Towards an Identity Model of Habits: Part I

My buddy James is a vegetarian.

I am not a morning person.

I’m a reader of fantasy books.

Remember those statements, ’cause I’m going to reference ’em later.

In the last few years I’ve been experimenting with various models of self improvement. Before I officially started this project I assumed that motivation was a significant catalyst for self change. After seeing it as a perennial problem (I can get psyched up for gym going starting on New Years, but it peters out pretty quickly, and the cycle repeats next year) I switched to other things.

I dabbled in gamification, because I saw its addictive properties as lowering willpower thresholds. Like motivation, it worked, but only for a while.

I’ve since focused on habits for the last two years, and though I’ve had a great deal of success, they’re only foolproof in relatively basic and linear behaviors. When things get complicated that paradigm just isn’t enough.

How are they not enough?

The linear model – what BJ Fogg advocates, of starting a Tiny Habit, reaching that hook point of automaticity, then naturally increasing difficulty, repetitions, or length of time until you achieve mastery – doesn’t seem to fully work all the time. Or rather it really falls a part when you’re pushing habits to mastery, which I see as another vector of effort (regimention/willpower and endurance/forming a habit being the other two vectors).

That vector involves plateaus in skill and the maddening frustration of constantly doing a task that is at least slightly above your current level.

It also runs into trouble when you’re dealing with families of skills. I advocate this not only because families can support each other, but in a world where time is of essence (we die, our bodies wear out), skills that have an accrual across time are necessary to start now to gain the benefits of daily minimums across time. If I start a habit of cardio 30 minutes a day, I may not master it. I might not get my goal of a six pack until I nail my eating habit. But for as long as I’m exercising, I’m accruing secondary cardio “points”.

Pushing skills in the vector of skill advancement throws a huge wrench into the equation because of habit harmonics. A dissonance starts – extra effort in one skill affects the solidity of other habits.

But the biggest problem with my current model is that it doesn’t attenuate in more complicated behaviors.

Let’s go back to the original three statements.

My buddy James is a vegetarian. When we go out and eat he avoids meat. In all scenarios. After the bars while tipsy and ordering pizza late at night, when going to a restaurant with friends with crappy vegetarian options, even in one place that had amazing pork tacos.

I do the same thing with fantasy books. It’s not as though I decide to read them – I HAVE to read them. It’s not even a choice. I need to have those few minutes before bed to scratch that itch and if I don’t have at least an option loaded on my Kindle, I start to get all itchy. The world is not right.

The inverse is important to analyze – I’m not a morning person. My waking up early is either a fluke or a deliberate preparation if I need it. Morning people are morning people because they enjoy it or they just are that way – it’s totally independent from fluctuating conditions. If they’re out late the night before, they still wake up early.

For all three – it’s an identity that’s welded in. It’s not what you do, it’s part of who you are, which not only makes it stronger, it also is able to somehow adapt incredibly well to changing conditions. Choice is also almost entirely scrubbed out of the equation.

For me this becomes an issue with eating and getting up early. All the other habits I consider foundational are easy. Working out – no problem, barring travel, it’s once a day at a certain time. Same with writing, meditating, and if I add flossing or recording finances. It’s a matter of if-then protocols – implementation intentions.

For eating that gets insanely complicated – it’s multiple times a day, across changing circumstances, etc. I believe it’s the reason I’ve had to scrap the habit several times, even when I’ve maintained it for close to a year. It just never stuck. And this is a big problem – eating is incredibly important for health, energy, and weight loss. It also has the biggest impact for whether I can socialize well later in the program – I don’t want to go out to meet people and, because of lack of willpower, blow out a previous habit of making good food decisions.

mask by 派脆客 Lee, tack by Zaheer Mohiuddin, welder by Per Hortlund

Unusual Reflective Tendencies in Habits

I have uncovered a pattern in my urges lately. I have been meditating as I lie in bed about to fall asleep. I’ve been doing some sort of exercise in the afternoons (biking or basketball). I’ve even had strong urges to do casual reading on marketing and do some fun writing in the evening. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about regimentation. Specifically about tasks that are absorptive yet fun that will take me away from worrying about my daily habits - yet most of the tasks are almost mirroring my beginning day tasks. It’s almost as though I’m subconsciously bookending the end of the day to reflect the beginning.

One explanation is that I’m grasping. I’m clenching at tasks and using regimentation as an excuse to worry through doing the same tasks again.

But I really didn’t notice this as a pattern at all until late last night. I was wondering how weird it would be (and what the repercussions would be) if I doubled down on habits per day. Then I realized - I kind’ve already do it!

I have no idea what this means. And I might actually try to double down in a day and see how it affects my endurance reserves throughout the week. We’ll see.

Right on Schedule: Emotional Breakdowns a Week into New Habits

Yesterday was rough, and today started really rough. Ego depletion, rapid surging of worry and insecurity, a difficulty keeping my emotional state steady. I feel totally overwhelmed. 

Last week I had tons of energy. My sleep was great, my wake ups were great. Lydia noticed I had a restless energy about me, and she stated that it had happened before. Apparently there’s a trend I have that when I start a new habit, I get excited - I want to do more AND I then get into a slump afterwards - a feeling of being up to my eyeballs with work and a sensation of drowning etc.

I just went back into my logs and did find this trend to be true (when I recorded my emotional states). There are several habits where I had fantastic sleep, energy, and emotion in the first week of a new habit, followed by a depression and bad sleep, followed by a stabilization. 

This is really interesting and really REALLY important, practically speaking, and is exactly the reason why I wanted to record all this - to spot trends. In knowing I’m going to go through this I can distance myself from it and understand that it will take a period to stabilize it. It also makes forgiveness and setting really low completion thresholds a la TinyHabits incredibly important.

Why is this the case? My tentative theory is that Endurance reacts slower than Willpower. Willpower, according to the studies, depletes immediately - you do a task designed to deplete willpower (don’t eat that donut!) and then do an unsolveable puzzle and the time it takes you to get upset and storm out of the room on the latter task becomes noticeably less. 

The Endurance load only settles after a time - it has to by definition because it’s willpower across time! But it only settles to affect daily emotions later. 

As to why I feel all energetic in the first week ….well that’s beyond me!

A Robust(er?) Model of Self Improvement - Part III

Assuming that these three variables are correct, the next question for me is how to express this as an equation.

I asked Lydia’s father, Bill Schrandt, who is a mathematics teacher, about how one can express a line through 3 dimensional space.

The ensuing discussion got into vectors, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, and projectiles and rocket motion. What I got out of it was that it’s much easier to deal with expressing planes, and much much more difficult to express a line - much less a curved path in 3 dimensions. This is something I’ll have to look into in more detail.

But another way to go about this is to figure out how all these values and variables work together outside of a graph.

And he agreed with me in that this all sounds very similar to basic physics - friction coefficients are needed depending on how much willpower a task takes. TinyHabits allow you to cross over danger zones because there’s less of an Endurance load on repeated habits. Willpower reacts differently across time…it sounds very much like a kinematics problem in physics.

So here are some of my basic relationship thoughts with regards to coming up with a habit equation:
-Endurance is Willpower across Time just as velocity is distance across time

-SRHI has a reciprocal relationship to Endurance. As the SRHI for a task approaches perfection (84) Endurance needed decreases and approaches 0

-We can reverse engineer an Endurance scale. If the SRHI is 12 (minimum) then the Endurance load is at a maximum of 72. If the SRHI is at a maximum of 84, then Endurance is at a minimum of 0. 0-72 scale for Endurance.