Towards an Identity Model of Habits: Part I

My buddy James is a vegetarian.

I am not a morning person.

I’m a reader of fantasy books.

Remember those statements, ’cause I’m going to reference ’em later.

In the last few years I’ve been experimenting with various models of self improvement. Before I officially started this project I assumed that motivation was a significant catalyst for self change. After seeing it as a perennial problem (I can get psyched up for gym going starting on New Years, but it peters out pretty quickly, and the cycle repeats next year) I switched to other things.

I dabbled in gamification, because I saw its addictive properties as lowering willpower thresholds. Like motivation, it worked, but only for a while.

I’ve since focused on habits for the last two years, and though I’ve had a great deal of success, they’re only foolproof in relatively basic and linear behaviors. When things get complicated that paradigm just isn’t enough.

How are they not enough?

The linear model – what BJ Fogg advocates, of starting a Tiny Habit, reaching that hook point of automaticity, then naturally increasing difficulty, repetitions, or length of time until you achieve mastery – doesn’t seem to fully work all the time. Or rather it really falls a part when you’re pushing habits to mastery, which I see as another vector of effort (regimention/willpower and endurance/forming a habit being the other two vectors).

That vector involves plateaus in skill and the maddening frustration of constantly doing a task that is at least slightly above your current level.

It also runs into trouble when you’re dealing with families of skills. I advocate this not only because families can support each other, but in a world where time is of essence (we die, our bodies wear out), skills that have an accrual across time are necessary to start now to gain the benefits of daily minimums across time. If I start a habit of cardio 30 minutes a day, I may not master it. I might not get my goal of a six pack until I nail my eating habit. But for as long as I’m exercising, I’m accruing secondary cardio “points”.

Pushing skills in the vector of skill advancement throws a huge wrench into the equation because of habit harmonics. A dissonance starts – extra effort in one skill affects the solidity of other habits.

But the biggest problem with my current model is that it doesn’t attenuate in more complicated behaviors.

Let’s go back to the original three statements.

My buddy James is a vegetarian. When we go out and eat he avoids meat. In all scenarios. After the bars while tipsy and ordering pizza late at night, when going to a restaurant with friends with crappy vegetarian options, even in one place that had amazing pork tacos.

I do the same thing with fantasy books. It’s not as though I decide to read them – I HAVE to read them. It’s not even a choice. I need to have those few minutes before bed to scratch that itch and if I don’t have at least an option loaded on my Kindle, I start to get all itchy. The world is not right.

The inverse is important to analyze – I’m not a morning person. My waking up early is either a fluke or a deliberate preparation if I need it. Morning people are morning people because they enjoy it or they just are that way – it’s totally independent from fluctuating conditions. If they’re out late the night before, they still wake up early.

For all three – it’s an identity that’s welded in. It’s not what you do, it’s part of who you are, which not only makes it stronger, it also is able to somehow adapt incredibly well to changing conditions. Choice is also almost entirely scrubbed out of the equation.

For me this becomes an issue with eating and getting up early. All the other habits I consider foundational are easy. Working out – no problem, barring travel, it’s once a day at a certain time. Same with writing, meditating, and if I add flossing or recording finances. It’s a matter of if-then protocols – implementation intentions.

For eating that gets insanely complicated – it’s multiple times a day, across changing circumstances, etc. I believe it’s the reason I’ve had to scrap the habit several times, even when I’ve maintained it for close to a year. It just never stuck. And this is a big problem – eating is incredibly important for health, energy, and weight loss. It also has the biggest impact for whether I can socialize well later in the program – I don’t want to go out to meet people and, because of lack of willpower, blow out a previous habit of making good food decisions.

mask by 派脆客 Lee, tack by Zaheer Mohiuddin, welder by Per Hortlund

Progression Dilemma Part 2: Pros and Cons

What’s the best option? Let’s list out the virtues of each path:

OPTION 1 - Establishing All Habits
Pros: Steadily working on things. Better regimentation. Circle of support. vortex forces are not in play (because you’re doing everything!). Accrual of long-term benefits, like writing “two shitty pages”, allows for great benefits simply because you’re doing it every day even though it’s in incredibly small amounts. This latter benefit only occurs in some skills…like writing or fixed skills like flossing.
Cons: Glacially slow progress. Incredibly difficult to regiment - overwhelming. problems with house of cards, problems with time, problems in willpower - you have to do ALL of it in one day. Vortex forces might actually be in play on another level because you aren’t progressing in everything - there will be times when the impatience in some skills will affect you. Depletion forces in play.

OPTION 2 - 1 Skill Progression
Pros: fast progress. lots of willpower
Cons: no support. no regimentation practice. Vortex forces definitely in play.

OPTION 3 - Family of Skills
Pros: Fast progress - arguably the FASTEST progress due to skills backing each other up (ex, diet AND exercise) Seeing fast progress helps with motivation, saves on vortex forces. Saving some on willpower, therefore fewer depletion forces. Targeted relevant support. A little regimentation practice.
Cons: Vortex forces in play (a little). downside of regularity to prevent things like writer’s block. Accrual of long term benefits a la two shitty pages not in play.

CONCLUSION:

Option 1 is definitely out - there’s just too much going wrong for it. I think the best option is the third - it seems to have the best of both worlds - the only real thing wrong with it is a lack of small accrual in certain tasks. 

What does all this mean for the future of the project? It’s something I’ll discuss in my next post. I think the important thing to remember is that these are three phases. Regimentation, habituation, and mastery. I think clarifying what success means and separating out these three vectors is critical for any further progress and discussion.

What is good for habituation isn’t necessarily good for mastery. And making decisions like that are what’s crucial for continuing this project - it also definitively signifies a turning point in this blog. What started out as a project on habituation has definitely outgrown its starting parameters. 

And that’s a good thing.

Regimentation Strategies and a Rudimentary Scale

Here’s my first rough Scale for Regimentation:

1) When I do a scheduled task I do not think of other tasks
2) When I end a scheduled task I do not continue to think of it afterwards
3) I am able to leave off thinking of work when work is done
4) I don’t work when it’s not time to work
5) There is a strong line between work and non-work for me
6) Work stress doesn’t tend to worry me out during non work times
7) I quickly get into a relaxed state once I finish work

Each question is a 7 point Likert Scale as is the Grit Scale and the SRHI. Do not agree at all = 1, Strongly agree = 7. I just took this and I scored a 17 our of a possible 49 points. Which sounds about right.

Some possible additions?
-I tend to put off tasks (procrastination seems to be a factor in regimentation)
-I tend to ramp up and ramp down depending if it’s work or relaxation (might be too simple to question #7

Some Strategies:

“Sticky” or Absorptive Hobbies 
Not looking at things like Facebook/work email
Spend time outside
Try to steer clear of staring at a computer screen.
Having weekends
Charting out a schedule for free time - I have a  tendency to let everything drop which inevitably leaves me feeling like I didn’t DO anything during my free time. Some amount of lazing is great, but total lazing makes me feel like I didn’t quite relax enough, as odd as that sounds.
Having an intention to not think of work stuff and to relax

The Weekend Power of Habit

I endeavored to take this weekend off. 

I automatically did all my habits on Saturday. And I did several of my habits yesterday (Sunday). There was a point where I was out with a friend and we had planned to go to a place that had only clean meals. We instead went to a Tex Mex place (my kryptonite). 

I automatically ordered a salad. It came completely covered with fried tortilla strips. And I just automatically pushed them to the side and ate everything else.

This is actually working. It’s something that I don’t really believe because the results aren’t immediate. But it’s in moments like that where I begin to understand that my self control is shooting through the roof - that’s definitely no the person I was 1 year ago.

My weekend in general was incredibly relaxing. I am starting to really focus on regimentation and am now really convinced that the art of regimentation is a significant and important part of this project. I think it’s something that most people have problems with - the ability to be completely caught up in something and just, in the next moment, completely forget about it. I think an inability to do this results in massive leaks in self discipline across time.

Weekends Off?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the off time regarding this project. A lot of sources highly encourage things like taking weekends off to prevent to boost productivity for the week. Other sources also highly recommend increasing the value of time off with things like hobbies - Warren Buffet plays the ukelele, Bush oil paints, etc.

These are, perhaps, two separate issues but they’re only getting more distinct as I mull it over in my head. For weekends off, on one hand, it seems antithetic to my project. A habit is something you do automatically with regularity. Ideally that means every day because the more regular a task is the more (presumably) benefits you’ll reap. Automatic tasks don’t sap will, so why take weekends off?

There are some counters to this. Certain tasks are a pain to do and do take energy no matter if they are habits or not. The act of sitting down to write is automatic, but actually working through editing a text is hard. And presumably that’s because I’m not just executing a habit, I’m also working on a difficult skill, which does sap resources. 

It becomes more and more clear that all of this isn’t just 2 dimensional graph, it’s at least three dimensions with various phases. And rejuvenation may not just be needed for habituation, but it may well be needed for increasing in skill towards mastery.

So perhaps habits not yet in 70′s or 80′s can be dropped on the weekends. After all, the more I do a task, the more it gets to be a superhabit. But once it’s a superhabit, I’m on the skill/mastery track. Perhaps weekend habits can be maintained by doing something fun and easy - a fun bit of writing, a walk for working out, a pinterest safari for marketing, etc.

But another argument for weekends even while forming a habit comes from the SRHI. It’s pretty hard to gauge whether it feels weird NOT doing a habit if you’ve never not done it. A weekend away from habits can, at some point, be a proving ground for that feeling, gauging its strength.

The worry with all this is getting so exhausted that all of it collapses. I’ve been taking more weekends off in year 2, and I’m still wondering if it should be a part of my schedule. Definitely hobbies and regimentation and not worrying after work will help. But I have to wonder if this is another hole in the system I need to plug in.

Regimentation Part 3: The Fog of Fear & the Repulsion of Planners

In a previous post I took a pic of old habit notes I had from high school and discussed my habits in middle school. I was really bad at them. But that’s ok, I’m getting pretty good now.

Another thing I was really really bad at despite trying constantly was planning. Planning ANYTHING. I had so many planners, but it was really difficult for me to keep to a schedule - it was almost like as soon as I wrote it down something would emerge from me, a perfect procrastinator who would see it as a challenge, preventing me from finishing a task when it was scheduled.

And I still have this difficulty. There’s an almost nebulous revulsion that arises when someone tries to pin me down to something for, say, next wednesday at 4 pm. I start immediately squirming and grasping for ways to at least have an exit should I not want to go to a date when the time comes up.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time trying to nail down tasks for the next 6 weeks. I believe that one aspect of this project that I’m lacking in is week to week, month to month progressions. I should know what I want to accomplish for a month, and how, week to week, the sub projects contribute to that overall goal. And how that goal progresses to the future. Which is essentially the realm of planners.

When I did this a great fog arose in my mind - like some subconscious part of myself was trying to erase the focus for the task of planning. It was agony, which was pretty hilarious. I take this as a positive sign a la Stephen Pressfield - when he talks about that quality as being a compass pointing north - it tells you exactly what you need to work on.

So I need to work on this, and I have to believe that if implement it correctly, I can improve my regimentation ability. Should this be a separate habit? I can see it as a Sunday task, sitting down to plan out what I need to do for the week and course correcting. It would certainly give me the opportunity to experiment to see how only doing a task once a week affects the habituation process. It’s something I’ll have to think about.

Regimentation Part 2: Pesky Tasks and R&R

So what should I do?

For one, I need to stop planning in a goal-oriented manner. That means not planning with goals in mind, but for quality time. Like the post I linked from James Clear on Zanshin, everything is aiming. So how do I aim? Start with a small amount of time - in short, it’s recognizing that fighting through difficult pesky and small tasks IS the battle, not some sort of failure before the real struggle.

That can definitely help mitigate that frustration if I know my frustration is solid progress forward. But an equally important ability is to leave work at the door and relax. I think that capacity is something I ignore because A) I always feel like I’m behind and B) I don’t really have many hobbies or relaxing activities. Almost everything I do slides into a desire to want to master it. I bought a calligraphy book and pen a few weeks ago, and I want to master it fully. I started biking, which I used to do purely for fun in high school to get out of the house, and I start thinking about it in terms of steady state cardio. Games get me frustrated a lot of the time. And watching TV shows on my computer often is me just staring at the computer screen like with work AND often has me reaching for something else to do.

This capacity of regimentation seems to me to be equally important as endurance and grit. It’s a handoff - if you have bad regimentation then you’ll leak willpower. Leaking willpower drains endurance - it’s harder to stick things out long-term if you can’t establish success in day-to-day tasks.

Regimentation Part 1

In a previous post I talked about how regimentation, habituation, and mastery are the three different parts of the self improvement process. I’ve talked almost exclusively about the last two - Habituation is the thrust of the whole project what with constant SRHI scores and Mastery is something I talk about a lot when it comes to overcoming skill plateaus.

But I’ve largely ignored describing regimentation - though initially I talked about it a little bit (HERE, HERE, and HERE).

I have severe problems with the mental framework of regimentation, and this severely undermines the structural integrity of this project. What do I mean?

I have an inability to move from one task to the next during the day without carrying the worries of one to the next. I have problems delineating the line between work and relaxation. Lydia has repeatedly suggested I take up a hobby, but I’m largely incapable of doing something purely for the fun of it and not subsume it for some sort of larger project of mastery.

I also have great difficulty in properly planning out a week with tasks that need to be done. I often make the mistake of planning things out in terms of objectives that need to be completed, and biting off way more than I can chew. This results in immense frustration and tension.

For example, yesterday I took some time to plan out the next three weeks in regards to launching a new website. Today’s task was to format one draft of a post. Unfortunately various small bits of that work caused me great difficulty. Italics doesn’t show up properly. The post videos and photos don’t show up properly. I have to edit down the video using software I am not familiar with.

Because I’ve planned it like this the task becomes difficult to win. I’ve programmed goal-oriented thinking with process oriented thinking, which means failures at small points make me frustrated because I feel like I’m failing, and because of that ending time for work extends out for the entire day. And I end up collapsing, “failing”, giving up, but with immense mental self flagellation, which drains all my willpower, preventing me from having a “springiness” of self. It makes other tasks later in the week harder to start.

I just saw a meme about DragonBall Z:

It’s a funny Reddit meme about a fictional martial artist, but basically it illustrates training. Each part is incredibly important - not just the training, but the recovery time and “feeding the machine.” Arnold Schwarzenegger also advocates this in his autobiography. He trains hard, but he warns against grasping too hard. Worrying about tasks causes you to work against yourself - when he works he plays and has fun as well, which contributed in his successes.

Habit Exhaustion, Stalling, and Growth Cycles

My habits, from an automaticity SRHI standpoint, are AMAZING. 

But from a regimentation and mastery standpoint, they’re shaky.

I’m having more difficulties moving from quality practice from one task to the next during a day. The reason is emotional - I feel like I’m not progressing towards Mastery in any given habit. So despite the length of time and the strength of my habits, it’s not paying off enough for me.

The best example is eating - I initially got a great ROI - I lost weight, etc. Now, despite having it solid, I’m hovering around the same weight, while my buddy, who’s been counting calories, has lost tons of weight. I have to remind myself it’s not about the result, it’s about getting good at the process, yet it still bothers me.

Lydia suggests that I should pick one or two specific habits to enter a growth cycle - the problem is that I feel that ALL of them need to be grown - it’s similar to picking a new habit. I feel I need 20 of them. And I feel it’s important to define that emotional state because it’s the cause of a lot of failure - the need to do everything at once, preventing any improvement on anything despite tremendous energy expenditure (emotionally or work-wise). I’ve always referenced it as “life ADD” - but we’ll call it something else. A compulsive urge to multitask and overcommit. I wish I had a good term from engineering for this, because more and more I”m seeing this whole system in terms of locomotion - aeronautics or something, with thrust, drag, acceleration, etc.

And there’s a cloudiness involved with this. I can’t see past the urge to overcommit, but when talking about it I realized that a few things are ok. Eating is ok - I need to clean it up, but it won’t need much additional willpower. It just needs to redirected, as does my fixed meditation. The two things that might actually make the most changes are bodyweight exercises, because it tends to affect mood, and dynamic meditation, which also effects mood. That’s what Lydia says anyways.  I have to think about it more.

A Robust(er?) Model Of Self Improvement - Part II

This model is a sketch. I think there are a lot of variables that still need to be honed. But here’s what I came up with.

Regimentation is a daily practice with specific problems. You have to overome fear, you have to avoid procrastination, etc. You have to have daily recording sessions. You have to manage Willpower.

Habituation is a mid-range practice. You need to avoid danger zones, set up things like TinyHabits. You need to weather disruptions like travel. You need to manage Endurance.

Mastery is a long-range practice. You have to bust through plateaus to continually increase in skill.

Above is a rough graph of what this might look like. One plane is time, another is the SRHI, and another is GRIT. This is a real map of my meditation habit along time and the SRHI. I totally fudged it for Grit because I’ve only taken the Grit Scale three times.

Grit is what I’m using as a stand-in for the path to mastery since it’s defined as Endurance + getting over things like setbacks and plateaus. Habituation doesn’t care about plateaus. You can have a solid superhabit of playing the violin but not ever improve your skill at it. Grit seems to be the best scale for improvement, and it’s ability to predict success is one of the reasons why Duckworth was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant.

Is it the best scale for this? I’m not sure. How does it play into Endurance? I’m not sure. But this graph seems to me the best model for all three variables - regimentation, habituation, and mastery.

Old School Habits: Habituation Notes from Highschool

I’ve been obsessed with habit formation for a long time. I remember trying to encode habits in middle school.

Yesterday when I was cleaning out my parent’s garage I found a bunch of old schedulers from high school (1994, 1995, 1997)….and it has been really interesting reading these again!

Here I basically talk about how I need to set habits - and interestingly enough I do the exact same thing I did in the first iteration of this project - start one task, then add another after a week. This obviously doesn’t work very well.

The check-list variant of habit formation. Not really that much different than what I do now.

A more robust iteration of the checklist.

Here you see more of a strategy of regimentation.

Again, very cool to see this, but it really underscores the importance of something like the SRHI to gauge the strength of the habits. It also underscores the need of a more robust program to keep up with all this, as well as a slower progression.

In the last picture I’m really going after a lot of things, but because I didn’t understand how willpower/endurance works, it was inevitable that, despite my ambition, I would fail.

I remember doing this a lot - going through eternal cycles of trying desperately to form a bunch of solid habits, forgetting, remembering a month or so down the line, and then going back to the same tasks. I felt after every cycle that if I just wanted it MORE, I’d eventually succeed. Which is often why the next cycle would be even more ambitious and encompass more tasks.

It’s also interesting to note how similar the activities were - waking up early, meditating, exercise, music….these are things I STILL want to master…only now I have a much better understanding on how to do so. 

Oddly enough looking back I feel really good about this project. I see exactly what I did wrong and I’m glad I finally zoned in on this old interest of mine, to research and experiment on it, and to do it right.

A Note on Scaling

I’ve been thinking a lot on what I want my writing habit to look like, and I feel my final picture is one that will have cross over to most other habits.

Habit formation is the focus of this project, but it’s not the entire end game. Mastery of skills is. And so scaleability of tasks and pushing for constant improvement to bust out of plateaus is key.

When I think of my writing habit, it starts with fear. I’m afraid to just write due to various reasons. So step 1 is simply overcoming that initial fear response. Train and train until the response is action to the task rather than putting it off.  To do this I implement a small habit. Small sized habits - like doing 2 pushups or writing 50 words - make it ludicrous to NOT start or do the task in a day.

Step 2 is making it so that the task - writing in this case - isn’t just something I have to do in a day. It’s like breathing. It’s like brushing my teeth. It’s a part of my daily routine. And an advanced version of this - the superhabit - means that it would take more effort to not do it than to do it.

This is all well and good, but this can, for some tasks, land you squarely in a cycle of churning mud in place. Do 50 words, but they can be crappy words. You need to push past, and this can be done in various ways. For bodyweight exercises its doing more. I went from two burpees to 24. And this is step 3 - extending the habit. I did this with burpees by simply recording them. By recording, I was forced to distance myself and look at what I was doing. Naturally you want to slowly do more.

In writing I’m doing this naturally. And I’ve started to emphasize this by recording how many words I do. And I will continue to do this, and it’s a great thing right now. But very soon I will need more than just quantity. I’ll need quality.

So enter step 4. With working out it’s following a version of a scaled strength plan. So instead of just adding to the number of pushups I can do I mix it up. I do back bends and abs. I do more and more difficult exercises. And this is exactly what I will need for writing.

I envision a plan where I have one day where I work on transitions. One day where I work on pitches, and one day where I work on specific chinks in my writing armor. Maybe for one month I work on one thing, and then I move on. Maybe I take a class. I don’t know.

What I do know is that it has to be targeted.  It can’t be just taking a general easy class, because then complacency rises up - it’s easy to write 50 crap words, but improvement doesn’t come through anything but uncomfort.

I’ve tried a version of this with eating - I challenged myself to not eat bread for a month. Could I do more? Yes. What about other habits? Could I improve in recording? Absolutely - I can memorize the SRHI and take it in my head. Meditation? Sure.

The picture I have in my mind is being tossed into a module. I might have craziness happening in my life as a whole, but at X time I’m tossed into a totally dark room with nothing but the next preplanned module that forces me to grow. The room is completely unaffected by the outside world or other adjoining rooms. And the training, for the set duration of time, is perfect for my abilities at the time - not too easy, not too hard, but just right to force me to grow. Then I’m tossed back out into the real world and can totally forget that room. That, to me, is my mental image of proper training and regimentation.