Back From Travels (And What I’ve Learned)

Finally got back from a rather long trip with Lydia’s family. It involved a week around Barcelona, then a week in Morocco - from Marrakech, a road trip through the High Atlas to Fez (with a stop to camp in the Sahara - see above pic). Back in Spain we road tripped through parts of Southern France with a stay in Carcassonne, a stay Vielha  (in the Pyrenees), a day trip to Andorra, a coastal road trip through the Basque region, a stay in San Sebastian and Llanes in Asturias, and a beautiful drive through the Picas de Europa National Park. We finished with a stay in Bilbao before catching the early train back to Barcelona.

Whew.

But enough about travel (except for some additional pics) - what I actually learned with respects to this project were:

1) Vegetarians are crazy good at sticking to their eating identity. Lydia’s sister-in-law has been vegetarian for a long time and has traveled quite a bit. She makes it work. She buys food like yogurt and nuts and stocks it, eating them in case she doesn’t have good food options. She eats around meat on dishes. 

I’m realizing more and more along this project that the auxiliary actions - for me it’s Sunday Meal Prep, for her stocking up on veggie food items, make more of a difference than struggling head on with eating right (and behaviors in general). I need to learn how to do what she and other vegetarians in my life do.

2) Proper preparation is still lacking in my travel protocol. I somehow didn’t carry a notebook and pen with me. I had multiple chances to change this behavior - I could’ve bought one back when we came back to Spain and had a night in Barcelona. 

Now, the normal old Biju would say - just do it - get a notebook, and continue to fail with this strategy again and again. But I’m not that person - this project looks into the mechanics of why I didn’t get one. And the truth is, I was too busy. I was doubling up on everything about 4 days before our guests arrived so I didn’t have any time or will to do the most important thing in travel prep: implement intentions and get the basic tools necessary for recording my habits.

Because whether it’s my natural growing propensity for self regulation or this newer trick of artificially upping my basic willpower requirements a couple of days before, I’m doing my habits even in the weirdest of conditions. 

I noticed that my Achilles was tightening up while doing a lot of walking every day, so I started doing a few of of Kelley Starrett’s exercises in the back seat of cars (I need to get some more of his tools to do this even better while traveling). I meditated in cars, and even on the back of a camel in the Sahara. What I’m not doing, is recording those instances, which leaves me untethered to a master plan. So it naturally petered out towards the end of the trip.

One option in prep is to have the last day before travel be totally free and dedicated completely to mental contrasting and implementation intention for the trip - sort of like a moment of reflection elite athletes go through before the action, visualization exactly how every part of the race will go. So instead of giving myself time off after the trip, do a brief bit of it before the trip so that I don’t automatically self sabotage. How I’d incorporate artificially advanced minimums into this is something I’ll have to think about. Maybe 4 days of difficult routines, followed by the final day before the trip being completely free? I don’t know, I’ll have to experiment.

3) Lastly, specifically lowering minimums can result in more output. This ties with the last point, but I didn’t even attempt to do any writing on the trip. One of our group journals without fail, and there’s really no reason why I couldn’t, if I gauged how to lower my minimums for writing. And I really haven’t pinned down a specific strategy to do this for all my routines.

On one hand, my ideal is to ratchet forward EVEN WHILE TRAVELING. On the other, there is value in keeping a minimal placeholder for a habit, and often times time requirements prevent the advanced instance of a progressed habit. 

While one day may give me the time to do a long walking session (most travel days are like this) I may not be able to do a full hour of serious writing. It’s more likely to be able to work on my eating than it is to do a 45 minute formal sit for meditation, especially if it’s an utterly full day. And I go back and forth on this - I think that it may well be that having a full habit while traveling is a level of habituation that’s even more advanced than a superhabit, and that skill need to be advanced to this level one at a time.

If that model is correct then the very first skill I need to master is recording, which underscores the biggest mess up I had on this trip.

Formalization of Stretching and Bedtime Curfew Habits

Stretching

I pulled my hip badly and am still recovering. I’ve been reading The Supple Leopard: The Ultimate Guide to Resolving Pain, Preventing Injury, and Optimizing Athletic Performance by Kelly Starrett and Glen Cordoza the guys behind Mobility Wod.

I’m pretty sold. If meditation is process oriented skill for all mental interactions in life, then their description of mobilizing and stretching is the process oriented behind-the-scenes skill for all physical activity. And it’s especially necessary for someone like me, who has gone from one injury to the next constantly over the course of decades. Plus, it’s just good for you.

They seem to know what their talking about, they have tons of exercises online that progress, so….

Implementation Intention

I’m going to start tomorrow with simply researching and attempting one or two stretches. I’m still learning and reading, so I’m hoping a lot of stuff will clarify itself. I’ll do this after my writing and before my exercise/rowing.

Mental Contrasting
Positive: It will help brace me for better movement and hopefully prevent injuries that I’ve seemed to constantly get into in the past. It will prevent those long periods of healing where I lose all progress.

Stumbling blocks: I don’t see any except that I’m new to this and will have to read a lot to get to a point of proficiency. But starting small will allow me the time to form a routine and learn at the same time. Luckily it seems so far it will be a habit I can do without specialized equipment in any location - so travel won’t be a problem.

Bedtime Curfew
Another small habit I’ll introduce to my greater Early to Rise project is setting a specific time, closing my computer, and heading to bed to read. I have a tendency to just stay up for no good reason. My sleep recording suggests that I generally get a set amount of sleep, I just need to shift over the time period (which is not at all what I expected - I thought I had problems getting to sleep and that I slept too long). So

Implementation Intention
On average, from the data I have from my Sleep Recording, I tend to go to bed a little before 2 am. If I’m going to keep with making small changes, I will intend to go to bed at 1:20 am. At that time I’ll close my computer and read.

Mental Contrasting
Positive: I hope this will help me wake up earlier, thereby increasing both the feeling and actuality of my productivity.

Stumbling blocks: Initially feeling like I have to stay up because I haven’t had enough time to do anything during the day. I’ll initially feel like I’m cutting short my day by going to bed earlier while not getting up any earlier. At this point, keeping it nice and easy with going to bed at 1:20 am - I don’t see there being any problems with the few times I stay out late since I don’t really do that anymore. I don’t foresee any travel problems except very occasionally. I do worry that I might have problems actually getting to sleep, but I think that’s a problem for a different habit.

Formalizing Meal Prep Sunday

A month or so I came across a subreddit called Meal Prep Sunday. It was exactly what you’d imagine - people were making all their meals for the week on Sunday in an effort to automate their eating routines.

I have repeatedly had problems with such automation. One reason involves what I described before in posts like “Syncing with Significant Others” - Lydia and I just have different eating times to our schedules, and if we are off, the likelihood of just cheating increases. The cheating is less about craving and more about convenience. It’s also just plain hard to stick to eating well.

The last three weekends we’ve been trying out meal preparation on Sundays. We bought a bunch of glass jars, we cut up all our vegetables (which is super easy now that we have a good food processor) and I make a stock. We only do lunches right now - either salads or soups - and that alone is working out fantastically.

I see this as a huge step forward in my eating. I can also see this fitting into a larger series of food habits progressing forward. To have a half step like this makes the thought of doing a Whole 30 Challenge almost like an afterthought rather than a true struggling challenge. It’s as though these counterintuitively small habits are foreordaining future successes (as described in “Towards an Identity Model of Habits: Part III”). 

This strategy is, to me, a different one compared to most normal habits, where I’m striving for the next level of mastery and automaticity. In this identity model it feels almost like the reverse - nail the small bits and whatever 30 challenge isn’t about enduring - it’s an afterthought, it’s finishing school, it’s icing on the cake. 

This is really important, especially for eating, which we don’t really think of as a skill that can be fully mastered. Until now I’ve usually thought of it as binary - either I’m not eating right or I am. Now it’s progressive, and I’ve never really seen that - I’ve heard of people talk about it like it should be implemented in small ways, but I’ve never seen the full progression, and that’s really important for people starting out, or people like me who are just horrible at it.

Meal Prep Sunday also marks the first real non-daily habit I’ve gone after. I’m formalizing it here in this post, and am very curious just how slow it will take to crystalize. It’s also a messy habit - it involves a bunch of routines, and I’m really curious if this is the proper way to encode it for maximum long term success.

Implementation Intention:

When I first get up on Sunday, I’ll work with Lydia to make a stock, go to the store to get veggies and proteins, and put the meals together.

Mental Contrasting:

-Positive: As I said before, I think this is a very solid half step towards mastering eating for life. This change in identity foreordains success with energy levels, general long term health, and weight loss.

-Stumbling Blocks:

Doing anything on Sunday can interfere with this habit. If I travel, there’s really no way to do this, though to be fair I’ll probably be eating out anyways. If I want to meet people up or do a day trip that involves weekends or just Sundays meal prep will be thrown into disarray. Compensating would really work well with getting up early. This just underscores that good habits have a tendency to support each other just as bad habits support each other, making it incredibly hard to make global behavioral identity shifts.

Secondly, there are a lot of behaviors here. The implementation intention isn’t really precise. What is the “if”? I’d say either when I get up, or after my weekend morning routine - so after I do my pantry check, water & bacon, and note down my sleep times, I do this. Ok, fine.

But what is the “then”? Do I go to the store, do I start chopping? Do I just get all my jars out?

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

Implementing a Wakeup Habit

As of last week both my small eating habits became superhabits. My plan was to either start a wakeup plan, advance in eating by doing a meal prep on Sunday, or start a walking/being outside habit. 

Lydia and I just got our city bike share card, and had a fantastic day cycling along several beaches, checking out a food festival, and exploring a park. It got us really excited and we sat down and decided we want to become outdoorsy, that we had to do it because of how easy it was. The main problem is that most difficult of freelancer dilemmas: waking up early.

We’ve both been dragging on getting up, and it’s always been on my list in order to cram more things into the day. But, as with eating right, I’ve attempted this habit many, many times and failed. So, as with eating, I’m going to tackle this as an identity based habit.

In my main blog post on how to construct such a megahabit - “Towards an Identity Model of Habits: Part III” - I talk about several methods to hit the problem:

-Social Identity

-Certifications

-Affirmations

-Greasing the Groove

-Counterintuitively Small Habits

-Quantified Self

-Falling in Love

-…and Miscellaneous Advanced Options

I think, when surveying options, the main thing to remember is that for these types of habits, the one thing you don’t want to do is to yet again attempt the habit you’ve tried to introduce before. We seem to think that THIS time it’ll be different, that this time if we really believe and clench harder, things will change, when we’ve seen our methodology fail time and time again. The answer lies in attempting new strategies.

I have always attempted this habit by just setting an alarm early and buckling down inside and just DOING IT. That has never worked. I’ve more recently tried Flux, a program that changes light on my computer and setting progressively early times to just get to bed. Those worked better, but eventually failed. 

The method for identity habits should be the inverse - enacting smaller, less directly connected behaviors and building upon them so that when it comes to do the obvious, direct behavior, it’s almost like an afterthought.

Look, it’s not as though we can’t force ourselves to get up early. If I have to be on a plane, if I have an interview, if I have a job, it’s done. But that’s not what I’m talking about by these deep habits. I don’t want to wake up early, I want to be a Morning Person.

So THIS TIME, I’m going to start with three small habits. The first is recording (from the quantified self option). But I don’t like all the fancy apps and gadgets that attempt to pinpoint REM cycles based on body movements and whatnot. All I want is to keep it simple and record what my wakeup and bed time was for the day before. This is great, because I can build the recording into my food recording superhabit.

The next thing I’ll do is drink a cold glass of water as soon as I wake up. After looking at dozens of websites on how to wake up early, this has been one of the few consistent pieces of advice (I’ll consider this taken from the “counterintuitively small habits” category”).

Thirdly, I’m taking a cue from the “Fall in Love” Category.  One other great piece of consistent advice has been to do something that makes you excited to get up. Krissy Brady from Lifehack writes:

One thing we tend to lose as adults is the feeling of freedom we had as kids. When we had no sense of schedule, deadlines, goals, or pressure, we were always emotionally available and our imaginations made us feel like anything was possible. 

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/10-simple-strategies-wake-early.html

A lot of websites circled around it, but this is my real issue. I use to LOVE getting up in the morning as a child, and somehow, I’ve lost that. I was thinking about what things I’d love to do that give me that same sense I felt as a kid. Going to the beach, definitely, but it’s too long. Other websites talk about having no pressure mornings, but for habits and willpower, nothing beats tackling your hardest task at the very beginning of the day. And then the most ridiculous thing came to mind: making bacon.

As a child bacon was a treat. My mom made it only a few weekends, but those were the days I’d wake up early, I’d go biking, I had long mornings drenched in sun and anything was possible. It somehow encapsulates that precise spot of childlike glee. And because I’m eating primal, it’s not even cheating. Hell, I could use the cals - in Brazil I only got over a long plateau after I started munching on chicharrones. It’s easy, it’s a treat, it’s ritualistic, it’s in my home and doesn’t take too much time, and I can drink a cold glass of water while I’m frying it up. Done.

So my implementation intentions are:

After I record my food, I will record when I went to bed the night before and what time I got out of bed that morning. I will record this on the same spreadsheet I record all my other habits. 

As soon as I get up I will make two slices (let’s not get too crazy here) of bacon. While I’m doing that, I’ll drink a cold glass of water. I will then grab my coffee and do my pantry check.

Mental Contrasting:

Positive: Waking up early will allow me the feeling of being a child, the feeling of unlimited energy and potential in the day. I’ll be able to take my time in all my tasks, from working out to writing. Afterwards, I’ll be able to get out and explore my city, which also gives me childlike glee. And it’ll give me the space I need to do more.

Stumbling blocks: I will forget what time I went to bed - I’ll have to have a place to note that down, and I’ll have to remember to write down what time I woke up. I’ll also have to remember to get bacon at the store - OH WAIT, it’s on my pantry check (finally some habits are building off others)! If I’m traveling I might not have bacon or a place to cook it on - though if I’m traveling I’m usually waking up early anyways.

Girl waking up by Gabriela Camerotti, vintage alarm clock by H is for Home, glass of water by Gioconda Beekman, bacon by Jazz Guy

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

An Identity Model Implementation of Eating

As I said before I’ve already started this informally. I don’t allow any “unclean” food into my kitchen and I do a pantry check every day to make sure I have enough clean staples in my fridge so that I can make a few snacks and meals. In case anyone is curious they are:

-ground beef
-eggs
-avocado
-tomato
-onion
-cabbage
-bacon
-canned tomato
-”picas” - chorizo, deli meat, olives, maybe cheese

Yesterday Lydia and I were completed depleted - her because of a particularly heavy work schedule, me because of bad sleep and an intense HIIT. We were both completely giving each other permission to cheat - “let’s just order some pizza” and comments like that. We were suffering from “decision fatigue” and trying to decide was just becoming painful. Usually that means we’re ordering in - and not anything clean.

What happened was nothing short of miraculous - we made Om Nom Paleo’s “Garbage Stir-fry” (which I know sounds horrible, but is really good, filling, and easy to make when you’re in a pinch).

I’m not joking about the “miracle” part of that last sentence. I was ego-depleted, which, according to all of Baumeister’s experiments, results in lack of self-control. Together things get worse. I wrote about the problem of “Syncing with Significant Others” which I feel causes something similar to habit dissonance, drastically magnifying problems in the decision making process. Furthermore, there was no habit in place, no implementation intention, no gamification or quantification of self going on.

But that counterintuitively small habit of doing pantry checks meant we had the ingredients. And we had this general feeling of knowing that we shouldn’t cheat. It almost made it so that it was easier to just eat clean. I have to analyze this more, but the salient point for this post is that pantry checking has already paid off.

So I made a list of small habits that pull from the pool of Identity-centric formations I posted in my recent post, “Towards an Identity Model of Habits: Part III”:

-Recording everything that goes into my mouth
-Not bringing cheat items into the house for cooking
-daily pantry check
-calorie counting
-ritual of the same meal or snack once a day
-tea ritual with recording food for the day
-grocery store trip
-Some kind of paleo primal certification
-joining a clean eating club in my city
-joining a virtual version of the above and taking part in the community
-weekly meal planning session
-daily meal planning
-after x number of drinks we auto ask for check
- or order a water between every drink
-flash challenges - bread flash challenge
-no drink flash challenge
-recording what you spend on food
-travel protocol
-going out protocol
-connoisseurship checklist

That’s just a rough list…I think since these are small I can do two at one time and be safe.