Day 879 & Half Steps, Mobilization, and Slow Cookers

Day 879 Record Keeping
Weekend Habits
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Eating
Day 103 Pantry Check
Day 101 Food Recording (did not do last night)
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Early to Rise
Day 34 Bacon & Water
Day 34 Sleep Recording (12:45|2|10|11:45)
Day 6 Bedtime Curfew 27
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Fantastic sleep, fantastic wakeup. Last few days I’ve been off. On Thursday I was running around town dealing with administrative VISA issues. It’s interesting that it’s often the next day that my will gets more depleted, which occurred yesterday. Unfortunately all the biking I did running from one government office to the next caused my hip/back to flair up again.

Half Steps, Mobilization, and Slow Cookers

I am doing my best to get through Becoming a Supple Leopard as fast as possible - I think it’s a genius book, and can’t wait to really get into a regular mobilizing routine. I’m very interested in using the daily 15 minute sessions he advocates to jump into a continual habit - he talks a lot about having proper posture while walking and not sitting for more than 30 minutes at a time because of the level of damage it causes (his other book, Deskbound, is also on my must-read list). It’s an interesting problem that I think no one has talked about - at what point do discrete behavior changes “flip over” to being online all the time. And what’s the most optimal and efficient manner in which to advocate such a change? Everyone slides past this critical step in its particulars.

I also got my pressure cooker/slow cooker today, which I’m really excited about, because it gives me a very clear half step forward after nailing down having pre made lunches. Some healthy eating blogs talk about doing a few slow cooker meals during Meal Prep Sundays, so that when you need a meal you just throw it in the pot in the morning. By the time dinner rolls around your meal is already done!

Day 148, More Thoughts on Continual Habits

Day 148 Record Keeping SRHI = 79
Day 116 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 81
Day 62 Bodyweight Exercise SRHI= 74 (3 bridges, 30 sec plank)
Day 162 Eating SRHI = 56  
Good sleep, bleary wakeup. Still feeling incredibly depressed, lethargic, life-drained. Ego and endurance depletion.

More Thoughts on Continual Habits

In this post I outlined a classification system for habits. Continual habits were habits that should eventually take hold of you all the time. I stated something like posture, but having read more into it, I think posture might not be one. All the corrections for bad posture often involve daily exercises that strengthen ligature and musculature with the end result of general better posture. 

But others come to mind. In some forms of meditation, the object is to continually be in a specific state. The manuals talk about first getting into that state, then extending it so it eventually covers everything. 

Continual habits seem to bleed over into habits of omission. When you have the urge to smoke or drink or bite your finger nails, it’s an urge that assails you constantly throughout the day. You sit that urge out long enough and it passes. You continually do that and the urges subside to nothing. You become a “not smoker” or “not finger nail biter” all the time.

Perhaps the best example of this is muscle memory. In the martial arts you practice and practice and finally you start to do moves without thinking. 

My question is: at what point exactly does it turn over? Where is that point where it flips over to being a part of who you are from having to practice at it in discrete instances?

When I was doing continual (or dynamic) meditation it at first started to become automatic. But then it become more and more difficult to maintain that level of self awareness - the state of catching oneself falling off the wagon  - and the habit imploded. But for a moment it was incredible - it was like being an entirely different person. And what was interesting was the numbers - the SRHI progression was extremely different from normal habit progressions.

Last night I was reading about lucid dreaming - one technique to get them at night is do reality checks while awake. Constantly doing them while awake will eventually get you to the point where it’s closer to your identity, close enough so that you will do them while asleep. One source said to start doing them 20 times during the day. 

This seems very similar to a continual habit - where the instances of practice flip over to a more core sense of self where you maintain the practice continually. AND testing lucid dreaming seems to be a good way to test that change over. A test I’ll have to think about doing at some point in the future.

Day 31 and Meditation Response Instances vs Fixed Sessions

SRHI = 52

Great night sleep, bleary wakeup. Had one drink more (than I usually do when I drink) last night.

In THIS post I describe different categories of habits. Meditation the way I will practice it is definitely the third one, a “continual habit” - something like posture, a thing that must be corrected at different points during the day. I would also like to practice meditation as a fixed session everyday.

There are three things I want to fix. Fear, anxiety, and depression - they are all things that I have in abundance, and especially recently, I’ve notice my mind following these paths. I’ll get anxious and worried for no reason. I’ll be looking at other people’s successes and become depressed. I’ve been thinking nostalgically about my time in China, and fall down mentally.

There is no particular reason to do this. I could just as easily get motivated by looking at successful people, or realize that I can make more memories by thinking about the past. And anxiety has always blossomed in my mind for no reason whatsoever. It makes me tense.

In practice I need to tackle these things in different ways. I can have a once a day meditation session and then keep track of how many times I actually use it in actual life. I can also practice a specific exercise for each one for a few weeks. 

The thing I need to play around with is tracking this. I would have to have to track this twice - once for the fixed session, which is no problem. And another one as the habitualized response - counting the number of times I respond to instances of depression, fear, and anxiety throughout the day.

I can do an SRHI index for both, but the latter might have to be modified, since presumably I’ll need to actually respond less and less as mental fluctuations occur less frequently. So frequency would not be an indicator of success.

Day 6, Lumo Lift, Categories of Habits

SRHI = 29

Remembered in the morning again - It’s interesting the stages you go through with this - First forgetting entirely and “catching yourself” later, then remembering as soon as you get up, then getting a degree of autamaticity about the whole thing…

A few months ago I was indundated with ads on Facebook about Lumo Lift, from http://www.lumobodytech.com/

Basically it’s a device to help with body posture. It’s a device that syncs with your smartphone to remind you when you are slouching.

It’s a great idea to combat a different habit - the correction of a general state of being that you should do all the time. They way I see it, there are several categories of habits that should be attacked in different ways.

1. Habits of Instance - a regular habit, like flossing or working out - you do these once a day

2. Habits of Omission - a habit of not doing something i.e. not smoking, or not facebooking

3. Continual Habits - a habit like good posture or relaxing, something that ideally should be kept up at all times

I’m glad Lumo Lift got put on my radar because it really is one of those core habits like learning an instrument or flossing - everyone says they want better posture, but very few people ever actually go about trying to achieve it. As such I’m putting it on my list of future habits, and have ordered the device.