The Science of Self-Help

View Original

Flu

I’ve been horribly sick with the flu for the last month.

My two habits - 750 words and exercising - petered out to nothing. But I want to specifically document my failures as well as when things are on track.

I found that the first thing to go was the documentation of my habits. I started having problems trying to figure out when I had instances of doing or not doing. This was difficult because I had just pegged all my charts based on the number of days I had been doing the habit - I’ve since updated this so I include the date, which I should’ve done in the beginning.

Once I started to lose track of swaths of the documentation, it became harder and harder to get back on track with … keeping track of it all.

I feel better today - I did my 750 words and did my workout. But here are a few questions:

1. Does missing a swath…like a month…adversely effect a habit that has been fully formed like 750 words?

2. Does missing a month adversely effect a habit in the process of being formed, like my exercise habit?

3. I can imagine getting back into the rhythm of 750 words, a fully formed habit. But do I have to completely restart my kettle bell habit?

I need to do a check with the SRHI to see where I’m at at both of these. I also feel that figuring out where that score is at quarter points would be helpful in case this happens again. That way I’ll be able to generally see if where I should be on any given habit at each quarter point, and if I’ve regressed if I miss a swath of instances. 

Because emergencies, sicknesses, etc do happen and in order to have a truly robust program, I need to be able to incorporate all these mess-ups and hopefully figure out methods to counter their impact.