Day 107, Depression, and Breaking 4 Months

Day 107 Record Keeping SRHI = 59
Day 75 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 69
Day 21 Burpee SRHI= 45 (2x6)
Day 121 Eating SRHI = 51  
Bad sleep, ok wakeup. Felt down yesterday, depressed this morning.

Recording Depression

I think it’s important to note depression. I think that depression comes into play more during “danger zones” - I also think depression tends to effect individual day’s record keeping, as evidenced by today’s lower SRHI scores.

Breaking 4 Months

On another note, I didn’t properly celebrate - Yesterday was the longest I’ve ever gone on an eating plan - 4 months. Breaking that 3 month mark was hard, and as I said before, it’s interesting how 3 months seems to be akin to breaking the 4-minute mile.

That’s not to say that I was perfect. But even continuing to monitor despite mess ups for over 3 months seems to increase endurance depletion to intolerable levels - something my record keeping habit helps with immensely. 

My theory is that it will be continue being hard until month 6. Which is why I need to focus on stabilizing my record keeping.

Day 90 & Eating Danger Zone

Day 90 Record Keeping SRHI = 71
Day 58 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 73
Day 4 Burpee SRHI= 22
Day 104 Eating SRHI = 30 - Failed to do yesterday
Bad night sleep, great wakeup.

Eating Danger Zone

With a three day bad eating streak and an all-time low in my SRHI my eating habit, which was absolutely steady for three months, has faltered badly. Before I had mused why 12 weeks was such a common denominator for 3 month transformations and clean eating regimes. In previous diets I’ve only lasted 3 months - sometimes a few weeks longer, other times a few weeks shorter. In those times I felt that feeling of just being sick of it, which to me is the signal for what I’ll call Endurance Depletion.

My theory is this time coincides with the Danger Zone of my Quarter Mark Theory. As an aside, this would put the entire life cycle for a good eating habit to be almost an entire year at 360 days (if we calculate from 90 days as the quarter mark). This, to me, makes sense. from Phillippa Lally’s graph, she extrapolated 250 or so days for the completion of an exercise habit. And I think of eating habits as being more involved - the eating habit is continual, performed several times in a day under different circumstances while an exercise habit is usually made once.

So, what can I do? Well for one, it’s good that I’m not recording it. Record keeping is my first line of defense for making it through because it gives you a bit of distance, and shows you just how bad  your doing in your habit. Without recording, the tendency for me is just to absently forget. It doesn’t explode, it just quietly fizzles out, almost before you realize it. When attempting habit formation as a kid (I used to have charts, just not as detailed as this) I’d remember weeks later.

I’m trying to decide if this is enough, or if I need other tools. Perhaps more cheats? Perhaps telling myself I need to eat clean once a day, then I can cheat the rest? 

The main point isn’t to perform the task perfectly - and this is a point I continually lose track of. It’s to survive this period (another 3 months - ugh!) in any way possible. Even if I come out limping and ragged on the other end, my prediction is that afterwards it gets easier.

This phase has also come with an emotional toll. I’m noticing a moodiness with a chance of depression. Things frustrate me easier, and I get down in life in general. This is, in my mind, the hallmark of Endurance Depletion - a general malaise. 

Day 87, Walking, Burpee Habit, and TinyHabits

Day 87 Record Keeping SRHI = 68
Day 55 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 73
Day 15 Walking = Total Implosion!
Day 101 Eating SRHI = 61
Day 1 Burpee SRHI = 12
Good night sleep, great wakeup.

My walking habit has totally imploded. And it makes sense - as I said in my last post, I neglected to have a good implementation intention and it was way too much.

I’ve decided to scrap it for something that’s easier and able to be done anywhere. I’m thinking this because I want the ability to do exercise anywhere in the world since I travel so much. I’m also going around Brazil and Argentina for 3 weeks during the up coming World Cup, so walking for an hour everyday would’ve been imploded anyway. 

Not that I’m opposed to it at a later point. But I feel burpees are a good, whole body habit that would be great for me. Fogg states to implement them at a certain time, so here’s my protocol:

After I  finish blogging on tumblr, I will do 2 burpees.

Yesterday I was trying to figure out what Fogg’s protocol was for increasing the load of the habit. At what point do you push yourself from one tooth, 2 burpees, 2 pushups, to a real set that will actually give you a result. In his TedX speech he put up a slide that said “plant a tiny seed in the right spot and it will grow without coaxing”

My assumption is that when the load is so low, you’ll want to spontaneously increase it on your won. He himself stated that his original habit of doing 2 pushups increased so that now he’s doing around 70 a day.

I want to join the next group TinyHabits project - it believe it starts next week. In it you choose three habits to begin and get coached on them for 5 days. My previous concern was that doing more than one habit leads to the collapse of them all. But if you lower the daily load, perhaps you can do more than one. I’ve decided to go ahead and try it and see where it leads. My habits will be burpees, backbends, and another one I haven’t quite decided on. 

In my rudimentary ideas of a habit formation equation, I’m thinking that Willpower over Time = Endurance. If the Willpower of an action is decreased, and Time stays the same, then presumably the Endurance needed for a habit will decrease as well, thereby cementing it easier into a habit. I’m curious if such TinyHabits react with respect to my Quarter Mark Theory - will they even enter a danger zone? Does habit formation occur quicker?

EDIT** Damn! I just missed the signup which closed on Friday. The reason I want to do this is because getting a certification requires you to do one basic session.

Day 83, Automaticity and Sleep, and Charts

Day 83 Record Keeping SRHI = 69
Day 51 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 68
Day 12 Walking SRHI = 25
Great sleep, great wakeup.

Automaticity & Sleep
This was the first day in a while that I actually had to think about doing my fixed meditation. I did pause and wait a while before doing it, and this might have caused lower scores in automaticity in the SRHI. It is something to think about - is there a correlation in the time away from sleep and strength of automaticity? Or is it simply a matter of hesitation? 

Can you train a habit faster if you arrange it closer to waking up? Or if you train yourself to do a habit at a fixed time without hesitation? As I recall there was an older test to assess the strength of a habit that depended on the speed at which you responded to a question. For example - do you bike or drive to work. The speed of the response was the scale at which biking or driving was a habit. Could that be hacked to train faster habits?

Charts

This first one is my graph on fixed meditation - the x axis is time in days, the y is the SRHI scale.

And here’s my record keeping habit:

There are a few interesting points. First, the length of the habit. If we say a habit is formed once hitting in the low 70s in the SRHI, it took around 60 days for record keeping and 30 for fixed meditation. I assumed it would take around 66 days for each, but it makes sense that fixed meditation, a task I can do anywhere without any equipment, would take fewer days. 

Secondly, the greatest gap in SRHI scores clustered closest together in time appears around the quarter to half way mark. For fixed mediation huge gaps start occurring from day 8 to day 17. If fixed meditation became a habit on day 29, the mid point would be 14.5, and the quarter would be 7.25.

For record keeping, the biggest gaps seemed to have occurred from day 14 to day 29. Record keeping got over 70 in the SRHI on day 58. Halfway for that is 29, a quarter way is 14.5

So it appears that my quarter mark hypothesis, that habits enter a danger zone starting at the quarter to the halfway mark in the lifecycle of a habit, works with these two habits. Obviously it will take more data, and it will be interesting how this works in different types of habits.

Day 46

Day 46 Record Keeping SRHI = 57
Day 14 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 39
Day 13 Dynamic Meditation SRHI = 48
Great night sleep, great wakeup.

Falling scores in Fixed Meditation - it has over the last two days become difficult to get the motivation to do it every morning, and this day was notably so. But then again, it is almost exactly at the quarter way mark for this skill, having long ago pegged it by estimation at 60 days (quarter mark = day 15).

Day 19, Gaps in Record Keeping

SRHI = 28

Great night sleep, great wakeup with no grogginess.

So this is the part I was waiting on - the inevitable place in the cycle of a habit where it goes to crap. The last few days I didn’t record. But not only did I not record my habits - I lost track of the non-recording - I had no idea 3 days were lost!

This of course knocked my SRHI down - all those questions like “Do you find it weird when you DON’T do the action?” had to be scored really low.

Personally I think this shows that Philippa Lally’s conclusion that you get the most out of the first few days out of a habit is wrong. Of course I’ll need more info - but I don’t believe that the smooth curve she gets out of her data sets is correct. There is no way that it just gets easier and easier the more you do a task - you inevitably get a crash where you are knocked down - and that’s the point where most people give up on a habit. And there are a lot of broken attempts at habits out there.

This makes record keeping a vital habit - from what I’ve read she didn’t get the full amount of data she needed because people kept not recording it.

All I can do in MY project is to keep chugging along. By my quarter mark theory (that habits get extremely difficult from a quarter to the halfway mark in their lifecycle) I stopped at day 16, so midway would be about day 30, and the full habit cycle will be 60 days.