The Elements of Change: A Grand Unified Theory of Self-Help

Behavioral scientist B.J. Fogg researches how small changes can transform your life. Admiral William H. McRaven advocates building momentum through completing small tasks at the beginning of the day. For author Charles Duhigg it’s habits and for Dr. Judsen Brewer, self change rests on mindfulness.

Every few years a new productivity technique emerges as the one true method to rule them all. But a better model is one that sees them all as pieces of a greater puzzle. As elements with unique characteristics and applications, they’re like building blocks that can be stacked and strung together.

As a young professor in Russia, Dmitri Mendeleev grew frustrated at his student’s inability to follow his chemistry lectures. But there was a good reason. Though chemists started identifying elements in the mid 1700s, there wasn’t a standardized system detailing qualities and relationships between substances. Delving into the problem in his classic text, Principles of Chemistry, he arranged elements in terms of atomic weight and shared properties. His breakthrough resulted in the Periodic Table of Elements.

Though motivation has a low half life (January 17th is National Ditch Your Resolutions Day) and habits presumably last forever, productivity techniques don’t have a concrete analog to atomic weight; there is, as of yet, no agreed upon willpower unit. But just as Mendeleev’s table was sorted by families so too can behavioral methods be grouped into those that Strengthen, Observe, Replenish, Diminish, Reward, and Automate.

STRENGTHEN

A number of recent books and studies have supported the idea of willpower as a resource. This family stretches out that initial resource in some way.

You can use Motivation to psych yourself up, whether through music or vision boards or just “digging deep”. This is usually the very first method people use, and it’s perhaps the least effective. Willpower Workouts are based on studies that suggest that self-control acts like a muscle. Exerting it artificially (like using your non-dominant hand throughout the day) will increase your starting pool of it.

Exemplar Priming recruits resources through either optimistic or inspirational text to influence the ego’s view of itself, resulting in better discipline. Or, you can just borrow those resources. Pretending to be an exemplary fictional character has been shown to increase perseverance with the Batman Effect. Momentum does this in a different way, by increasing confidence and overcoming inertia with a series of wins.

OBSERVE

The Hawthorne Effect, known as the Observer Effect, describes how behaviors positively change solely by being observed.  Creating Systems does this by focusing on the process of a skill rather than the output of one endeavor. Mindfulness, the minute observation of the self, has been shown to have numerous benefits especially in breaking vices. Creating and noting specifics is the realm of Metrics, which allows the mind to grasp and have a record of behaviors that might not otherwise be noticed. 

Implementation Intention is a formal statement of cause and effect that can radically change behavior in habits and even in focus. Meanwhile, Mental Contrasting is an exercise used to analyze what exactly a behavioral change entails. Functionally this troubleshoots by listing out the pros and cons of a change, and what could possibly go wrong while doing it.

REPLENISH

Sometimes you need more fuel to start with, and sometimes you just need to refuel. This family focuses on regenerating willpower and the rewiring involved in long-term learning that’s cultivated by rest.

The most literal version of refueling is eating. Glucose positively influences cognition and energy, and it may play some role in willpower generation. Time Off is not only necessary for replenishing self control, but for learning, focus, and mental and physical health. Microdosing on nature through Forest Bathing can improve happiness and wellbeing, having long thought to have a general restorative effect. 

Emotional cues can also renew willpower resources. Harnessing the power of Kawaii through viewing cute images surprisingly promotes focus and performance, as can Laughter and Anger.

DIMINISH

While the first two families dealt with increasing fuel in some way, the next few deal with bypassing expenditure issues entirely. Tiny Behaviors lower the expenditure of willpower, while Bypassing Decisions takes away the need to use it at all. New procedures can reset willpower and focus through the Novelty Effect, and in a related element, changing up Sequences, can make learning and skill acquisition more efficient.

REWARD

Rather than changing the performance of a behavior, this family incentivizes what you do. The classic Pavlovian treatment is Avoiding Pain and employing concrete Rewards. Some more ephemeral rewards include Socializing and the satisfaction of beating someone (yourself or others) in Competitiveness. 

Completeness is a specific type of reward involving the hunger to get it all. This can take the form of a compulsion to collect or perfectly beat every level in a video game. It can also include the inverse, the fear of missing out on an experience.

AUTOMATE

This family removes all external cues in favor of regularity. Rituals can act not only as an interceding wedge to break apart triggers and responses, but they can also emphasize focus, athletic performance, taste, and rejuvenation through random consistent behavior, often involving objects or implements.

Habits involve repetition, time, association with the self, and automaticity. Combined together, habits work regardless of mood or circumstances, and as such have the longest staying power, balanced on the very opposite end of the chart from Motivation.

BETTER MODELING

This blueprint can not only better illustrate common self-development strategies, but why addictive behaviors are so powerful.

Take for example, “Don’t Break the Chain” apps. Popularized by Jerry Seinfeld, the comic used a calendar to keep track of the days he worked on new material. Every day he discharged the behavior, he would draw a large red X across the day. It got to be satisfying to simply not break that chain, and many people have talked about how it helps them stick to goals.

Broken down, this strategy employs an INTENT (“I will record when I discharge my habit”) to use METRICS (red Xs), where COMPLETENESS (a week where all days have Xs) and REWARDS (the satisfaction of seeing a marked calendar) fosters MOMENTUM (“On day 20, even if I don’t want to do it, I will, because I’ve done it for all the other days”).

Why are vices like smoking so addictive? Aside from the physical addiction:

It’s a TINY HABIT that is a RITUAL (the fire, the movement to another place, implements like the lighter), often involving SOCIALIZING (a community of other smokers), MINDFULNESS (observation of the flow of the world or just the smoke swirling), TIME OFF (often from work), and concrete REWARDS (the hit of nicotine).

Here’s a slideshow of as many behaviors and techniques I can think of just to demonstrate the modeling power of this elemental table:

NEW FORMULATIONS

Rearranging blocks results in new methods of behavioral change tailored to fit unique problems in self-development. Here are a few I’ve discovered and tested:

Structured Randomness
Borrowing from Dr. John Perry’s concept of Structured Procrastination, Structured Randomness was an effort to solve meal planning issues. While meal prepping can bypass decision making throughout the week (preventing Decision Fatigue) it can often be too draining or impractical to make every single meal ahead of time. Here, a once-a-week habit is created of intentionally randomizing the meals made during the week. Harnessing The Novelty Effect, it allows not only for a boost in adherence, but as a side effect creates interest by fostering the exploration of new recipes.

Tally Clicking
How do you remove a habit? While the current, popular advice is to just replace the trigger or response in a habit loop, in many cases this just isn’t practical. Instead, by using a tally counter, we can use curiosity and metrics to monitor the diminishing of the habit. And by using click training, we can wedge an action in between the trigger and response.

An Ego-Depletion Protocol
When you’re absolutely drained of willpower, I’ve found that stitching together a series of theories on renewing discipline comes in handy.

Switch up your schedule, bring your tasks down to minimums, and accomplish a few goals to bring the power of momentum on your side. Eat food to boost energy, do an exemplar priming exercise to build self confidence, and distance yourself from your feelings with mindfulness. Bolster your mood by watching funny videos, going out for a walk, and scrolling Reddit for cute animal pics.

Efficient Routine Creation
Crafting a long term consistent practice is critical for everything from physical or mental health to laying the foundations of any skill.

The most efficient method I’ve found is to supplement B.J. Fogg’s Tiny Habits with psychologist Gabriela Oettingen’s WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) Method. Tiny Habits lowers the daily minimum in order to form habits, WOOP creates a specific intention while planning around future problems, and using a system of metrics prevents interruptions (like large gaps in the discharge of routines) from becoming permanent.

Pushing Routines
An efficient routine will start small, but can often become difficult to level up. And that’s critical to reap long-term benefits.

To level skills up for time, try shortening them, then changing up the workout. Rather than shooting for 1 hour of running you’ll find it easier to try 20 minutes of biking, running, and swimming. The Novelty Effect boosts focus by shifting to a slightly different modulation of attention. This method works for pushing skills, where sequencing, tiny bursts of concentrated effort, and novelty provide effective cross training and plateau-busting power.

CONCLUSION

There’s a lot here, and there’s a lot to tweak. Mendeleev didn’t have all the elements on the table either. But what this table illustrates is an updated model of what the answer to self-change really is. In the past it’s been motivation or a positive attitude. These days it’s habits or grit, but none of this captures the real truth.

The answer is legion. And that’s a good thing.

90 Days of No Beer: Mapping the Terrain of Quitting

“What’s it like being back on the B?” Lydia said as we sipped on stouts and porters at Brash Brewery in Houston. In this case, “B” referred to Beer, and I had just come off 90 days of not drinking any.

For the challenge I carried around a tally counter in order to easily track the number of urges I had to drink beer during a day. The tally counter technique is something I’ve used before to quit smoking, and it offers a number of positive reinforcements for the behavioral change process. In brief, it harnesses mindfulness, self tracking, ritual, click training, and curiosity to drastically increase adherence as opposed to relying on sheer will alone (I will do a more detailed breakdown of the technique in the future).

Whenever I felt an urge, I clicked, and totaled the number with a few notes at the end of each day.

I started this challenge for a number of reasons. First, I wanted to know if the tally clicker technique would work on another vice. Specifically, I wanted to know if it would work on what I’m calling a “half habit” - that is, a habit that’s a partial behavioral change - not drinking beer, versus not drinking at all.

I feel half habits can be important when it comes to moderation. For a long time, the general medical advice for alcohol consumption was 2 units for males per day. In practicality, that’s not easy to do and in fact requires even more razor sharp, specific discipline to make it stick. This is all exacerbated with alcohol, a discipline eroder.

In addition, I wanted to test whether beer had an adverse affect on me. In the past I felt super bloated and sluggish after imbibing it, which I know other people have issues with. And in a larger context, I wanted to help further map out the terrain - is there a pattern to quitting a behavior like there is a pattern to creating a habit? 

All of this is also a great test of the viability of the technique for future changes (including the most personally difficult to remove vice I can think of - negative self talk.)

Unlike other vice removal challenges, this formulation - focusing on tracking urges rather than just not doing the behavior - allowed me to collect a lot of daily data.

90 days later, I had my data. But before analyzing the specifics, my general takeaway was that the technique was almost scarily flawless. At no point was I remotely close to breaking down and having a beer. As with the last time I used the technique, the thought that kept arising was “effortless.”

At one point, I got drunk with an old friend in a bar with excellent selections of beer. A few other times I was lonely and incredibly depressed (with Lydia’s beers in the fridge!), both instances of willpower-breaking circumstances. In each case the level of control and adherence despite my natural inclinations was shocking as I clicked away.

Looking at the data specifically, there didn’t appear to be any concrete pattern to the chart data, other than gentle swells up and down and up again in clusters that diminished across time.

There wasn’t any correlation to the popular “icky threes” that always gets bandied about in smoking cessation - namely that day 3, week 3, and month 3 have more clusters of urges.

While this chart informed the diminishing of my urge for beer, I am also interested in how this lines up with a general map for quitting anything.

Looking at my notes, I realized that at some point, urges for other vices arose. I started finding other ways to closely skirt the urge. For quitting smoking it was getting into cigars or hookah, here it was switching to cider. I started catching cravings as they came yet before they fully crystalized. Sometimes I would have this sensation of craving without any content. I just wanted.

The turning point was when I started feeling revulsion towards beer. It wasn’t consistent, but spoke to a greater equanimity towards it. At several points I had people pushing beer on me or asking me to taste it, or watching a tv show where people were drinking, and I just didn’t feel anything. This matches up almost exactly with the notes I took when quitting smoking and my earlier experiment trying to uproot negative self talk.

James Clear’s new book, Atomic Habits came out recently, and in it he describes another layer to the Charles Duhigg/Pavlov behavioral process. Instead of TRIGGER - RESPONSE - REWARD, Clear interjects a MENTAL CRAVING in between TRIGGER and RESPONSE. I think this is a good move.

Usually TRIGGER, CRAVING, and RESPONSES are so mashed together they appear as one. During this challenge more connections and triggers became unearthed, ones I never consciously thought about. In the 3rd month, I went to get ramen, and just got hit by a lot of urges. Apparently I associate ramen with having a beer! But also, it highlighted subtle nuances, like that there’s a difference between a memory of a craving and having the actual craving. Boredom also seriously triggered bouts (also common in smoking and in my anxiety), but it was also funny how so many urges came simply because of the assumption that drinking a beer was just the easy choice.

While much of the technique worked shockingly well, what didn’t work was the recording. Looking back, I made all sorts of mistakes with dates, the number of days I did the challenge (I think I actually went 94 days) and basic arithmetic for weekly totals. In the next experiment, I would probably just default to a spreadsheet where it’s easy to fill in numbers and have the math done for you. I would also see if the process can be sped up by simply exposing myself to the trigger more. Would looking at pictures and videos of beer actually inoculated me through exposure, speeding up the removal of the urge entirely?

Opera singer Jerome Hines once said that “the only proper way to eliminate bad habits is to replace them with good habits” and that seems to be the general consensus of the productivity community today. To follow Duhigg’s advice, you’ve gotta change the cues, routines, or rewards.

After getting home Lydia asked if I was going to continue to abstain. Almost despite myself, I said yes. I didn’t really miss beer as much as I thought I would. And seeing a map of the entire process is just too compelling.

When I think back to unwieldy replacement methods or just old school brute willpower, they always seemed to involve multiple attempts, massive amounts of irritability, and a whole lot of failure.

When removing vices in the future, I know the method I’d want to use.

photocred: “beer” by Mor

Habit Terminus: A (Successful) End to Flossing

Five years ago when I first started my battle for solid habits, I bought into the tacit assumption that self improvement – for whatever you’re going after – lasts forever. And since there was always something more to do and more to add, that appeared self-evident. Yet here I am at the very end of my flossing habit. I’m calling it a habit terminus.

Habit Terminus - the point at which there’s nothing to do but rinse and repeat, and even the rinsing and repeating is automatic.

Here’s the data I collected on the full habit.

Or if we’re being a little fancier - a 3D graph of the entire habit with SRI, habit load, and time (hopefully this displays for you)!

While I’m very happy to finally be at the end of any habit, it begs the question, how exactly do you know it’s the end? How and when can you call it?

My first automatic reaction is to resort to old school, pop science thinking. It’s been about a month. The 21-days-makes-a-habit adage originally came from Maxwell Maltz’s 1960 book, Psycho-Cybernetics (a book I’ve had on my shelf for over a decade and have yet to read), and applied to one behavior - plastic surgery patients getting used to their new faces. I’m very skeptical about these kinds of vague, hand wavy metrics, but I will return to this later in the article.

The second stand out thought is just to take the Self Report Habit Index (SRHI) to assess whether or not the full behavior - “Flossing all teeth” - is automatic.

Taking the SRHI like this was interesting. 

As you can see by the chart, these 5 questions were kind’ve….weird.

• It makes me feel weird if I do not do it

• It would require effort not to do it

• I would find it hard not to do

• This task is typically “me”

• I have been doing it for a long time

For the first 4 questions, distinguishing how I would react to flossing all teeth vs doing the previous iterations of them (20, 10, etc..) was difficult to clearly forecast. So I answered them all with “Undecided”.

The last question - “I have been doing this for a long time” - was just not true, especially in comparison with the duration of the habit itself. Hence the “disagree”.

This doesn’t really tell me much except that the SRHI needs to be modified or replaced with a better diagnostic tool to properly assess the situation.

Which leads to the third method, to focus in on the habit load rather than the habit as a whole. Rather than resorting to time or automaticity of the habit, I could sort out some sort of rudimentary scale for how unnatural or “heavy” the number of teeth flossed was - like what many doctors use for pain (“on a scale of 1-10, how painful is this”). This zoomed in approach avoids differentiating between the automatic nature of flossing 2 teeth vs flossing all of them.

This brings up another question - how many days does it take for a habit load to normalize? And how do you assess this in such a way that is efficient and not burdensome?

I’ve called this problem the Law of Limited Natural Growth - a properly created habit using BJ Fogg’s TinyHabit system, naturally grows a little, then plateaus.

One method is to raise the bar with challenges. I’ve had success with this in writing, (after a really intense NaNoWriMo) and with not eating sugar after a dietary challenge (I believe it was Body for Life). There are severe problems with this method - you’re overexerting yourself in the willpower department, and that’s never a good thing for other habits you’ve got going on. The first few times I did NaNoWriMo, I either ended up dropping habits completely or dropping them down to really low daily minimums.

The second and most successful method I’ve used to date is modulation. By that I mean slightly modifying the habit across time in one session in order to bypass boredom. This has worked particularly well for timed habits, like meditation and cardio. I have a few theories as to why this works, but I do not see it as viable with more straight forwards habits like flossing.

The method I used here was simply to raise the bar slowly. I flossed 6 teeth, then 10, 20, and then all of them. That worked, but I couldn’t tell WHEN I should up the bar.

When I was in high school I was obsessed with long distance running. The cross country coach sent out a progression to get beginners up to speed over the course of a summer, building from 1 mile to 9. Programs like Couch25k or NonetoRun do this as well, but as of yet I’ve never seen why the progression intervals work. I’ve never found if they are based on studies or just general coaching instinct. And sadly, the progression didn’t work for me at all.

Going forward with flossing I plan on changing to regular string rather than the weird flossing plastic handled things I use now, and I’m curious if that affects the habit. I’m also curious how travel affects it. I once theorized that the final test of any habit was doing it under duress like travel. 

But most importantly progress should feel effortless, and I felt I wasn’t doing things efficiently, especially when it came to upping the number of teeth per session. There were definitely points at which my habit could have broken because it felt strained to do 20 teeth versus 10. 

As I was combing through the data I decided to check the intervals in which I naturally progressed from one habit load to the next higher load. Here were the results:

6-12 teeth = 21 days
12 - 20 teeth = 15 days
20 - All teeth = 21 days

There’s that pesky 21 days! Maybe there’s something to pop science after all…

Formalizing a Flossing Habit

Flossing was one of the very first habits I intended to create in this project. I held it off because I thought it would be easy, and because I thought there were more important, foundational habits that needed to be sorted out first. I still think the latter might be true. 

Choosing new habits has gotten difficult - it all needs to be a habit, yesterday! My protocol has generally been to assess what will make the most changes in my life. And as far as I can tell, flossing just affects my mouth (and maybe heart disease? The consensus seems to have changed on this).

Long ago I made an original list of habits I wanted to implement. At this point I'm very close to catching them all - though, other habits have sprung up as being equally, if not more foundational (mobilization and recording come to mind). With that in mind, I've decided to go for it anyway. But there's also another reason.

Fruit flies have long been used by biologists and geneticists for study because of their short lifespans. In the same manner, I'm oping I can use flossing to study skill pushes. I've studied two vectors of my master graph of behavioral development in detail - time (in days) and habit strength (in SRHI). But the third vector, developing and expanding a behavior, is still unclear to me.

Few behaviors offer such a clear pattern of development. While writing or physical fitness have a host of vectors across which skill pushes can be measured, for flossing it's pretty much just the number of teeth flossed. With other skills I've had to attempt to use Duckworth's Grit Scale or come up with another index of difficulty. Here, it's a number.

I'll be guided by Lydia on this. She formed a flossing habit based on my methods really early on, and has been keeping it up for about 4 years. She said it's a breeze, so here goes!

Implementation Intention

Following BJ Fogg's advice in his TedX Talk, I'll floss 2 teeth. I will do this in the morning right after I brush my teeth.

Mental Contrasting
Positive: This will help me nail down a habit that I've intended on doing for decades. It will also help me understand the nature of pushing habits

Stumbling blocks: This habit is tool-specific. One stumbling block will be just making sure I have floss handy. I also find normal floss quite difficult to use, especially with back teeth. This might cause a stumbling block once I move to harder to reach teeth and switch from using the special one-use floss sticks pictured above to normal lengths of string.

photo cred: fruit fly by Martin Cooper

Meal Prepping, The Novelty Effect, and "Structured Randomness"

Despite the lack of recording, I’ve really ramped up my Sunday Meal Prep Habit since moving back to the States.

I hit a glass ceiling in Spain. I’d make 6 lunch meals, which involved trips to 2 or 3 stores/markets. It took an hour to prep and store, and then I had to deal with the glass jars I stored them in. 

Eating healthy, pre-prepped lunches during the week was effortless (this word/feeling is key - I’ll get back to it later), and I attempted to do little bits here and there to increase that habit, because a lot of meals were obviously left unaccounted for. But none of it worked - we were stuck hovering at the same output. 

I’ve started to call this Limited Natural Growth.

Limited Natural Growth - A well-established habit naturally has a growth spurt, then plateaus.

Getting past that plateau requires other techniques.

I’ve since moved back to the States and things are a lot easier. We got a car and don’t have to haul things by hand. One store usually has everything. Salads don’t have to be made, they come in pre-mixed bags. We can shop for an entire week. My “Sunday Meal Prep” has essentially transformed into a “Sunday Shopping” habit.

But we still encountered the onerous task of deciding what we were going to cook.

It seems pretty inconsequential, but decision making itself has its own willpower cost. As in Spain, we found ourselves dithering, and more often than not I would balk, leaving the bulk of the burden on Lydia. I felt we were going to hit another plateau, until Lydia decided to randomize our weeks.

Lydia had a dream - she wanted to cook through entire cookbooks and now, with access to everything, she can do it. So she entered every title of every recipe from her favorite clean eating cookbooks into a spreadsheet and randomized them for dinners.

It’s been two and a half weeks and has felt effortless. With my system of mechanistic change, I’m trying to chase that feeling. To me, a really good progressive program should feel like it doesn’t bog you down, like you aren't dipping into reserves of motivation or willpower. 

This plan has worked so well, I began to wonder what was going on. It turns out it has a name: The Novelty Effect.

The Novelty Effect is best summed up in an excellent article on the subject by Clive Thompson on Medium:

"My behavior is governed by what psychologists call “The Novelty Effect” — the short-term boost in performance that comes from changing the environment around you."

The power of changing things up is not to be taken lightly. It grows you. It’s the reason why 30-day challenges are so great - they get you to do more than your usual routine, and that feels exciting. In doing so you rise to the occasion. 

Of course, you also fall back down.

Thompson continues by stating:

“Temporarily” is the key. A change to our environment can invigorate us by changing the intellectual furniture of our everyday lives. But as soon as we become habituated to the new, the improvement fades."

However, by introducing one day (Sunday, in my case) when I planned to randomize the rest of my week, something amazing occurred. I could potentially ride this temporary wave indefinitely. It’s Structured Randomness.

---

A few years back on a work trip I met a fellow travel journalist who described a project. In it she tried a new workout every week for a year. Based in Colorado, where demand tends to be high for all things fitness-related, she tried everything from acro yoga to trapeze. She got so addicted she kept it up for years. 

The gamification experts often describe player types that can be appealed to in games. The Bartle Taxonomy of Player Types includes Killers, Achievers, Socializers, and Explorers, but it’s the last one that I want to focus on here.

Explorers like new things, to reveal a new world, or discover hidden places. It’s a button of addiction that can be pushed in programming, and so too (I believe) with Structured Randomness. It activates the fun and addictive centers, appealing to my appreciation of cooking and experiencing food.

I’ll continue to monitor it, but I think this is a watershed moment not only for eating healthy, but for all other habits.

Because of the concept of Limited Natural Growth, it’s often very difficult to break free from plateaus. This results in fully formed habits that, unfortunately, don’t progress or do you any good. 

The standby techniques are just pushing the habit in small increments or using intense, brief challenges. Those have never sat well with me because in practice, they're a pain. For both, you're dipping into that well of motivation or willpower, and though it works for one habit, if you're trying to do it for 10, that well dries up fast. The key is effortless change.

But beyond this project, Structured Randomness appears to result in a more broad-spectrum human experience. Lydia once did a project where she read a book in a new genre she’d never read before every month for a year. We’re planning to see if we can eat at a restaurant that serves food from every country in the world here in Houston (though, since we’re going alphabetical, it may not be “Random” but it’s at least “Structured Variety”). And at one point we attempted to try one new restaurant or activity a week, to break free of the rut of habits and the intense, often repetitive practice that is commonly considered a precursor to mastery. Broadening horizons just exposes us to more, and that, I feel, is a good thing.

I don’t know how this technique could apply to things like meditation, or writing, but it bears a lot of future thought.

photo cred: coin flip by frankieleon, shopping carts by Kevin Lau, novelty store by Jim Barter, Bartle's Taxonomy by Ramiromagalhaes 

Grinding Without Progress: The Science Behind Efficient Multi-Habit Growth

Intro

For most of last year I’ve had a nagging sense that I’m not progressing in individual skills as fast as I should. I can now easily establish multi-year habits, but what’s the point if I’m not really leveling them up?

This is infuriating. In the past I’ve demonstrated quick advancement. With bodyweight training I was able to do a full back bridge (something I haven’t done since elementary school) and typewriter pushups within several months. I started NaNoWriMo unable to complete 50,000 words in 30 days to completing it in 5 days. These were things I thought I would never be able to do. Furthermore, I don’t think I’m a special case. We as humans have an extraordinary capacity for improvement when the right training methodology is in place.

However, when I put all of these individual habits together I find myself simply grinding away, paying for the privilege of hovering at exactly the same skill level across the board.

Why is This Happening?

In my old conception a habit reacts very much like a spaceship. If willpower is fuel, a new behavior uses that fuel until it reaches automaticity. At that point, very little fuel/willpower is needed because the ship as reached inertia and continues its flight path at the same velocity. When I push the habit (in time, skill level, or difficulty) I’m accelerating, and I have to draw upon fuel until I reach the next progression. After a time that too becomes automatic.

That model works fine with individual habits. But in combining several it doesn’t. If I do my rowing, writing, mobilization, meditation, and social media in one day – all of which I’ve already leveled up past a Tiny Habit – I’m exhausted.

I believe there are two issues here:

1) The Question of Automaticity with Skill Pushes
When I move from a Tiny Habit to a medium habit, how long does it take for that push to become automatic and drain less willpower? This is sort of a grey area that no one really talks about. If I’ve got a solid habit of flossing one tooth, does pushing it to 10 teeth make it like implementing another habit? Should I then take the SHRI for this new habit before moving on? 

This is definitely something that’s clear in writing. When I start to do more complex writing, the daily willpower load is higher, which t in turn degrades the automaticity of the behavior - it takes me longer to start and sometimes I put it off. This is the very definition of writer’s block.

2) Energy vs Willpower
Are these two different issues? Is the sheer amount of work draining on an energy level? If I automatically run 5 miles a day, it may not take willpower to do regularly, but I’m still going to be tired, and that’s going to affect the rest of my day. Is it just the sheer amount of work that’s causing a drain on the system?

(As an aside, the Harvard Business Review did an excellent article on energy management in the workplace. It treats energy as a resource similar to willpower and offers suggestions to manipulate it.)

Rolling Progressions

Happily there might just be a way out. Several articles on learning challenge the normal stance that mastering a skill is a simple matter of amassing hours (like the 10,000 hours rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell). In this article for Salon, Peter Brown and Henry Roedigger III excerpt their book, Making It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. 

In the article the authors discuss varied and spaced practice. Cross training through varied practice develops deeper learning. And spaced practice, in the case of a study of surgeons learning a specific procedure, showed that they learned more efficiently across time through spreading out lessons with a week of space rather than doing the lessons in one day. 

In a test given a month after their last session, those whose lessons had been spaced a week apart outperformed their colleagues in all areas—elapsed time to complete a surgery, number of hand movements, and success at reattaching the severed, pulsating aortas of live rats. The difference in performance between the two groups was impressive. The residents who had taken all four sessions in a single day not only scored lower on all measures, but 16 percent of them damaged the rats’ vessels beyond repair and were unable to complete their surgeries. 

This study in particular underscored that it wasn't just improvement in cognitive tasks, but mechanical skills as well.  

This is not as surprising as it seems. Mark’s Daily Apple recommends a focus on eating to lose weight with periodic (once a week) HIITS like sprints. My once a week meal prep results in better eating for the entirety of the week. And in an hour I can schedule an entire week’s worth of tweets. There is a lot of room for saving space and cutting work volume on any given day in order to preserve willpower, efficiency, and allow for greater cross training throughout the week. A rolling system of practice, where each habit is extended on one day of the week, might be just what I need.

What Would This Look Like?

Monday - Prepping ALL meals for the week
Tuesday - 1 hour of social media, scheduling out all tweets for the week
Wednesday - Extended practice in writing
Thursday - A HIIT
Friday - An hour of meditation

I can already see how this would improve things dramatically. For meal preps, the power of an extended prep time to do lunches and dinners for the week would mean making real gains. A solid HIIT one day of the week would allow me to go all out without having other habits suffer from lack of energy. Really working on writing would give me the time to move on from my already mastered ability to bust out a rough draft. I could work on global edits and get more efficient at writing one piece from start to finish. I’ve been thinking about longer meditation sits – now I could do them.

Notice I do not include mobilization in this. I believe some behaviors, like mobilization, are ones that need daily practice in order to reap full benefits. In this case I think there are just too many muscle groupings to be hit in one day. But that’s not so bad since, according to Dr. Kelly Starrett, a good daily habit would only consist of 15 minutes a day, which is only a little more than my Tiny Habit of 10 minutes.

Two Options

One method of implementation is to just nix all my habits but the one I’m extending. Essentially I’d have one habit slot that’s split depending on the day of the week. The other option is to keep Tiny Habits going throughout the week and rotate the pushed habit. I feel that there are still benefits to be reaped from, say, low level cardio, and light writing. However, that doesn’t necessarily apply to social media or meditation.

One solution is to cross train on off days with the latter method. If it’s the case that Vipassana should be spaced at once a week for greater efficiency and progress, then why not do other practices that take less time in that same meditation slot on other days of the week? If doing slow cardio has benefits, then why not do it while walking outside - something that is not only a natural mood lifter, but helps immensely with sleep? For social media why not do other tasks, like reading articles, adding followers, commenting, or generally researching tactics on other days?

Measuring

I don’t like blindly trusting research. And with habit research I was able to test the techniques on myself with days as my base metric - if I stuck with it then it was working. With this, it’s a bit trickier because I’m just experimenting on myself. I can’t exactly map out how much better my meditation is compared to practicing every day, and the same generally applies to writing because standards and progressions aren’t solid. 

But perhaps the best argument for just doing trying it comes from an old self help maxim that goes something like:

“If what you’re doing now isn’t working then why are you repeating it?”

The general feeling of not progressing may well be the best reason to change to a different system. For behaviors like meditation, I know that increasing time is part of the solution. For writing, I’m not even exerting enough time to get the base tasks to progress, and that definitely seems to be the case with meal prep. There’s just not enough energy left in my tank at the end of most days to push everything.

Furthermore, in cases like this paralysis by analysis has always been my problem. The way seems simple - try it now, and see how I feel in a month. 

Photo cred: grinding by Andrew Sutherland, graph by Stannered, Wikimedia Commons

Towards an Ego Depletion Protocol: How to Bypass Bouts of Procrastination, Tiredness, and Wanting to Put Your Head Through a Wall

ENTANGLED HABITS
I write as soon as I wake up. I do this because it's the most psychologically entangled habit I have. It can be extremely frustrating, there are too many variables, and there isn't a well established progression. Lately I've also had to deal with a lot of proposal writing, involving multiple rewrites and knowledge that I have to learn from scratch. This results in greater bouts of anxiety, depression, procrastination, and an inability to focus.

It's exactly what Dr. Roy Baumeister calls "ego depletion" - to Baumeister, willpower is a limited resource of discipline that we drain throughout a day. So if you drain it when doing one task, you're going to have diminishing returns when working on the next. In his experiments, Baumeister accomplished this with difficult puzzles, and the resulting willpower drain would result in participants doing poorly on the next challenge  - when they weren't yelling at the examiner or just walking out in a huff.

Despite the recent reproducibility problem surrounding ego-depletion, I have found it to be quite true in my own metrics (that deserves an in depth post at another time).  For me, ego-depletion results not only in not accomplishing the task at hand, but failing to discharge the rest of my routine, even if the other tasks are easier. It's a catch 22 - tackle the hardest task at the beginning of the day when I'm fresh, or jumble my schedule up and get too exhausted to do my hardest, most important task.

AVOIDING EGO-DEPLETION
I tend to avoid this problem by using methods to conserve willpower until I reach a hook point of automaticity. BJ Fogg's TinyHabits or other formulations of ludicrously small habits help immensely.  Another bit of Fogg wisdom comes from one of his old tweets, where he says to "Stop obsessing about willpower and discipline. For long-term behavior change, focus on planning and design." Combined with the idea of avoiding decision making to prevent fatigue, I also use it in habits like my weekly meal prep, where I pre make all my lunches to avoid even having to make a decision based on food.

Training multiple habits towards mastery should be like training elite athletes using periodization: nudging skills, then backing off in a carefully controlled symphony of progression. But because real life is chaotic, ego-depletion is inevitable. Over the last few months I've been trying to figure out direct methods around this. 

A DEPLETION PROTOCOL
Luckily there have been a number of unusual studies that test this. Among the variables that delay ego depletion or improve willpower are:

• External rewards, like money

• Belief in unlimited willpower

• Positive mood

• Exemplar priming - in this case, reading a passage that depicts a person overcoming adversity

• Self Awareness

• Glucose

I want to be clear. Ego-depletion as a theory has faced some harsh criticism, as have these methods around it. But this blog is about a first person science.  As such, testing these variables in my own life is the final arbiter in my book. So I constructed my own rudimentary protocol:

My Ego Depletion Protocol

1. Stop, drop and eat! (Glucose)

2. Write down observations of what I'm feeling and what's happening (Self Awareness)

3. Write down reasons why I could be depleted (Self Awareness)

4. Watch a Youtube clip of a comedy or stand up comic (Mood)

5. Drop all habits to a smaller daily minimum

6. Reverse my routine

7. Get out into the sun (Mood)

8. Read a list of my accomplishments (Exemplar Priming)

9. Read a list of affirmations (Exemplar Priming)

10. Meditate (Mood or Self Awareness)

Numbers 5 is more of a continuation of Fogg's theories. If willpower over time hits a wall, then lowering a daily threshold gets us over that wall in order to reach the hook point of automaticity. For days where practice is difficult, automaticity isn't enough to get us over the wall, so lowering the daily minimum still works. Number 6 relies on momentum. While writing is mired in procrastination, working out and meditating is easy for me. When I get the majority of my tasks done in a day I gain some sort of velocity that helps me over the procrastination wall. 

SELF EXPERIMENTATION
I have practiced this protocol on and off for last month and a half. It has worked remarkably well. On one day I was pretty close to tears in frustration and ready to give up on everything. Going through the protocol allowed me to get through all my tasks at my normal load, even though I gave myself permission to drop down to lowered minimums.

The biggest problem is formally acknowledging that I'm in this state. Normally it's just something I'm in - I find myself endlessly looking at Reddit or justifying watching a bit more of a favorite TV show. However, the more I practice the protocol, the easier it is to "catch" myself. Another difficult issue is retraining myself to view this system as a mechanistic model, rather than a personality flaw. When I'm in the moment it is incredibly easy to start self flagellating myself as being weak.

Moving forward I would like to actually test individual ego-depletion counters. I haven't had much luck finding a willpower scale (I'm still digging though the science papers!), but after a lot of search I found the State Ego Depletion Scale that was used to test these protocols. While I could not find the original paper, I did manage to find an online version of it in an appendix of a dissertation from the Netherlands! 

This is an incredibly unwieldy scale at 25 questions, but it's a start. With it I hope to find what the most efficient actions are by taking the test before and after going through specific protocols.

photo cred: Svein Halvor Halvorsen

Formalizing a Social Media Habit

All of my work projects have basically been crying out for me to use social media. I've had magazines reach out to me, only to back off once they knew my social media game wasn't that robust. Book publishing is like that as well, and it's understandable. I've been putting off using social media professionally simply because to me, for some reason, it feels like showing off rather than being recognized because of the quality of your work. 

Despite my reservations and my lack of knowledge, I don't think that this is any different than any other behavior. First thing's first - start a habit.

Implementation Intention

I've already started today - When I'm done with my writing sets, which now include blogging/research, I'll do a small habit - 10 minutes - of either research on how to use social media or actually start sharing stuff.

Mental Contrasting
Positive: This will help me get my message out to the world. It will also help me better accomplish my goals of publishing. But perhaps most importantly, it will allow me to connect with other people who are doing similar things to me. What I want is to be a part of a community of like-minded experimenters and eventually help a lot of people. 

Stumbling blocks: There are a lot. I've always felt like I'm trying to be a part of the cool kid's table, professionally speaking. I feel like the world is conspiring professionally to keep me out of that crowd. I feel powerless, like it doesn't matter how good I am, I'll never get the recognition and respect I want. Social media appears to me like a waste of time with limited ROI. I could theoretically waste all my time on my phone, and I see that scattered potential in some of the people I know around me. I'm afraid that I'll get addicted to it and fall into a sink hole of time where my actual content gets worse and worse. In addition I feel that my inability to grow my online social presence will continue to keep me back in my work.

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.

How to Reincorporate Challenges as Raised Daily Minimums (Beginning Habit Periodization)

This past month I completed a 30 day No Alcohol Challenge. It was great, I learned a lot, but now what?

Lydia reported seeing that many people, after completing a Whole Life Challenge, went back to bad eating as normal. I found the same case during my No Bread Challenge.

Back in the day I feel many people assumed that after 30 Days you’d get a habit that you could extend indefinitely. We know that’s not true. Nowadays, challenges are supposed to do something - but what? If we don’t harness them, we might as well have not done them in the first place.

The role of a challenge, for me, isn’t to jump start initial change. It’s to extend an already established small habit. If there are three vectors to long-term change - willpower to start the habit daily, habit to extend it and make it automatic, and the grit or deliberate practice needed to push past skill plateaus and increase intensity - then challenges belong to the third vector. Unfortunately this is the vector I know the least about.

I do know that there is a certain amount of …looseness or roominess… I feel mentally when it comes to the idea of ignoring alcohol at a bar with friends. There is a similar sort of freedom with my 8 week progressive HIIT challenge - it’s becoming easier to visualize myself trying something like Crossfit.

And I’ve successfully fumbled into progressive minimums for rowing - I started with HIITs twice a week for 8 weeks, and now I’m doing the entire challenge again 3 times a week. HIITs are now in my program to stay. What is the best way to do this with alcohol?

Lydia is adhering to a once a week drinking rule. I’m thinking of something more gradual, a twice a week drinking rule. It becomes really weird in this case because A) I didn’t have an established drinking habit and B) I don’t know how to concretely record a NON habit, especially one that’s so sporadic.

I’ve also been researching what’s at the heart of all of this - periodization. I’ve mostly been able to look at weight lifting, and it gets confusing very fast - there’s linear, non-linear, and newer undulating models of progression. And the thing that’s challenging - but good - is that it’s based on years of progress - microcycles, mesocycles, macrocycles, quadrennial cycles.

I asked Lydia how Crossfit did it, and she said it was a 6-10 week cycle dedicated either to endurance or power, and that it was based on percentages of a max. And that reminded me of my time in weightlifting where people talk about various programs - Strong Man, 5 X 5, Russian Volume, etc.

My main concern is HOW they came up with these formulas of when and how much to drop down to. For example, if I do NaNoWriMo, I’m writing at least 1600 words a day. Afterwards, do I drop down to 50%? 60 %? If I drop down too low it results in fewer gains over time. If I don’t drop low enough I run the risk of blowing myself out. I have no idea how you’d even begin to calculate that with a large set of athletes, never mind using only myself across multiple skills. It’s something I definitely have to dive into because it’s where all the fruition of my habits comes to.

And how much of this crosses over to other skills? There’s a lot of research to be done.

Strategies to Upkeep Intensity of Habits During Travel

If the gold prize for behaviors is being able to inculcate them extremely fast, then silver surely goes to being able to maintain and maybe even push habits through interruptions like travel.

Next month, Sept 12 - 17th, I’ll be traveling to Aruba for a conference. Normally when this happens I attempt lowered minimums for a few days, abandon all my habits, then pick them up a few days after I get back.

Doing that is really really good. Progress isn’t made, but my habits continue - and that used to be impossible for me. I’ve done this new behavior more times than I can count now.

But I want to push it. When I normally think about sustaining the same levels of habits through travel I think in terms of the minute - I think about if I’ll have the time, or if I’ll have access to wifi, or space to do pushups or whatever. This time I want to experiment by thinking of it in terms of general mechanics.

I see people who do sprints and workout while on vacation - why can’t that be me? Maybe it’s not the details that matter, maybe those are excuses used to cover a lack of willpower?

The next question becomes how can I increase willpower for the duration of that week? In “Sandbagging” I described Lydia’s idea of starting more habits and later losing a few in order to artificially boost the remaining one. In “Skill Pushes and a Looming Problem: Strategies” I describe a “Dragon Ball Z/Kung Fu” Method of pushing skills.

Widening this theory, what if I increased the system load of all my behaviors the week before the trip? Generally speaking I tend to feel the affects of such loads several days to a week later. My theory is that by overloading the system before, I’ll be able to artificially boost willpower in the system by dropping down to my regular habits.

What does that actually look like?

I’d say that 4 or 5 days before traveling I’d up all my minimums. 4 rounds of writing, 45 minutes on the rower for LISS, and additional 20 minutes of LISS on HIIT days, 45 minutes of meditation, extra mobilizations, earlier sleep times.

Then drop down to normals once I get to Aruba.

Here’s hoping it works!

Skill Pushes and a Looming Problem: Strategies

I have a few ideas on how to juggle the problem of multiple skill pushes:

The Cast Method - making sure everything is exactly the same, or minimal, while ratcheting up a skill. For example, increasing rowing from 20 minutes to 30 minutes while keeping everything the same. This method is usually based in fear for me because I don’t want my whole routine to fall a part (like it has in the past). Another better method MIGHT be…

Sandbagging - I initially viewed this method to implement habits, but I think it could be used as a safe diagnostic tool to discover where the breaking point is. Take two or more skills, push them, and as soon as things start to get wobbly, drop back all skills to normal levels except one. I believe that this will also solidify that one skill’s advanced practice.

Fracturing - Cycling practice. When I had a daily practice of 1 hour of cardio at the gym, I usually did an hour of recumbent cycling. But it was pretty boring. It was actually easier to break it up and do half on the cycle and half on the treadmill, or into 3 with the last 1/3 on the elliptical. I feel this would really work well with practice that involves an extension of time.

Gamification - NanoWriMo, the Flash diet, I feel this is fantastic for 30 day challenges. I actually think it’s better for pushing skills than it is for making skills habits. 

Ritual - I keep meaning to write a massive post on rituals. The idea for me is that these small things ease the transition between the normal day and the place in the mind where difficult things happen. For example, when I was trying to establish a non-bracketed habit of recording my food, I made tea. I got to the point where I really enjoyed the process, and so I enjoyed the quiet time before bed where I recorded.

I did the same with writing for a while, and it’s something I still need to fiddle around with. Personally I think Ritual is like a proto- or ur-game or motivation - it just helps to lower that starting threshold, whether it’s starting or pushing a habit.

Changing multiple skill variables to maintain equilibrium- I mentioned one example of this already - my 8 week HIIT cycle, where it folded really well into my already established rowing habit. I think it worked because though it was more intense it wasn’t longer - equilibrium was maintained so there was no real load to the system. I think I have more problems increasing my base time. I like the idea of this best.

The Dragon Ball Z Kung Fu Method - Artificially intensifying practice in order to then lower it to higher base levels, but nowhere near the levels set during the initial push. 

In the cartoon DBZ and in many legendary “iron” kung fu trainings a practitioner would weigh himself down, or in the anime, train at weighted artificial gravity. After getting thoroughly used to the weight, they’d take the vest off and then would be able to fly, have preternaturally fast reflexes, or be incredibly light on their feet.

When I did NaNoWriMo, where some days required 13,000 words, going back to my normal writing quotas was incredibly easy. But I haven’t deliberately done this technique very much, so it would be interesting to practice this.

Where does this leave us?

So while my normal “Cast Methodology” relies on a natural growth in willpower to lift the extra load, gamification and ritual seem to lighten the new weight. Sandbagging and the DBZ Method both use comparisons in feeling and temporariness to advance practice. Changing variables and fracturing appear to cause as little load as possible. 

And fracturing also uses the feeling of doing multiple things to fool the mind into thinking things are going faster - it’s like hanging out with a friend. You go to one place for an hour, and it may be tedious, but go to three places in that hour and it feels like you’ve done a lot more and you know that person more. Depth of experience or relationship in this case acts as a stand in for depth of practice.

I still don’t know what skills I plan on moving forward, but this at least gives me a bit more clarity on my options.

photocred: chess by Ruocaled, ritual by rahul rekapalli, shaolin by Sven Laqua

Skill Pushes and a Looming Problem: A Rudimentary Skill Push Scale

Based on previous behaviors in this project, it appears that Skill Pushes come in several flavors or vectors:

-Classes

-Time (meditating for 10 minutes to 30 minutes)

-Reps (flossing one tooth to flossing all of them) 

-Deliberate practice (focusing on problem areas and working them)

-30 Day Challenges (like my no bread challenge or NaNoWriMo, or even the 8 week HIIT thing I recently completed - “30 Day″ is just a catch all)

When I think about it it becomes pretty clear that there is a difference in difficulty or weight with these pushes. Assuming Tiny SkillPushes ™, from lowest system load to highest I’d organize them like this:

1) Reps

2) Time

3) Classes

4) Deliberate practice

5) 30 Day Challenges

Why? When I think of increasing my meditation by 5 minutes versus doing 5 more pulls on the rower, I’d pick the latter. The same is the case with adding another glass of water in the morning or going from flossing 1 tooth to all of them. I think it just has something to do with the active nature of added reps versus just ENDURING more time. Enduring is just more painful (to me).

Those two are definitely easier than classes, where you have to do all sorts of other things like interact with people and do homework. And that is preferable to deliberate practice where you have to essentially come up with your own class. There is a big difference between doing a module where you give over some agency to a program, versus poking and prodding to find what your weaknesses are. When I used to play the violin I used to absolutely hate doing this, and it’s probably why I never got really good at it despite having played for over a decade. 

Lastly, I find 30 Day Challenges to be a huge drain on the entirety of the system. When I do NaNoWriMo, I usually reduce other behaviors to minimums, though it’s getting easier. Also challenges are challenging and are not tiny pushes by their very nature.

As an aside, classes used to be incredibly difficult for me. But incorporated as part of an established habit, I sort’ve go on autopilot. Homework? No problem, because I no longer do everything at the last minute. I automatically start doing something, so simply processing what another person tells me to do (rather than trying to figure out where my effort has to go myself) is exponentially easier. It’s also an important reason why all this self-help stuff should be incorporated together as part of a whole system.  

But why was my 8 week HIIT program so easy? I think it’s because I was mixing variables. It was a part of an established routine which is based on time - 30 minutes. The HIIT was more intense, but it was for a shorter time.

I think skill pushes can mix and match these variables. If I were to go to a meditation retreat I would consider that a “Challenge” - but it would be a challenge because it’s increasing time of practice to several hours a day. At the same time, I’m presumably not doing ANY of my other routines while on retreat. It’s also not forever, while things like flossing would be an increase for GOOD. Though presumably a retreat would make a time push from 30 minutes to an hour look like nothing.

photocred: scales by Hans Splinter, violin by Jason Hollinger, doodle by Allie

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 II - Potions, Pleasure, and Skill

Alcohol as a Potion

What ratchets everything up is that alcohol erodes that self control. I think I just don’t think about this enough.

Imagine the opposite. If there was a potion that magically imbued you with a top up on willpower with no real downsides, why wouldn’t you drink it?

By this logic, why would I drink a witch’s brew that leaches self control every time I sip at it? And because of my progressively lower tolerance, that factor is progressively increased. It seems totally and utterly counter to this project more than any one thing.

I never drank until I turned 21. When asked “why not?” I would reply “I have little enough control over my life as is, why would I want to give up more?” What changed my mind was a fusing of two distinct sides of my self. Socializing becomes one with drinking, and I think this is quite normal in adults. As I delve into habits I realize just how fused some of them are, and that improvement involves an uncoupling.

Hedonism

How do you socialize without a drink in hand to lower the awkwardness and anxiety of interacting with new people? I had this conversation recently with a friend who was quitting for a month - he had done this the last few years and was thinking of making it permanent. 

It started with him waking up with to a bad hangover, and being struck with the visceral realization of it simply being chemical. Why would he choose to feel bad based on a few hours of fun?

The Greek hedonists talk about how certain sacrifices are needed to extend and deepen the joys of life. We could choose to go on a drug and booze fueled bacchanalia, but for how long would that last before we cut short life? How many conversations are forgotten? How many true relationships do you have rather than a filler person that’s simply there? I think I haven’t truly explored what fruits that trade off would entail.

For my friend, it just wasn’t worth it. Sure, he said, he might have moments of awkwardness, the moments of feeling like an outsider at social situations. But in knowing a bit of skill acquisition in social dynamics, I know that’s a pain period that gives way to true social skill - after all, I interacted plenty enough with people before I took a sip of alcohol.

Years ago I was talking to another friend who was having problems socializing. He was reading quite a bit of existentialism, and we were talking about feelings of isolation in crowds  -  in the midst a party. I told him that when I felt that rising isolation I imagined the party as a ritual. In order to gain connection  you have to wait, you have to sip the libation of the rite in order to gain its rewards. It was a combination of all of it - a bit of drink, waiting in awkwardness, and then it usually comes together. It was more of a begging thing, you see. I wanted my friend to stay out, I didn’t want him to be alone and sad like I had so often been.

I’m now beginning to see many sides to that dance. I’m beginning to believe another sacrifice can be made -  greater awkwardness in lieu of the drink in order to gain even more - deeper connections that last beyond the rite.

Skill

Oddly enough pickup artists are perhaps the greatest advocates of not drinking in social scenarios  Initially the subgroup focused specifically on seducing women, but it has grown to cover all elements of social behavior, from business networking to forming a social group in a new city, for the purposes of being a more whole, fulfilled person. Pickup artists treat socializing as a skill to be learned like any other. 

Most adults never learned social skills in a methodical manner. We happen across our skills, and so very often we grab for the glass as a crutch to lower inhibitions and loosen tongues. To become truly skilled is to execute behaviors without any such aids.

In this manner I see actually learning social skills methodically as an answer to the awkwardness. Focusing on skill sets rather than any given interaction also means that awkwardness becomes a pain period on an ascending path of refinement rather than you as a person being odd. It’s less personal. And it works a lot like vipassana, where precise noting of the details of a painful experience pushes you to master it.

Potion by Roberto Milloch, Dionysus by Derek Key, monks meditating by Renee Barron

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

Sleep Success!

Yesterday I talked about my attempt to reset my sleeping patterns - it worked!

When I attempted to do this in the past - and I mean my entire past - it’s almost never worked because my implementation intention is incredibly vague. I just generally think “yeah I’m going to sort’ve go to bed early, maybe, kind’ve…” and of course nothing happens. I end up dithering online until super late because I get a charge of energy, and it just all goes down the toilet.

This time I had a plan. And I wrote it down as an implementation intention:

At 11pm I’ll drink my Valerian Root Tea.
I will go into the bedroom and lie down at 12 pm and set the alarm.
I’ll read the Kindle for 20 minutes.
I’ll listen to a boring recording on meditation for another 20  minutes.
I’ll perform Dr. Weil’s 4-7-8 breathing technique for sleep.  
I’ll perform my own meditation technique.

Planning for sleep, and having it be progressive - first tea, then not looking at my computer, shifting to bed and a kindle, then turning off the light and just listening, etc seemed to do the trick, as well as the formal intention jotted down on a text program on my computer.

And I didn’t even do everything - by the time I got to bed I skipped the book and the headphones and just did the exercises and zonked out.

So, a few things:

1) What’s the minimal effective dose? Does Dr. Weil’s technique even really work? Do I need that much progression? I don’t know, but I like the fact that it’s a ceremony, and there are progressive active tasks for me to do, giving the power to me.

2) What could I do better? Definitely not drink so much before bed - I woke up a few times to go to the bathroom. I drank a bunch of water, then the tea right before…so also maybe doing it a few hours before bed would work better.

3) Can I maintain it? We’ll see tonight - I intend a similar procedure tonight.

4) This is a beginning. I would ideally want to be a morning person, and wake up earlier - but one step at a time!

I ended up waking up at around 8 am today, which has resulted in a much more optimal day for me - one filled with sunlight, a good start, and some free time to get out, rather than feeling utterly rushed.

And quality of sleep is something I’d like to get into in another post. Tonight it was pretty good despite waking up a few times. I’ve historically had many problems with this, but who knows if it’s just not having a formal bed time ritual.

But this is the first time I’ve ever consciously controlled and shifted my sleep without rather drastic measures - like staying up all night or just being forced to get up because of circumstances. I usually feel quite powerless in sleeping, especially as a freelancer, so I count this as a rather big win for me personally.