I’ve decided to not only NOT drink alcohol, but also coffee, which tends to make me worried and nervous.

I’ve done this by having a DAILIES - not drinking coffee/beer for a day. This section in Habit RPG is a daily task that gets more and more difficult - so in the game your score gets higher and higher the longer your streak is.

I’ve also created HABITS - specific tasks. I wanted ways to conceive of tasks that are positive rather than simply getting docked for failing to NOT do something.

So every time I refuse a drink, I get points. Every time I don’t drink an alcoholic drink at a bar or social event, I get even more points ( I’ve gone into the advanced features to weight the task as “difficult” thereby giving more points for every successful completion).

According to The Power of Habit, it is easier to replace a task than not do it - so I also get points every time I replace coffee or alcohol with water - and I might also include a replacement with any positive activity, like going for a walk.

Lastly, I’ve decided to use a technique in meditation to fight any cravings. My addiction isn’t physical, it’s more a social habit based on the experience and the art of a finely crafted drink amongst friends, etc. There is a specific technique to bring about a feeling - normally irritation or anger - and then calming the self as a way of practicing avoiding the pitfalls of actions that come from anger.

In this way one instance of practicing bringing about anger/irritation and quelling the emotion is like one rep. I’ve gotten a lot out of that technique when it comes to emotional management, and see no reason why it wouldn’t work with any other emotion. So I’m doing it for alcohol.

I’ll look up pics of drinks or situations, feel the cravings enter, and then practicing dealing with them by relaxing my mind and unhooking the feeling of a stimulus with the craving. I’ll go into more detail on this in another post.

In Habit RPG one “rep” of this will also be a HABIT and I will get points from doing this too.

So far here are the specifics of the game:

-Not drinking a margarita at a Mexican place (Just came up with this one recently) - MEDIUM difficulty, cause I associate the two

-Drinking water as a replacement for alcohol/coffee - Easy

-Not drinking coffee - Easy - not sure if this should be replaced with the later or not

-Not drinking at a bar - DIFFICULT

-Not drinking at a non-bar social event - DIFFICULT

-Not drinking coffee/alcohol for the day

I decided to do start two gamified habits this week because one, writing, has to do with work, and this one is a habit of omission.

I suppose you could call it breaking a bad habit, but a lot of psychology seems to suggest that positive reinforcement works better for long term habituation. So “habits of omission” it is.

Specifically the habit I want to break is drinking.

I find that in the habituation game, alcohol is perhaps the absolute worst thing you can do for several reasons.

For one, even a few drinks will sap you of willpower. It actively corrupts discipline and since this entire project revolves around willpower, this is not a good thing.

Also, since I don’t drink regularly, even a few drinks will make me hungover the next day, making it highly unlikely that I will continue in my gamification - and with a day or two away from the game, I run the risk of leaving the game.

Lastly, there are other skills later on that tend to get corrupted by alcohol. Later on I want to gamify eating right, and not only is alcohol not really great, but it tends to give you the munchies. Being hungover is not good for getting into shape when I gamify fitness, nor is it good for mental health. I just read a very great thread on reddit about a guy with mental health issues who was “self medicating” - one redditor responded by saying that the first thing people with mental health issues should do is stop drinking because it exacerbates the situation. I have noted this in my own mental health.

I’ll get into the specifics in another post, because I find that Habits of Omission have to be treated differently.