Day 2593 Record Keeping
Day 2564 Fixed Meditation (DID NOT DO)
Day 2438 Writing (4, 10 min Pomodoros)
Day 1028 Flossing (all teeth)
Day 650 Planning
Day 244 Exercise (DID NOT DO)
Day 169 Mobilizing (DID NOT DO)
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Bad sleep. Incredibly distracted. I think a majority has to do with a lack of proper planning. Furthermore, my food experiments have thrown everything out of wack. Several of my afternoon habits were pinned to drinking my concoction after lunch. Since I’ve experimented with not eating lunch for last 2 months, it’s totally eroded my workouts, my mobilizing, and my discrete daily meditation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about setting better triggers, triggers that are consistent, not prone to such changes, and ones I can move around without disturbing the trigger and response. I’m thinking of either an alarm or a buzzing alarm. It would potentially create a "floating” or “remote” habit. Tied to a specific alarm, I can mix and rearrange my schedule at will.

The other thing I’m having severe problems with is Meaning, which I’m increasingly thinking of as an important additional Element of Change. I’m defining it as getting what you want out of a routine. That can be growth, or change in the case of skill based habits like exercise, or just rinsing and repeating for ones with a clear terminus, like flossing.

My metaphor in the past has been that this entire system is like a spaceship headed to the moon. Willpower is fuel, you’ve got a payload, and have to contend with friction in order to get into orbit. Orbit is like a habit, you go around and around with very little need for thrust except for a few corrections. But that’s not the whole story - you need to use willpower to grow. In this metaphor, the gravity well of the moon is like the positive elements of Meaning. You get addicted to your powers growing.

The negative aspect is not seeing growth. The orbit decays, your flight path falters, and you just can’t make it. It starts feel like you’re just churning in the mud, not making progress, so what’s the point of even continuing? It starts to erode that previous automatic trigger-response mechanism.

I think other things link together with Meaning. Mindfulness, Rituals, they all contribute to this feeling of falling in love with the process, and I think that could be another key process.