The Science of Self-Help

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Day 93 & Crispness

Day 93 Record Keeping SRHI = 67
Day 61 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 70
Day 7 Burpee SRHI= 39
Day 107 Eating SRHI = 56
Good night sleep, great wakeup.

Crispness
While my Burpee habit and Fixed Meditation seem to be enjoying a solidity, I feel that for some reason my record keeping isn’t, despite the fact it’s an old (temporally) habit. It feels somehow lax, especially with respect to automaticity questions on the SRHI.  Do I think about the habit - yeah - but I think about meditating less and less and I’m feeling the same progress in burpees.

Why?

I think it has to do with the specificity of the trigger.

I’m reminded of clicker training, where a sharp click sound is used to mark the action to be rewarded. I feel this specificity needs to be set in order to achieve automaticity in a habit. 

For example, as I wake up, I perform my meditation. After I shut down my tumblr and my google spreadsheet where I record my SRHI scores for the day, I do my burpees. But there is a certain vagueness as to when I record things. 

Sure I record things before burpees and after meditation, but there’s no specific trigger. I sort of sludge my way towards it. And though I know I’ll record keep after meditating, I usually plunk around on the internet first.

I just followed BJ Fogg on Twitter, and he said

Hmm. It seems “crispy” will become a technical term in behavior change. The process to get crispy behaviors? Crispification, of course

He currently has a new batch of “habiteers” and I wonder if this is a description from them..In any case “crisp” is a really good descriptor. I want the trigger and subsequent action to be crisp. I think it’s the only way to really iron out problems in automaticity.

So, I’m going to try it. Here’s my implementation intention:

As soon as I’m finished meditating, I will immediately begin record keeping

This seems obvious, but since I’m just waking up, I’ve already made it a daily habit to plunk around on the internet and laze for a while. That’s not going to cut it. I think it’s going to be difficult, but it should be interesting to see what this change will do to my automaticity scores.