The Science of Self-Help

View Original

Day 56 & Stalled Habits

Day 56 Record Keeping SRHI = 61
Day 24 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 60
Day 23 Dynamic Meditation SRHI = 48
Great night sleep, great wakeup.

It might be time to revisit my old theories on willpower and it’s effects on habit formation. Dynamic Meditation definitely requires a lot of willpower - it’s something I have to exert throughout the day.

My theory was originally that the more Willpower an action takes, the more Endurance (Endurance being WIllpower over time) it will take, and once your stores of Endurance run out the habit stops forming. I was originally thinking regarding actually completing the habit.

But in this case it’s more than that - it’s about maintaining the vigilance throughout the day and actually accomplishing the habit in a rigorous manner constantly that would contribute to automaticity. In this case, I’m doing Dynamic Meditation halfway, so the habit is stalling - something you can see in the day-to-day numbers.

And this doesn’t bode well for my future posture habit. It seems as though the strain of constant vigilance needs special handling. So doing two habits at once was definitely not a good idea.