Day 1120

Day 1120 Record Keeping
Day 1092 Fixed Meditation (DID NOT DO)
Day 966 Writing (A LOT)
Day 506 Rowing (walked, 1.5 hours)
Day 247 Mobility/Stretching (DID NOT DO)
—
Early to Rise
Day 275 Sleep Recording  (12|(5:30-7:30)11:30|1:20|)
Day 246 Bedtime Curfew
Day 84 Wakeup Alarm
Day 1 Wakeup Walk 22
–
Horrendous sleep, horrible wakeup. Very very upset this morning because of bad sleep. The morning walk turned it around and was very enjoyable. I’m pretty sure the sleep had more to do with the timing of when I drank tea (which was a few hours before bed), as I had to get up several times to go the bathroom. Add that to the list of variables to test. Really busy with work hence the lack of the habits that failed to discharge. 

Day 1083 & Reflections on Sleep Cycle


Day 1083 Record Keeping
Weekend Habits
—–
Eating
Day 31 Sunday Meal Prep 74
—
Early to Rise
Day 238 Sleep Recording  (12:50|(5-9:30)|1:30)
Day 209 Bedtime Curfew
Day 47 Wakeup Alarm
–
Horrible sleep, horrible wakeup. 

Reflections on Sleep Cycle

It’s interesting taking  notice when I wake up at nights and can’t get back to sleep. Last night I went to sleep at 1 AM and woke up at 5 AM. I couldn’t sleep for 4 hours, and then I slept for 4 more hours, getting exactly 8 hours. 

But what usually happens is that I start to get really depressed as I see failing to get up early and get a good, solid, stable night’s rest as a reflection of a failed character. When I inevitably get up late, I see myself as lazy, even if I now know that I’m not oversleeping (score one for the quantified self people!). 

I also tend to not have any protocols for getting back to sleep - or waking up and doing work even though my mind is going a million miles a second (despite meditating, etc). 

While I still maintain that an ideal sleep is what’s normal - going to bed at a decent time and waking up in the morning, there are times where that’s simply not possible. I felt like I nailed sleep back in the States, but jet lag has caused this weird biphasic sleep pattern. As I travel, that may well be inevitable. If it is inevitable (even if only at certain intervals) than it should be taken advantage of, instead of raged against. 

I feel that’s a good aphorism to follow throughout this endeavor. Instead of making it into some character failing, view it as a method to gain an advantage - that may well mean getting some good work done for a few hours and getting back to sleep.

Day 1079

Day 1079 Record Keeping
Day 1051 Fixed Meditation (10 min)
Day 925 Writing (2/13 min, revision)
Day 465 Rowing (LISS, 30 min, 4200 m)
Day 206 Mobility/Stretching (10 min, back & hip smash)
—–
Eating
Day 303 Pantry Check (DID NOT DO)
Day 301 Food Recording (DID NOT DO)
—
Early to Rise
Day 234 Water
Day 234 Sleep Recording  (12:30|12:50|1:30|2:10)
Day 205 Bedtime Curfew
Day 43 Wakeup Alarm 81
–
Ok sleep, ok wakeup. Still waking up at 3 am and not able to get back to sleep till early. ARGHHHH!!! Friends coming to stay with us for a while. Challenging myself to stay the course. Must formalize eating challenge.

Day 1078 & Resetting Sleep After Jet Lag

Day 1078 Record Keeping
Day 1050 Fixed Meditation (10 min)
Day 924 Writing (2/13 min, draft)
Day 464 Rowing (HIIT, 15s:60s, 14 min, 2500 m)
Day 205 Mobility/Stretching (10 min, hip stretch, back smash)
—–
Eating
Day 302 Pantry Check (DID NOT DO)
Day 300 Food Recording (DID NOT DO)
Day 30 Sunday Meal Prep 71 (retroactive from Sunday)
—
Early to Rise
Day 233 Water
Day 233 Sleep Recording  (12:30|12:50|2|3)
Day 204 Bedtime Curfew
Day 42 Wakeup Alarm 80
–
Ok sleep, great wakeup. Woke up again at 3 am. I really need to learn how I can

Reset Sleep After Jet Lag
I think the biggest problem with resetting sleep has to do with my relationship with writing. Writing is my biggest challenge. When I started out seriously writing, I got more sleep because if I was tired at all there was no way I could choose the words I needed carefully and really think. It wasn’t like a regular job where people regularly show up with half a mind. As a writer I have to be totally alert and rested, and I can barely make it through when I’m at 100%.

I’m beginning to see that as the old way of doing writing. Rather than thinking of writing as a super cerebral perfect choosing of poetic words emphasizing specific turns of speech from the get-go, my new model of writing has to do with several passes done at a rather low thinking level in order to avoid perfectionism and resulting writer’s block.

Thinking less is actually pretty helpful for busting out a rough draft. Thinking less is really helpful for removing The Editor mentality when scamping for sentence level rewriters. James Patterson’s idea of progressing quickly through many rewrites to prevent getting stuck at any one point backs this point up. It switches the whole endeavor to a more mechanistic, workflow driven emphasis that has less to do with one specific success or mistake. I like it.

It also means that I should at least be able to force myself to get up earlier, for at least a reset. Unfortunately I’ve been doing my sleeping one way for quite a long time, so in the moment I naturally default to habitual behavior. Time to change!

Day 958

Day 958 Record Keeping
Day 930 Fixed Meditation (DID NOT DO)
Day 804 Writing (7/30 min, HARD)
Day 344 Rowing (DID NOT DO)
Day 85 Mobility/Stretching (DID NOT DO)
—–
Eating
Day 182 Pantry Check
Day 180 Food Recording
—
Early to Rise
Day 113 Water
Day 113 Sleep Recording (1|3:20|5:30|5:50|9|9:20|2|2:20)
Day 84 Bedtime Curfew 73
–
INCREDIBLY Horrible sleep. Attempted a, of all things, David Avocado Wolfe/ Dr. Oz home remedy on a lark to see if it would work - banana tea (boiled whole for 10 minutes with cinnamon). Consistent sleep is definitely something I will have to tackle soon. Despite my horrible sleep and lack of energy I faced the hardest bout of writing I’ve had to do in a long time. It is to be expected that this also had me run out of time to do my other habits today. But I’m almost done with my proposal, so I should hopefully be back to a more normal, balanced routine.

That being said, I will be having guests and traveling for the next 3 weeks starting on Friday. So I will be trying to up daily minimums this week.

Day 953

Day 953 Record Keeping
Day 925 Fixed Meditation (30 minutes)
Day 799 Writing (3/30 min)
Day 339 Rowing (30 min/4200 m)
Day 80 Mobility/Stretching (couch stretch)
—–
Eating
Day 177 Pantry Check
Day 175 Food Recording
—
Early to Rise
Day 108 Water
Day 108 Sleep Recording (1|1:50|12:30|1:30)
Day 81 Bedtime Curfew 75
–
BEST NIGHT OF SLEEP EVER. Makes me think that I will soon also have to delve into energy as a variable and techniques to conserve it. Including figuring out what exactly is causing me to sleep badly most days. As would be expected all my habits flowed smoothly.

Day 917

Day 917 Record Keeping
Day 889 Fixed Meditation (30 min)
Day 763 Writing (2/30, 1000 words, see note below)
Day 303 Rowing (30 min/ 4200 m )
Day 44 Mobility/Stretching 80 (Couch stretch)
—–
Eating
Day 141 Pantry Check
Day 139 Food Recording
—
Early to Rise
Day 72 Bacon & Water
Day 72 Sleep Recording (1|2/3:30|1:10|1:40)
Day 45 Bedtime Curfew 80 
–
Incredibly horrible sleep, good wakeup. My curfew got automatic and is in the 80s now. This doesn’t really make sense because everytime I move the curfew up the less natural it becomes. I need another way of doing skill pushes for things like this.

I also need another way to do my writing. Writing for 30 minutes at a time in rounds may be great for certain things. But if I’m just doing scamping stream of consciousness writing without an internal editor, it’s better to attach success to words rather than time. One is about extending…and knowing me that means I have a tendency to fidget to take up time…the other is about hitting a real mark as efficiently as possible. 

Ideally I’d like to do this stream/scamping writing one day, then edit the next. I’m setting a thousand words for the scamping…we’ll see how that goes. For editing it might be on a section by section basis. The idea is to completely separate the two - we’ll see how this goes.

Sleep….jesus, I need to do something about this, because it leaves me totally wrecked during the day. I thought not drinking would give me better sleep…instead I’ve had pretty bad sleep - don’t know if the one has anything to do with the other.

Speaking of - this is day 30 of my No Alcohol Challenge!

Day 893

Day 893 Record Keeping
Weekend Habits
—–
Eating
Day 117 Pantry Check
Day 115 Food Recording
—
Early to Rise
Day 48 Bacon & Water
Day 48 Sleep Recording (4|11:40|12:29)
Day 20 Bedtime Curfew 57
–
Great sleep. Went to bed for no good reason, just got sucked down a well of random internet searches. A friend called right before my curfew, because of time zones I always feel more obligated to pick up. Another behavior I should consider implementing is a complete shut down of Whatsapp, WeChat, and other phone text apps. I already do this when I actually go to bed because, again, because of time zones, I’d be woken up all night. But I should do this an hour or so before bed. It follows the advice of several bloggers that talk about going to bed an hour or two before you’re going to sleep. The truth is, my sleep ritual isn’t really there, and it might be time to really think about bringing it all together.

EDIT: Forgot to mention Day 6, No Alcohol Challenge. Went out to dinner, ended up having my first non alcoholic mocktail, a ginger mojito. It was really good, good use of ginger to simulate that slight alcohol burn, much like vinegar in shrubs. Gave me ideas on how to make my own when I’m just craving a change of flavor. But it was really insanely sugary, and I started feeling my heart race towards the end of the meal.

Day 792

Day 792 Record Keeping
Day 764 Fixed Meditation (26 min)
Day 638 Writing
Day 178 Rowing (20 min/ 3200 m)
—–
Eating
Day 16 Pantry Check (64)
Day 14 Recording (68)
—–
Ok sleep, ok wakeup. Got up early despite staying out late. Was very tired when I got back, but very automatically performed my food recording. Those tiny eating habits are progressing quite quickly.

Day 83, Automaticity and Sleep, and Charts


Day 83 Record Keeping SRHI = 69
Day 51 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 68
Day 12 Walking SRHI = 25
Great sleep, great wakeup.

Automaticity & Sleep
This was the first day in a while that I actually had to think about doing my fixed meditation. I did pause and wait a while before doing it, and this might have caused lower scores in automaticity in the SRHI. It is something to think about - is there a correlation in the time away from sleep and strength of automaticity? Or is it simply a matter of hesitation? 

Can you train a habit faster if you arrange it closer to waking up? Or if you train yourself to do a habit at a fixed time without hesitation? As I recall there was an older test to assess the strength of a habit that depended on the speed at which you responded to a question. For example - do you bike or drive to work. The speed of the response was the scale at which biking or driving was a habit. Could that be hacked to train faster habits?

Charts

This first one is my graph on fixed meditation - the x axis is time in days, the y is the SRHI scale.

image

And here’s my record keeping habit:

image

There are a few interesting points. First, the length of the habit. If we say a habit is formed once hitting in the low 70s in the SRHI, it took around 60 days for record keeping and 30 for fixed meditation. I assumed it would take around 66 days for each, but it makes sense that fixed meditation, a task I can do anywhere without any equipment, would take fewer days. 

Secondly, the greatest gap in SRHI scores clustered closest together in time appears around the quarter to half way mark. For fixed mediation huge gaps start occurring from day 8 to day 17. If fixed meditation became a habit on day 29, the mid point would be 14.5, and the quarter would be 7.25.

For record keeping, the biggest gaps seemed to have occurred from day 14 to day 29. Record keeping got over 70 in the SRHI on day 58. Halfway for that is 29, a quarter way is 14.5

So it appears that my quarter mark hypothesis, that habits enter a danger zone starting at the quarter to the halfway mark in the lifecycle of a habit, works with these two habits. Obviously it will take more data, and it will be interesting how this works in different types of habits.