The Science of Self-Help

View Original

Day 89 & Coursera Stat Course & A Habit Equation

Day 89 Record Keeping SRHI = 67
Day 57 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 75
Day 3 Burpee SRHI= 31
Day 103 Eating SRHI = 58 - Failed to do yesterday
Bad night sleep, great wakeup.

A Habit Equation

I’ve been flailing around the internet trying to get help with mathematics in order to fully express my ideas on habit formation in an equation and graph form.

So far I’ve got graphs of SRHI v Time. But I’m wondering where Endurance fits. Ideally I’d like to have a fully expressed equation - one that describes how long a habit takes, when you’d get into the “danger zone" 

I’m guessing this would have variables for the Total Time for the habit to manifest, Endurance, SRHI, and the time that has elapsed. I’m guessing there will have to be a coefficient or constant…I don’t know what this would be - for individual Endurance and the willpower required for a given habit on changing scale based on self report indexes. Like how there are books with friction numbers for different surfaces.

Initially I thought that Endurance would act like velocity - Willpower across Time, but now I’m not so sure.

Coursera Stat Course

In my flailing I found another course on Coursera called "Experimentation for Improvement” which sounds right up my alley. It uses statistics to efficiently use experimentation - so instead of just changing one variable, which can be very slow, you speed up the process. Well, changing one variable was just what I had in mind for this project - the thought that there is a better way blows my mind. I’ve signed up for the course, which starts in early July, and I think it will really help me out, even though it’s not what I need to make sense of my data and create a habit equation.