Day 1568

Day 1568 Record Keeping
Day 1539 Fixed Meditation (20 min, vipassana)
Day 1414 Writing (6, 20 min Pomodoros)
Day 953 Rowing (kettlebell swings, HIIT, 15s:60s, 14 min)
Day 694 Mobility/Stretching (10 min, back smash)
Day 4 Flossing (SRHI = 44, 6 teeth)
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Ok sleep. Woke up super depressed and absolutely depleted mentally. I went through my ego depletion protocol. Only this time I added a rough test-retest, asking myself how depleted I was on a scale of 1-10. Starting with a 1, I retested after each action on the ego-depletion recovery protocol. I started at a 1 - super foggy headed with no will to do anything other than languish in my own depression - to a 7. 

The rest of my day was pretty damn productive. I did more meditation, hard work on writing, and a HIIT. The HIIT was interesting because I don't think I've done kettlebell swings since before I was exposed to Kelly Starrett. Doing it while bracing my core for good posture made it an entirely different experience. It was more challenging and I really felt it work my entire core.

Day 1022

Day 1022 Record Keeping
Day 994 Fixed Meditation (10 min)
Day 868 Writing (3/20 min)
Day 408 Rowing (75 kb swings, form, 3x25)
Day 149 Mobility/Stretching (back stretches)
—–
Eating
Day 246 Pantry Check
Day 244 Food Recording
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Early to Rise
Day 177 Water
Day 177 Sleep Recording  (12:20|1:30|12:30|1)
Day 148 Bedtime Curfew
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Bad sleep, ok wakeup. Really unfocused today. Still need better form on kettle bell swings.

Day 169, On the Cusp of Habit #3 and Habit "Elasticity"

It’s Day 169 of my project.

My once rock solid habit, 750 words, is kind’ve in shambles, as is my new kettle bell/stretching/walking habit.

I’ve been sick for a long time, my rib hurts from coughing, I’ve been traveling, and my close friend died.

But I’m still moving forward.

The point of this whole habit thing isn’t to do things under the right circumstances. It’s to make actions so a part of who you are that you do them through any circumstances.

That being said, looking at my records, there’s good and bad. Despite my last post, I didn’t miss out on a month of habits - it was less than two weeks. BUT, I have been very sketchy in my consistency during the last few weeks.

This is worrisome because I’m at the point where I was supposed to start my 3rd habit, Flossing. But since my previous two habits are not consistent, I’ve decided to put it off for two weeks. I’m a little at a loss as to what to do.

I haven’t taken the SRHI again - I think I’ll do it after one more week and see how stable the habits are. Right now I’ve been so sketchy that I think my SRHI will not really be consistent - I know it generally has a high test retest capacity, but at this point I think scores will be all over the place. I want to have an amount of consistency in order to determine whether or not I should move on.

I’m hoping that there is an elasticity to habits - that once a habit has “set” it is easier to get back into the rhythm. Which is great for 750 words. But I don’t know if my exercise habit has fully set. If it hasn’t, I’ll rely on the SRHI to know when to move on to flossing.

On a larger note, I’m wondering whether or not this is what I should expect in the future. Will the turbulence of getting near the half way mark of habit 5 wreck havoc on the solidity of habits 1 through 4? Does adding a habit by its very nature interrupt other habits?

It seems counterintuitive - a habit is ideally an independent entity that has by repetition bored a pathway all of its own into the subconscious, one that is somehow self-sustaining. Previous habits haven’t interfered with older habits, have they?

But now that I think of it, if I encounter some sort of high stress it does interfere with habits - I’ll sometimes skip showers if I feel some sort of life trauma. My eating habits will change, I’ll tend not to put on my contacts. But once the stressful period is over, my habits snap back.

Is inculcating a new habit the equivalent of a “life trauma”? We’ll just have to see as my project continues…

Flu

I’ve been horribly sick with the flu for the last month.

My two habits - 750 words and exercising - petered out to nothing. But I want to specifically document my failures as well as when things are on track.

I found that the first thing to go was the documentation of my habits. I started having problems trying to figure out when I had instances of doing or not doing. This was difficult because I had just pegged all my charts based on the number of days I had been doing the habit - I’ve since updated this so I include the date, which I should’ve done in the beginning.

Once I started to lose track of swaths of the documentation, it became harder and harder to get back on track with … keeping track of it all.

I feel better today - I did my 750 words and did my workout. But here are a few questions:

1. Does missing a swath…like a month…adversely effect a habit that has been fully formed like 750 words?

2. Does missing a month adversely effect a habit in the process of being formed, like my exercise habit?

3. I can imagine getting back into the rhythm of 750 words, a fully formed habit. But do I have to completely restart my kettle bell habit?

I need to do a check with the SRHI to see where I’m at at both of these. I also feel that figuring out where that score is at quarter points would be helpful in case this happens again. That way I’ll be able to generally see if where I should be on any given habit at each quarter point, and if I’ve regressed if I miss a swath of instances. 

Because emergencies, sicknesses, etc do happen and in order to have a truly robust program, I need to be able to incorporate all these mess-ups and hopefully figure out methods to counter their impact.