Day 197 Record Keeping
Day 165 Fixed Meditation (16-32 sec, one instance of 1 minute)
Day 111 Bodyweight Exercise (3 bridges)
Day 38 Writing = 56
Day 211 Eating = 79
Great sleep, great wakeup.

30 Day Nerve Cluster Reformation
I was watching a video lecture dealing with emotional control. He was talking about how some experiment described brain physiology - the test subjects were asked to change their behavior, and in 30 days their brains had physically changed - I’m assuming this is what neuroplasticity is all about.

His point was that if you do a task for long enough it starts becoming you - physically. Now whether or not this is all true - specifically the 30 days, which has the hallmarks of an old wives tale (like forming habits takes only 21 days) - is unimportant - but it still has some relevance to my project.

I have been doing this no bread thing for 24 days now. In Barcelona bread is just normally given with each meal. I started off thinking it was going to be really really difficult to not eat it, especially if it’s sitting there on the table staring at me - and it was at first. But it very quickly became easy. I really don’t even see the baskets and it has progressed to amazing lengths of automaticity.

The same occurred for the one week that I did my dynamic meditation. I would start automatically catching negative trains of thought almost exactly when they began (and sometimes before they fully coalesced in as a distinct thought in my mind) - and that shift occurred really quickly.

So what does this have to do with my project? These 30 day challenges might be a good thing that I can use to bolster or take a habit up to the next level. Eating well is a great primary habit - working on not eating bread allows me to have minute control over it - I don’t have to avoid restaurants that have bread - or burger places etc - I just eat around it, and I practice for the month to have that control. There’s also something very gamified about it - I feel the challenge of going to a place that’s more difficult because I get points for doing it.

I foresee doing the same thing for not drinking, or for a modified version of dynamic meditation - only focusing specifically for individual emotions (anxiety, anger, depression) for 30 days as an outgrowth of my meditation habit.

I do not generally like 30 day challenges. A lot of them are done in the misguided view that it will cement into a habit by that time, which is just highly unlikely. But I think they can be used to take a regular habit to greater lengths.