for staying on track. Looking it over may help with the identity change as well.

Falling in Love

I know, it sounds really odd, but bear with me here. The things you love to do are things that tend to stick. I love reading, I used to love bicycling. I didn’t need to think up a methodology for how to increase habituation or push for mastery – it just happened. They don’t take up self discipline points – they give them back because you feel relaxed and rejuvenated just doing them.

Can you deliberately fall in love? The New York Times ran an interesting article on the subject of deliberate love, but this was about people. For activities I think the key rests in ritual, something that’s been coming up more and more in self-improvement circles (and one I need to do a detailed post on in the future).

I love getting into bed, opening my book and escaping to another world. Reading isn’t just a “megahabit” that sticks with me across time and circumstances, it’s something I love to do, I couldn’t do without, and it, in a large part, helps define me. And I think you find the same kind of talk when you encounter people who are enthusiastic about things.

I think there’s something important in ritualizing – you get excited about the preparatory ephemera and it not only lowers starting thresholds, it inverts them. Can you deliberately do this? I have no idea, but I’m curious to try. I’m also curious if this would be a totally different paradigm outside of identity.

Advanced Options

I think there are other more advanced options. Buddhist thought talks about meditation as wearing away the concept of a self. The conclusion for me is that if the self is an illusion, and you know it, you might be able to don another illusion more easily. Vajrayana and Tantra deal with visualizations, hypnosis mucks around directly with the unconscious, which presumably is the seat of identity, as does NLP to a degree.

These are all way out of my league, but perhaps the smallest distillation, visualizing myself as another person who is, say, a clean eater, may have some benefit. Though, as with affirmations, I’m not clear if this has actually been proved to make a difference.

mask by 派脆客 Lee, certificates byMark, stones by Sue Langford, tea by Dave Fayram, thangka by Richard Weil

Towards an Identity Model of Habits: Part II

How exactly do you train a new identity?

That’s the big question, and it sometimes feels like an unsolvable riddle.

The Greek philosopher Zeno had a series of paradoxes where he posited the impossibility of motion. In one, the Dichotomy Paradox, he states that in order to travel from point A to point B, one has to go through a midpoint, point C. In order to get to point C, one has to get halfway there, point D. One has to do this an infinite number of times, which is impossible. Therefore travel to point B (and all travel) is impossible. Yet we disprove logic like this every day.

I’ve deluged friends like James with questions, but the details come out vague. Somehow, like travel, they just did it, and the same thing applies to me and the identity habits in my own life. It just happened, and how I hate that response!

One methodology around this vagary comes from Neuro-Linguistic Programming. In it the founders, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, advocate taking exceptional people and breaking down their actions into composite parts in order reproduce their resulting….exceptionalness. Although I am as of yet unconvinced of NLP as a whole system, I like this technique. According to Bandler and Grinder many of their models were using tacit techniques, and it was only by breaking them down could they repeat their results. In Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D. the duo dedicate one entire volume to the famed clinical hypnotist’s verbal patterns and a further volume just for his nonverbal cues.

But it’s not as though identity isn’t already a part of habit formation anyway. The Orbell-Verplanken SRHI has several questions dedicated to identity. My move to an identity theory of certain habits is more because I believe ALL the little bits – including gamification and motivation – are cogs in a robust mechanism of self change.

What I want is to use all those cogs to construct a training protocol to make certain behavior’s identities more than just simple if-then grooves in my mind so that I have behaviors that cover radically changing circumstances. For some behaviors, it’s not really that necessary. For some they definitely are.

Milton Erickson was arguably the most famous and successful clinical hypnotist, but his students weren’t necessarily any better than average. But by putting a microscope to his actions Bandler and Grinder were (allegedly) able to reproduce the results. I don’t know for certain if this reducability worked for them with hypnosis, but I have definitely seen it work for other behaviors.

I hope, in Part III, to put people who have developed Identity Habits under the microscope to reverse engineer some plausible methods for this type of change.

mask by 派脆客 Lee, hypnotic pendulum by Ray Scrimgeour

Syncing with Significant Others

Lydia and I had a bit of a clash yesterday, at least from a habit/regimentation perspective.

She wanted me to take care of something, but it was, unfortunately, right when I do my writing. Since it’s a time based habit now that I’m pushing it, any interruption becomes problematic. I don’t do as well as I could, and if it messes up it also has a tendency to unbalance any other habits that are linked to it in the bookend.

Delays in the if-then protocol of the link then also prevent the next habit from forming efficiently. For example, if I have to take care of something after my writing habit, then my meditation habit suffers if I’ve implemented it as taking place “right after my writing is done.”

This started to get me angry and frustrated, but I got over it and realized that this problem has been bubbling up for a long time. Often times Lydia wants to eat before I do because she gets up earlier. Being out of sync pushes me subtly to hurry up my habits even when she’s not pressuring me.

She’s pretty good about not pressuring me, and we have tried to eat separately, but I feel the push nonetheless. A subtle push like this prevents me from doing quality work when I’m in my habit, which won’t at all help when I’m transitioning more and more to the quality of the work rather than it’s regularity. 

So how can I tackle the problem? Here are a few ideas:

1) Wake up earlier. I describe the benefits of this in my post “Early to Rise - The Habit of Getting Up Early” but an added benefit is that helps sync you with your significant other or roommate. It affords you greater control because you can shove more uninterrupted, un-rushed time to work. I’m reminded of one of my favorite children’s authors, Lloyd Alexander, who developed a habit of getting up at 3 am to write.

2) Have multiple chains. Rather than having an unending series of constantly expanding chains starting from wakeup, make space in those chains. For example, right now my chain is like this:
  
wake up ->rowing->drink a glass of water->writing->shower->meditate->record->eat

There are options here. I could do random stuff after rowing because writing is tied to drinking that glass of water. I could do the same thing before my shower because meditation is tied to the shower. There is flexibility here.

I could also start making a chain right before going to bed.

3) Complete autonomy. Address the issue and come to a mature understanding that I’m out of the picture until after I record. It’s very easy to NOT do this because it’s not like I don’t have absolute flexibility. But that way of thinking leads to an erosion of habits.

4) Focus even more on the implementation if-then link. The link - the joining of trigger and action - is the most important aspect of habit creation. So if I have to take care of something halfway into my meditation, that’s ok. As long as I continue and record right after finishing in order to protect that “joint”. 

It is, however, wrecking havoc on my eating habit because usually that’s the thing that becomes unchained, preventing me from anchoring it at any one trigger.

There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to this. I’ve been informally coaching a few other people and it’s amazing how the subtle pressures of those you live with can impact this habit formation system