Day 201 & No Bread Challenge Analysis

September 15, 2014 by The Science of Self Help

Day 201 Record Keeping
Day 169 Fixed Meditation
Day 115 Bodyweight Exercise (2x5 diamond pushups, 3x5 bent knee inverted rows)
Day 42 Writing = 64
Day 215 Eating = 77
Great sleep, good wakeup.

No Bread Challenge Analysis

I thought of this challenge more of an exercise in stabilizing habits that are more general and have wobblly bits to them, and a challenge to experiment with rising emotions and urges in habits that have to be maintained more continuously and as a negation (as opposed to habits that need only be performed once per day).

Eating right is a habit that is way too general. There are just way too many factors that have to be triggered at various times during the day. You gotta know what places around you serve the correct foods. You need to learn how to shop and cook regularly. If I were to do this habit again, I would break it down into minute bits. But, not having done so, I felt this no bread challenge was an excellent way to bolster the habit.

As for rising emotions in negative habits, this definitely worked. At my latest count I said no to bread or other high carb substances 31 times in the space of 4 months. Taking a picture really helped because it made it a challenge, and freed me to go places where I would be tempted. Posting it to this blog seemed to make it official. The whole process definitely became gamified - I felt like I was earning points.

I want to try this again, and I want to find what the tipping point is. How many instances of refusal does it take for me to make this into a habit? Does it change from challenge to challenge? Did I really make refusing bread into a negative habit? Or, as many people say that you don’t form negative habits - did I replace eating bread with taking a picture of it? Will this work with other habits? Is it still at work within me - will this habit continue?

I’d really like to try this with dynamic meditation - but I’d like to break it down into individual emotional concerns. For example - a month of no stress - rather than do everything at once like I did in the past. Each challenge will no doubt have unique problems - how do I take a picture of responding to tension and stress? I’ll have to think about it.

Day 197 & 30 Day Nerve Cluster Reformation

September 11, 2014 by The Science of Self Help

Day 197 Record Keeping
Day 165 Fixed Meditation (16-32 sec, one instance of 1 minute)
Day 111 Bodyweight Exercise (3 bridges)
Day 38 Writing = 56
Day 211 Eating = 79
Great sleep, great wakeup.

30 Day Nerve Cluster Reformation
I was watching a video lecture dealing with emotional control. He was talking about how some experiment described brain physiology - the test subjects were asked to change their behavior, and in 30 days their brains had physically changed - I’m assuming this is what neuroplasticity is all about.

His point was that if you do a task for long enough it starts becoming you - physically. Now whether or not this is all true - specifically the 30 days, which has the hallmarks of an old wives tale (like forming habits takes only 21 days) - is unimportant - but it still has some relevance to my project.

I have been doing this no bread thing for 24 days now. In Barcelona bread is just normally given with each meal. I started off thinking it was going to be really really difficult to not eat it, especially if it’s sitting there on the table staring at me - and it was at first. But it very quickly became easy. I really don’t even see the baskets and it has progressed to amazing lengths of automaticity.

The same occurred for the one week that I did my dynamic meditation. I would start automatically catching negative trains of thought almost exactly when they began (and sometimes before they fully coalesced in as a distinct thought in my mind) - and that shift occurred really quickly.

So what does this have to do with my project? These 30 day challenges might be a good thing that I can use to bolster or take a habit up to the next level. Eating well is a great primary habit - working on not eating bread allows me to have minute control over it - I don’t have to avoid restaurants that have bread - or burger places etc - I just eat around it, and I practice for the month to have that control. There’s also something very gamified about it - I feel the challenge of going to a place that’s more difficult because I get points for doing it.

I foresee doing the same thing for not drinking, or for a modified version of dynamic meditation - only focusing specifically for individual emotions (anxiety, anger, depression) for 30 days as an outgrowth of my meditation habit.

I do not generally like 30 day challenges. A lot of them are done in the misguided view that it will cement into a habit by that time, which is just highly unlikely. But I think they can be used to take a regular habit to greater lengths.

Day 27 and Basic Habits

March 25, 2014 by The Science of Self Help

SRHI=43

Great night sleep, great wakeup

Throughout this project I want to put attention on basic tasks that we all generally want as a habit. You always hear people talking about how they want to workout everyday, or start flossing, but we rarely turn our full attention to just how few of those statements we actually follow through on. And sometimes even if you do, it’s hard to remember the habits you’ve stated.

When we say “I really need to improve my posture” I rarely really think about it. It’s something to say and mean in the moment, but all too often it takes a back seat.

Luckily gamification is bringing some of these to light. KWIT is a gamified program to quit smoking. I haven’t used it, but it seems to be a great setup with achievements, a social element where you can share those achievements, and even a running statistics list to show how much money you’ve saved.

Lumo Lift is another one for posture, one I believe I’ve mentioned in the past. I’ve ordered mine, and it is something I’ve vowed to work on many times in the past.

Unfortunately flossing has not, as far as I know, been gamified yet - makes me really want to start a “learning coding” habit - but if I’ve learned anything in this endeavor is it pays to be slow and methodical.

Day 21 and Little Bit Review

March 19, 2014 by The Science of Self Help

SRHI=40

Great night sleep, great wakeup.

Mashable just did a writeup on LittleBit, a new habit formation app. It’s nice, and it has a lot of positives. It tracks progress through pictures, or “Bits” - if you don’t do a habit once, it’s fine, but if you don’t do it twice in a row, you lose a bit.

I like this because there have been studies that show that people on diets have easier times sticking to them if they take pics of their food (I’m sure there’s an app for it). That distancing technique seems to be one very useful trick for habit formation because it forces you to think big picture instead of just going with the flow of your emotions in the moment.

I like the visualization - you can see when bits are taken away and added. And a lot of times it seems that rewards and punishments in gamification don’t have to be all that much - in Duolingo it’s a sound and a green light. A punishment may work the same. And I really like the punishment, and how 1 day doesn’t matter, which seems to be consistent with the research. It also reminds me a lot of HabitRPG, which was the first program I encountered that did this punishment system.

I also like how after you’ve completed your habit you can share your reel of pics with friends - the social component is a great motivator.

What I don’t like is that it’s yet another 21 day habit formation program. Any task you wish to become a habit becomes one in that magical 21 days - which is very much not consistent with the current research.