Day 97 Record Keeping SRHI = 71
Day 65 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 72
Day 11 Burpee SRHI= 47
Day 111 Eating SRHI = 59 Did not do yesterday.
Good sleep, good wakeup.

Good Habits

Found a great overview of the science of motivation and habit fromation.

http://www.sparringmind.com/good-habits/

It covers just about everything I’ve learned - he gets into Baumeister, BJ Fogg, Phillippa Lally, implementation intentions, micrquotas, even books that I’ve talked about.

One thing that he talks about were studies done in visualization:

You see, a variety of research shows us that excessive fantasizing about results can be extremely detrimental to the stickiness of any habit. When you charge headlong into a new habit without clearly defining your goals, they will start to weaken, and it will be very difficult to stay consistent.

I had read this before, and it’s something I’m quite guilty of. I tend to fixate on the what-if scenarios if the goals were completed already. In order to make concrete change you have to fall in love with the process of change itself, and that is often the small steps it takes to get to the big ones.

Imagine if you could just love the struggle of doing small tasks - focusing on a perfect smooth transition between them in one day - that THAT was your goal rather than the six pack or the flossing as a habit or whatever. It’s the shift in thinking between an emphasis on the process rather than the result - and it’s a shift that is slow in coming to me.

Arnold, in his autobiography, mentioned something about this - that every time he worked out he thought that no one in the world was experiencing this amount of pain, and because of this, he was going to be a champion. That’s a good mentality to have along the frustrating path to self improvement - reframing the frustration as something transformative.