Day 1664 Record Keeping
Day 1636 Fixed Meditation (15 min, applied tantra)
Day 1510 Writing (3, 20 min Pomodoros)
Day 1049 Exercise (15 min, walking/running, 15 min, biking)
Day 790 Mobility/Stretching (10 min, back, back erector smash & hip stretch)
Day 100 Flossing (20 teeth)
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Good sleep. Early day with lots of errands. Had to get Lydia to the airport and left at 5:30. Yet, I did all my habits.

A Note on Cross-training Meditation and Exercise

I’ve been really thinking quite a lot about cross training in order to push habits. Normally I think of cross-training in terms of switching up things in a week. One day walk, the next day bike. But I remember when I was attempting body for life several years ago in China, I found that I just got bored, for lack of a better world.

I knew I could bike for an hour, but it wasn’t just boring, it took a lot of effort to will myself through the same movement. But if I changed it up - walking, biking, and the elliptical, suddenly it just felt easier. And I improved - for the first time since high school I began to run.

They say that making any decision drains willpower - in this case it feels like sticking to things despite boredom does as well. In this case, changing things up in a session appears to access something akin to the Novelty Effect.

I noticed the same thing when I was switching things up in meditation in a session. But in this case it again seemed to not only yield longer times with ease, but stronger meditation.

This is something to seriously think about in the basic progress of any habit.

Today in mediation I did another sort of cross training - applying meditation, not just to my normal mental state, but after bringing up negative emotion, and then using tantra to change it. Adding rigor through making training closer to the negative aspects of real life, and ratcheting the base difficulty may be yet another way to push habits.

Whether these methods are enough to raise the base intensity of habits over longer periods of time remains to be seen.