Recharging Habits

Since finishing NaNoWriMo my writing habit has been lax - automaticity has been difficult to achieve. A part of that has to do with improper transitional planning - I knew exactly what I had to do during my 30 day challenge, and after it ended I was left swinging in the wind. 

Another aspect is a lack of a proper implementation intention. It had been eroded by my recent travels, and for NaNoWriMo it had changed. My unstated implementation was “write A LOT” - which I did. But shifting gears to a normal schedule my if-then protocol was gone. And this is very noticeable when compared to my very new rowing habit, which has a crisp if-then (as soon as I get up, I row), a fact that’s reflected in rapidly soaring SRHI scores.

I switched up my routine yesterday and today, immediately writing after rowing. It just feels more automatic. It appears that the closer I have a task to waking up, the more charged the habit gets. Why? I think it has to proper implementation - the further a long in the day the more willpower stores are depleted. Also more tasks come up later in the day. I need to eat, I need to go to the bathroom, I need to cook. All of those tasks are not precisely pinned down - they change, making the implementation sloppier.

That usually doesn’t matter so much - but after various forms of degradation (travel, a 30 day challenge, getting sick), it starts to make a big difference in automaticity. 

A while back I talked about the potential that all long-term habits may need a “re-charge” once and a while. Scott Young, in his post “Why is it So Hard to Create Permanent Habits?” describes this train of thought.

In the post Young talks about how many habits have to be restarted. We want to think they will be permanent, but they often aren’t - habits for him are a medium-term strategy. They are, in his terminology - “metastable” - they lower thresholds of action in some ways, but not all ways. And because of this, they often have to be restarted depending on the changing action you are doing in the habit. 

This idea of metastability conforms to my experience as the reason why I’ve found few habits have had permanent lifespans. Inevitably, the habit breaks down because of a temporary lifestyle change: a vacation, an illness, needing to move or work overtime. These create shocks which are often enough to break the behavior, increase the decision cost, making it no longer automatic when you return to the habit. 

http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/03/25/permanent-habits/

His full post is really interesting, and I’d like to analyze it fully in a separate post. I agree that shocks will destabilize habits. But I think proper mid-range planning can compensate allowing you to “shelf” some habits at lower daily minimums (which he mentions) or, in this case, “recharge” them by rotating them in a daily regiment. 

I also think that tempering a habit comes with these periods of unstableness - there’s my quarter mark theory, there’s a dip in the graph before a superhabit is formed - without a metric to determine habit strength or a habit of tracking habits it’s hard to see whether a habit is lost, or if it’s still there and going through a weak patch.

Depletion and Why I Missed Day 547

On Day 546 I did Tabatas after not doing them for a while. I did not adequately understand the impact that would have on my daily habits.

The rest of that day after recording, depletion hit me. It hit me physically, but it no doubt affected me as a hit to my willpower - several studies have linked glucose depletion with willpower depletion.

The next day (547) I was utterly sore and tired. Nothing got done.

This was to be expected  - the “physics” of this system seems clearer and clearer. What’s necessary is to plan in advance and prep what a course should have been. 

And really the main problem was my first habit in my regiment - writing. Writing takes a lot of will for me to do in this phase of mastery. That should have been something I should have planned to do very minimally. But right now, I don’t have minimums clearly stated as I did before (e.g. 50 words).

A few days ago I wrote to my Dad, who is trying to start a new healthy eating habit. At his request, I sent him a few solid suggestions on what to do to stick to it. The relevant ones were Recording, TinyHabits, Implementation Intention, and Mental Contrasting.

What I’ve realized is that I don’t really strictly do these, and I should. In order to continue progress, I need very clear daily minimals - TinyHabits. I need to know in advance what’s going to mess me up in order to plan around it - that’s Implementation Intention. I don’t have a solid if-then protocol of when I’m going to do anything, which is Implementation Intention. And not having that results in a slapdash daily regiment (I have a tendency nowadays to record more towards the end of the day after a huge break, which doesn’t help in solidifying my recording habit). 

I think the problem is that I think that these habits are all done - I got to superhabit level on all of these. But with the introduction of mastery - pushing habits to new levels - it’s essentially introduced turbulence to each of them. I have to start thinking of them as new in that vector.

Another element in the mastery vector that’s missing is mid-range goals. The idea is to push a behavior so that it’s solidly at the next shelf, rest it, and work out another behavior. So 2 pushups became 3x8, that transformed into harder variations, and finally now I’ve shelved it at 2 typewriter pushups. Having a very clear knowledge of what the next level is allows me to naturally work for it.

What’s happening in meditation is a perfect example of doing it wrong. I made all sorts of progress and now I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m meditating every day, it is sometimes good, it’s sometimes bad, but I don’t have direction.

These are serious deficiencies that lead to a hamster wheel state I absolutely hate: The feeling of having toiled and worked over long periods of time and not having concretely accomplished anything.

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.

Time of Day and Habits

Again, talking to Lydia, and she’s stopped really recording or thinking about recording her exercise. She’s been doing Crossfit, which she really likes, but because of the change in schedules (sometimes it’s earlier than other days) she doesn’t feel like it’s, what BJ Fogg calls, crispy.

That is to say, there’s not a specific trigger immediately followed by an action.

I have had this for all of my really solid and quickly developed habits. But what I’ve noticed is that when an action achieves superhabit status, that crispiness doesn’t really matter.

If I don’t have time or the will to do something in the morning, like writing or exercising, I do it later. I get that “something’s missing” or “my day’s incomplete” vibe that seems to be the hallmark of a well inculcated habit.

Think about brushing your teeth - it’s not really a big deal if I don’t do it immediately as soon as I wake up, or immediately after eating. But I feel something’s missing, and daily consistency is still achieved.

It might well be that a great protocol to follow is start out by constructing a really “crispy” habit - and once it’s a superhabit, play around with it, or use that freedom to evolve it.

I do want to check out crossfit. If I like it, my bodyweight schedule will be in flux, but that’s a great thing - it gives me more of a workout, and since I’ve already developed a superhabit, what I’m hoping is that it also keeps consistency. I’m hoping that if I have a day where I don’t do an exercise in my room, I’ll have that “wait something’s missing” itch that’s scratched later on by a gym or crossfit workout.

This freedom also will hopefully allow me to bust through plateaus. 

Writing Habit So Far (From Start to Superhabit), SRHI over Time

This graph isn’t very clear cut at all in terms of backing up my Quarter Mark Theory. But analyzing it further there are two big gaps in progression. 

At around day 53 there is huge downturn - actually a gap in recording that occurred. That was during a week of travel to England and France. 

There is another one starting around day 72. This was during another travel to Germany where my computer completely died.

In both cases I wasn’t prepared - I didn’t go lo-tech and I didn’t have a solid implementation intention.

Before both and after both travels I quickly got back to the 70’s in the SRHI.

Does this blow my hypothesis out of the water? I’ll have to keep looking into it.

It is interesting to note that in the first iteration of my writing habit using 750 words, I got to the 70s on day 50 (though at the time I wasn’t taking the SRHI every day - it was more like once a week, if that). And this most recent iteration of the writing habit really did seem to stretch out a lot longer than I would have thought it would. I’m guessing this had to do with the travels and gaps in recording.

This graph might be particularly useful to try to analyze how gaps might stretch out a habit. AND it could be useful to analyze how long it takes for regular habits to become solid superhabits over 80 on the SRHI.

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.