Day 169 Record Keeping SRHI = 84
Day 137 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 83
Day 83 Bodyweight Exercise SRHI= 80 (3 bridges, 15 sec 1-legged planks)
Day 10 Writing = 12
Day 183 Eating SRHI = 56
Great sleep, great wakeup. Irritable yesterday, but getting better at controlling it.

Clicker Training

Yesterday I was talking to a friend who is trying to counter a bad habit he has. I’ve previously counseled him on forming implementation intentions whenever the urge arises in order to distract him. I also suggested that he record when the urge arises, and a brief statement like if he indulged or if he held it at bay, and what the circumstances are so he can later look for patterns. This is similar to what I did when I first started my dynamic meditation.

He made an off hand remark about wishing he had a clicker to easily count the times per day and it reminded me of clicker training - used to train a wide array of animals. As I understand it the theory is based on operant conditioning. But the clicker helps in identifying the precise moment of the behavior to cement the action-reward mechanism, which allows for better training. It reminds me of BJ Fogg’s quote about how habits, when properly formed, have a “crispness” to them.

For me crispness is related to having a clearly defined trigger. Doing pushups as soon as I get out of bed is much better than doing pushups “sometime in the morning”. It’s more about the trigger-response mechanism rather than the behavior-reward of clicker training - but I wonder if clicker training can be used to help habits structure more efficiently.

When I first researched this I laughingly told my roommate that I was going to train him. But when I researched “clicker training humans” I did find that there were coaches that used the technique in gymnastics, and that it worked pretty well.

It bears further research because that crispness seems to have a big effect on all this.