Regimentation Part 2: Pesky Tasks and R&R

So what should I do?

For one, I need to stop planning in a goal-oriented manner. That means not planning with goals in mind, but for quality time. Like the post I linked from James Clear on Zanshin, everything is aiming. So how do I aim? Start with a small amount of time - in short, it’s recognizing that fighting through difficult pesky and small tasks IS the battle, not some sort of failure before the real struggle.

That can definitely help mitigate that frustration if I know my frustration is solid progress forward. But an equally important ability is to leave work at the door and relax. I think that capacity is something I ignore because A) I always feel like I’m behind and B) I don’t really have many hobbies or relaxing activities. Almost everything I do slides into a desire to want to master it. I bought a calligraphy book and pen a few weeks ago, and I want to master it fully. I started biking, which I used to do purely for fun in high school to get out of the house, and I start thinking about it in terms of steady state cardio. Games get me frustrated a lot of the time. And watching TV shows on my computer often is me just staring at the computer screen like with work AND often has me reaching for something else to do.

This capacity of regimentation seems to me to be equally important as endurance and grit. It’s a handoff - if you have bad regimentation then you’ll leak willpower. Leaking willpower drains endurance - it’s harder to stick things out long-term if you can’t establish success in day-to-day tasks.

Regimentation Part 1

In a previous post I talked about how regimentation, habituation, and mastery are the three different parts of the self improvement process. I’ve talked almost exclusively about the last two - Habituation is the thrust of the whole project what with constant SRHI scores and Mastery is something I talk about a lot when it comes to overcoming skill plateaus.

But I’ve largely ignored describing regimentation - though initially I talked about it a little bit (HERE, HERE, and HERE).

I have severe problems with the mental framework of regimentation, and this severely undermines the structural integrity of this project. What do I mean?

I have an inability to move from one task to the next during the day without carrying the worries of one to the next. I have problems delineating the line between work and relaxation. Lydia has repeatedly suggested I take up a hobby, but I’m largely incapable of doing something purely for the fun of it and not subsume it for some sort of larger project of mastery.

I also have great difficulty in properly planning out a week with tasks that need to be done. I often make the mistake of planning things out in terms of objectives that need to be completed, and biting off way more than I can chew. This results in immense frustration and tension.

For example, yesterday I took some time to plan out the next three weeks in regards to launching a new website. Today’s task was to format one draft of a post. Unfortunately various small bits of that work caused me great difficulty. Italics doesn’t show up properly. The post videos and photos don’t show up properly. I have to edit down the video using software I am not familiar with.

Because I’ve planned it like this the task becomes difficult to win. I’ve programmed goal-oriented thinking with process oriented thinking, which means failures at small points make me frustrated because I feel like I’m failing, and because of that ending time for work extends out for the entire day. And I end up collapsing, “failing”, giving up, but with immense mental self flagellation, which drains all my willpower, preventing me from having a “springiness” of self. It makes other tasks later in the week harder to start.

I just saw a meme about DragonBall Z:

It’s a funny Reddit meme about a fictional martial artist, but basically it illustrates training. Each part is incredibly important - not just the training, but the recovery time and “feeding the machine.” Arnold Schwarzenegger also advocates this in his autobiography. He trains hard, but he warns against grasping too hard. Worrying about tasks causes you to work against yourself - when he works he plays and has fun as well, which contributed in his successes.

Habit Exhaustion, Stalling, and Growth Cycles

My habits, from an automaticity SRHI standpoint, are AMAZING. 

But from a regimentation and mastery standpoint, they’re shaky.

I’m having more difficulties moving from quality practice from one task to the next during a day. The reason is emotional - I feel like I’m not progressing towards Mastery in any given habit. So despite the length of time and the strength of my habits, it’s not paying off enough for me.

The best example is eating - I initially got a great ROI - I lost weight, etc. Now, despite having it solid, I’m hovering around the same weight, while my buddy, who’s been counting calories, has lost tons of weight. I have to remind myself it’s not about the result, it’s about getting good at the process, yet it still bothers me.

Lydia suggests that I should pick one or two specific habits to enter a growth cycle - the problem is that I feel that ALL of them need to be grown - it’s similar to picking a new habit. I feel I need 20 of them. And I feel it’s important to define that emotional state because it’s the cause of a lot of failure - the need to do everything at once, preventing any improvement on anything despite tremendous energy expenditure (emotionally or work-wise). I’ve always referenced it as “life ADD” - but we’ll call it something else. A compulsive urge to multitask and overcommit. I wish I had a good term from engineering for this, because more and more I”m seeing this whole system in terms of locomotion - aeronautics or something, with thrust, drag, acceleration, etc.

And there’s a cloudiness involved with this. I can’t see past the urge to overcommit, but when talking about it I realized that a few things are ok. Eating is ok - I need to clean it up, but it won’t need much additional willpower. It just needs to redirected, as does my fixed meditation. The two things that might actually make the most changes are bodyweight exercises, because it tends to affect mood, and dynamic meditation, which also effects mood. That’s what Lydia says anyways.  I have to think about it more.

TinyHabits, Plateaus and Ratcheting

At some point BJ Fogg talks about how a habit, when properly planted, will grow on its own. He then follows up by talking about how many pushups he does now (I think this is in his TED talk).

I don’t think think this is accurate - and I think a lot of habit researchers make leaps simply because they don’t have enough data. At 321 days of recording my own bodyweight habit, I’ve stalled. 

I started with a basic two pushup habit like BJ Fogg, then it grew - I was doing a pushup progression getting into typewriter pushups, as well as burpees, bridge progressions, etc. Which was great.

But recently I gone back down to two pushups after traveling and introducing other habits. I’m back down to the basic two pushups.  This makes sense considering other sources who talk about plateaus as inevitable. A plateau requires a push to get past.

I understand what Fogg is saying - we do have an artificially created growth cycle when we pass the danger period through making deliberately small habits - it’s as though we’re chomping on the bit but we’ve been forcing ourselves to take it slow. Graphically, the TinyHabit shifts a lot of things over.

But AFTER that initial growth cycle, we need to deliberately push ourselves. Because it ain’t gonna grow on its own.

The problem comes when we introduce multiple habits - also something most habit researchers don’t have data on over long periods. Other habits that are entering a danger zone or a growth cycle will inevitably leach willpower from habits that are floundering. There’s just not enough ambient willpower to sustain growth in all fields.

At the same time the danger is dropping down to the initial TinyHabit for maintenance purposes. You want to drop down to conserve willpower but you still want to keep the habit.

I’ve done this with my pushup habit.  But the thing is, my maintenance level shouldn’t be 2 regular pushups now. It SHOULD be two TYPEWRITER pushups. Going back down to the initial TinyHabit reverses progress rather than maintaining it.

So I think a new protocol for Willpower cycling would be to ratchet TinyHabits for maintenance. At periodic points in a habit’s lifecycle a line must be drawn to determine what a TinyHabit is in each category of habit for the express purposes of keeping up the habit without reversing progress. Maintenance levels for habits have to be progressive across time.

What’s exciting (well, to me at least) is that a TinyHabit has a different graph and lifecycle than a regular habit - and this can and should be mapped out to prevent problems later down the road.

Zanshin: Learning the Art of Attention and Focus From a Legendary Samurai Archer | James Clear →

A great article on Zanshin by James Clear. I think it’s an excellent illustration of the state of relaxed focus AND process oriented thinking.

Focus on the process, and the results become a side effect. 

“It is not the target that matters. It is not the finish line that matters. It is the way we approach the goal that matters. Everything is aiming. Zanshin.”

A Practical Discussion on How to Reach Harmonic Consonance with Multiple Habits

Right now I have several superhabits. My eating is about to achieve superhabit status, I’ve dropped my work habit, and my dynamic meditation is already at the habit stage.

So why am I having days where my willpower/endurance is utterly drained?

There are probably several reasons that involve sleep and eating - I’ll brainstorm other variables later. But one main reason is that I’m pushing a lot of my habits and trying to break out of plateaus in superhabits. Here’s a rundown:

Bodyweight exercises - I’m trying to push the number of reps and I’m including other exercises like squats and reintroducing tabatas.

Fixed meditation - I’m switching from basic meditation to first bringing up negative emotion and then quelling it

Eating - I’m at the verge of a superhabit here. I theorized that right before gaining superhabit status there’s another danger zone. And danger zones are where endurance takes a hit.

Writing - I’m trying to write things that are really difficult for me, specifically research-based writing.

Dynamic meditation - I’m extending my sessions from 20 minutes to an hour. This has largely happened naturally, but I might have pushed it a little too fast.

Those are at least 4 drains of my willpower/endurance. Of COURSE I’m barely getting through the day. But how do I solve this?

Ideally what I imagine in graphic form is a series of constantly shifting willpower/endurance drains, where some habits are reined back and one is put into overdrive.

(apologies for the bad sketch)

So in the top left is stage 1 where the second habit will require more willpower for one reason or another. And in the top right in stage 2 willpower requirements are shifted to the first habit. The bottom two are the same habits with regards to work or improvement. Ideally willpower gets you past a hump and when willpower normalizes, you can use that excess on busting past plateaus or whatnot in other habits - BUT output remains the same as when you were expending more willpower.

So right now I want to improve writing. I want to form a nested habit of research-oriented writing. But really it’s not a full habit - writing isn’t a big deal, it’s getting over the automaticity of starting research-oriented writing. If I were to record this, I wouldn’t do the full SRHI - I’d probably just include automaticity questions, and I’d think of implementing a Greasing the Groove strategy to get it done faster.

While I’m leaking willpower/endurance for this, I should dial back all other habits to maintenance mode. So bodyweight exercises are just at pushups and bridges. Meditation, I’m just doing basic meditation, for dynamic meditation I’d do 20 minutes.

Once I’ve successfully overcome the fear of research-oriented writing and I can do the task fluidly, I can bring it back as one slot in a greater writing habit and cycle it along with pitching, writing improvement, narrative first drafts, etc.

I think I once called this process “crutching” because it reminds me of leaning on something in order to maintain forward motion.

I think this process is very interesting because it’s this intersection of regimentation, habituation, and mastery of a skill that things all get really dicey. Either you lose a habit, or your skating along, or everything collapses.

Habit Harmonics

Harmonics is the word I’m using for how two habits interact with each other. I don’t know if it’s truly correct, but it’s what I’m using now.

Imagine two strings in a graph. The two strings represent a habit. Each string plays off one another.

Since willpower is one depleteable reserve, if two habits are draining more than their normal share (when being in a danger zone or through busting through a plateau) they will work against each other in habit dissonance.

To prevent that from happening when training multiple habits, a larger view has to be taken that takes into account the willpower/endurance drains of ALL habits. As more habits get trained (like in this project) this dance becomes more and more delicate.

It’s similar to that moment during the danger zone where the habit seems like it’s going to fall a part. The delicate part is managing any drainage through things like making a TinyHabit.

But when it all works together, habits start backing each other up in habit consonance.

So imagine a scenario - you’re in shape, you enjoy being outdoors. Your friend calls you up, and they want you to come out to play beach volleyball. You say yes and everyone is in swimsuits playing on the beach.

If you are in shape, you are more likely to go along with this. You are athletic so there’s no embarrassment. You have friends that are also athletic, you have no shame in just being in trunks. All of this is less likely to occur if you aren’t in shape. All of your habits - your social circle, your workout habits, your eating, going outdoors - all of this is pushing you to greater amounts of physicality. All your habits back each other up.

Another example of habit consonance is the idea of a habit singularity, where there is an explosive growth in habit formation. All basic habits are taken care of - there’s no question you’re going to workout - but how you do it changes. Habits act as slots that can be mixed and matched smoothly. This is perhaps the apex of habit consonance.

The problem is how to get there if multiple points in a given habit draw more willpower/endurance, and we’re trying to train multiple habits.

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.

A Robust(er?) Model Of Self Improvement - Part II

This model is a sketch. I think there are a lot of variables that still need to be honed. But here’s what I came up with.

Regimentation is a daily practice with specific problems. You have to overome fear, you have to avoid procrastination, etc. You have to have daily recording sessions. You have to manage Willpower.

Habituation is a mid-range practice. You need to avoid danger zones, set up things like TinyHabits. You need to weather disruptions like travel. You need to manage Endurance.

Mastery is a long-range practice. You have to bust through plateaus to continually increase in skill.

Above is a rough graph of what this might look like. One plane is time, another is the SRHI, and another is GRIT. This is a real map of my meditation habit along time and the SRHI. I totally fudged it for Grit because I’ve only taken the Grit Scale three times.

Grit is what I’m using as a stand-in for the path to mastery since it’s defined as Endurance + getting over things like setbacks and plateaus. Habituation doesn’t care about plateaus. You can have a solid superhabit of playing the violin but not ever improve your skill at it. Grit seems to be the best scale for improvement, and it’s ability to predict success is one of the reasons why Duckworth was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant.

Is it the best scale for this? I’m not sure. How does it play into Endurance? I’m not sure. But this graph seems to me the best model for all three variables - regimentation, habituation, and mastery.

A Robust(er?) Model Of Self Improvement - Part I

I went through my entire blog to dredge up what I’ve learned, and spent quite a bit of time last night listing out terminology, asking questions, making notes, and doodling graphs.

What I came up with is a model for the whole process of self improvement. See, my view is that self help generally doesn’t look at the entire picture. Either they’re looking at just one habit, or they’re looking at grit, or their looking at daily scheduling. But the real story is larger.

We don’t just want to be people who just eat right. We also want to eat right and exert self control in a dozen different habits. We want them regimented throughout the day, and we want to bust through any plateaus in progress. And we want all this to be happening as quickly and efficiently as possible.

What self help tends to ignore is how all these various projects interact with each other. There are so many examples of this - BJ Fogg has a program of habit formation that’s a few weeks long. That’s not enough to really get the whole story, nor is Lally’s experiments where she just draws the graph further to extrapolate that difficult habits may take up to 250 days. Duhigg’s Power of Habit essentially talks about hacking one habit - not eating donuts at work. You have to do the habits and figure out what happens a year out with other progression involved. And still, it’s not enough.

“Just do the work” and other cliches underscore this undercurrent that self improvement is all about simplicity. With the percentage of people who fail at basic habits and self improvement, this overly simplistic view seems to ring false. Self improvement is highly complicated.

The work of Lally, Duckworth, Baumeister and Verplanken and this movement to scientifically quantify all these …for lack of a better world…soft concepts..that’s all fantastic. But I want to crank it up even more. To me it’s still shocking that there is no accepted Willpower scale. 

My goal is create as scientific of a model as I can using the data I can get from myself. I’m going to coin terminology that I think best fits, and keep evolving it. I think creating a technical jargon has immense uses in “soft” arts. It allows our minds to grab hold of concepts. I’m reminded of magic, where (if you really get into it) every twist and turn of the hand has a name - a principle, a theory. And it seems to create a space in your  mind - suddenly you’re not just waving your hands, you’re executing a highly defined protocol. 

I want the same for this.

Beyond Superhabits

The more I ponder the state of my habits the more I now think that superhabits are just the beginning.

Nested Habits
My writing habit is solid, but I’m having problems with specific aspects of it. Today I started pitching, but the fear set in and it took me a lot to overcome it. A few days ago I had the same problem with writing research intensive articles.

When I first start any habit half of the problem is getting over that fear and procrastination that stops me from actually doing the task. It’s why TinyHabits are so great. You do a little, and doing a lot becomes nothing eventually.

I have no problem writing a lot of things - but I have problems when focusing on specific aspects of the trade. That’s to be expected. My frustration enters when I mistake mastery in the general task of writing with mastery over a specific aspect, like research writing.

What I should be doing is nesting writing - forming a new research writing habit within the slot of my already formed general writing habit. How would this work? The same as any habit - start small to overcome the starting inertia of the habit, understand that it will get harder before it gets easier, and keep going until it’s as automatic as any other superhabit.

Willpower Cycling
In my general theory, as a habit approaches 84 of the SRHI (max automaticity), it also approaches 0 Endurance, and therefore approaches 0 Willpower. I don’t quite understand the relationship between Endurance and Willpower (and I’ll be keeping this simple by just referencing Willpower), but what I can say is that the Willpower needed to do a habit gets less and less through the process of habituation.

That doesn’t mean it goes away. It’s a very dependent relationship. Willpower is one depleteable resource, but through the process of habit formation you are also building your Willpower reserves. And it fluctuates depending on other drains on that resource.

For example, if I’m trying to bust a plateau of one of my superhabits, it’s going to drain more Willpower than just skating along in superhabit mode. So cycling plateau busting protocols and habit formation protocols is a necessity.

What do I mean by this? It means I’m working against myself if I, say, start doing crossfit to bust past a plateau in my bodyweight exercises AND at the same time start building a brad new flossing habit. I’ve suddenly got two drains on a resource that might only be equipped to handle one.

Mid-Range Programs
I am noticing a deficit in mid-range planning for my planning, and this has to incorporate willpower cycling theory. I’ve got my long-range plan - this general habit project. I’ve got my daily list of individual habits that I do and record daily.

There’s a certain satisfaction and security a weightlifter has when following a training program like Russian volume training or Rippetoe. It means that there’s never a time week-to-week, month-to-month where he suffers doubt as to whether or not there is a greater progression. I don’t have that in many of my habits.

I suffer from a lack of mid-range planning - I frequently feel like I’m drowning, churning my legs in the mud, and though that might not be the case, a part of the security of a  mid-range plan is KNOWING that progress is being made, that there is a hand off from week to week or month to month rather than just toiling away.

What to Do
Lydia suggested to plan out the week and/or the month. This way I can gauge what I should push (plateau busting, etc) and what I should just late skate in order to do good work in other theaters.

What’s the thing I needs the most work? How should I gauge improvement. And most importantly how do I gauge improvement across weeks. These should be like little mini-projects - like 30 day challenges that have discrete beginnings and ends, whose fruits are handed off to the next push.

Taking Days Off

Yesterday I took the day off. 

It was fantastic.

I woke up late because I had problems sleeping. But then instead of just getting grumpy and not doing anything I went out to grab lunch. Then we went to an arcade. Then I talked to my friend, then went to check out an archery place to see if we could practice on their shooting range. It was too busy, so I ended up playing ping pong.

That entire day was effortless and fun. Normally I’m so tired after doing my habits - it’s been taking a toll especially since I’m not only adding new habits, but I’m trying to break out of what I view are several plateaus. I just don’t have the will to do more later in the day - especially since some habits take a lot of will, and that sometimes takes a long time to finish.

Lydia takes weekends off, and she urges me to do the same. 

I feel bad about it today, but I wonder if it’s a good thing to recharge me. I don’t think that it would be good for habits I’m trying to form, because the greater the frequency the better the scores for stabilizing the habit. But what about superhabits?

I’m still mulling this over. 

Active rest is a huge part of exercise cycles - shouldn’t it be a part of habit cycles? But more so the point of doing all of this is to help me better experience life - isn’t having a fun Sunday a part of that?

I don’t know. 

Nested Habits

I was talking about pitching for work. I want to make it into a habit where I just continuously pitch because publication schedules are so slow, it only works if there are continuous pitches being thrown out. So even if smaller amounts are being answered and even smaller are positive, I’ll have a steady stream of work. Like juggling.

But I’m wondering if I need to treat some of these things as almost separate habits. For example, I have no problem writing 50 words. I have no problem writing a first draft of 50 words a day most of the time. But sometimes I falter. 

The last couple of days I’ve been trying to do a very specific article - a listicle with no narrative that has a lot of research involved. This rips me out of the flow of words constantly - so 50 words isn’t as easy as a 50 word narrative. Pitching is the same way - it requires a lot of research so it’s slow going.

Now I don’t necessarily need to do this everyday, but to work at the habit, I want to be able to cover all types of terrain every day on a cycling basis. 

But these difficult executions may need to be nested. If I need to do listicles, maybe I should do it once or twice a week and do the SRHI for that. Because it feels like I’m starting another habit and the protocols of being calm and compassionate through messups as the will grows seems the same as starting a  new habit from scratch. 

Time of Day and Habits

Again, talking to Lydia, and she’s stopped really recording or thinking about recording her exercise. She’s been doing Crossfit, which she really likes, but because of the change in schedules (sometimes it’s earlier than other days) she doesn’t feel like it’s, what BJ Fogg calls, crispy.

That is to say, there’s not a specific trigger immediately followed by an action.

I have had this for all of my really solid and quickly developed habits. But what I’ve noticed is that when an action achieves superhabit status, that crispiness doesn’t really matter.

If I don’t have time or the will to do something in the morning, like writing or exercising, I do it later. I get that “something’s missing” or “my day’s incomplete” vibe that seems to be the hallmark of a well inculcated habit.

Think about brushing your teeth - it’s not really a big deal if I don’t do it immediately as soon as I wake up, or immediately after eating. But I feel something’s missing, and daily consistency is still achieved.

It might well be that a great protocol to follow is start out by constructing a really “crispy” habit - and once it’s a superhabit, play around with it, or use that freedom to evolve it.

I do want to check out crossfit. If I like it, my bodyweight schedule will be in flux, but that’s a great thing - it gives me more of a workout, and since I’ve already developed a superhabit, what I’m hoping is that it also keeps consistency. I’m hoping that if I have a day where I don’t do an exercise in my room, I’ll have that “wait something’s missing” itch that’s scratched later on by a gym or crossfit workout.

This freedom also will hopefully allow me to bust through plateaus. 

Next Habit?

Here’s a list of further habits I want to start. And again, think of this in context of what does the AVERAGE IDEAL PERSON have. When I think of this I think of what my mother would say to me as a kid - Jason has great grades, Brian has great posture, he does this, she does that. What does that mythical ideal person who has “it together” do?

-Flossing
-Posture
-Language learning
-Learning a musical instrument
-Finances
-A slot for general learning
-Social media
-Waking up early
-Programming
-Making my bed

All the other times I’ve talked about this, it’s always been the same thing - EVERYTHING is important! EVERYTHING had to be established years ago! Getting up early charges all my list of tasks because I have more time. Social media, programming, and my general learning slot would all be nice because they would help with work and life in general (I need to migrate my blog). My finances really need to be looked at and organized. AND a general learning slot would mean a rotating daily schedule, which would highly contribute to my theorized habit singularity.

BUT I’m really leaning towards doing a task that’s easy, both psychological and doesn’t really have plateaus and need to be scaled. Something nice and boring, and I think that’s flossing. 

I’m still mulling it over

YEAR ONE IN REVIEW

I just want to take some time to look back at how much I’ve accomplished in this first FULL YEAR of recording. Sure I had this blog a year before, but this is the first consistent year of recording and habit acquisition. Here’s what I’ve accomplished:

1. I have NEVER deliberately followed through on any daily discipline. I might have fallen into some things, but not by conscious choice. And as I mentioned in a previous post - I’ve been obsessing over habits since I was in middle school.

2. Meditation: I can regularly meditate myself out of bad moods.

3. I can do a bridge - and now a wall walk down and walk up bridge! I can do typewriter pushups. I can do bulgarian split squats. I’ve started on the dragon flag.

4. I have lost about 7 notches on my belt since the beginning of daily recording

5. I have maintained focus on daily recording despite moving to Brazil and Spain, and traveling to South Carolina, Texas, New Mexico, England, Paris, Germany, and all over Brazil for the World Cup. I’ve more recently went on two long road trips throughout Texas and to Oregon and visited the Dominican Republic. I’ve also done a couple of smaller road trips to Dallas and to Santa Fe. I might’ve missed recording at times when sick or traveling, but I always always got back on the horse.

6. I have written a book on meditation for my mother that is helping her. I’ve also done some coaching for friends needing to stick to things.

7. I wrote that book in 1 week, sometimes writing 13,000 words per day to finish National Novel Writing Month.

8. My grit scale has improved. When I originally took the scale, I was pretty average, scoring a 3.5 out of 5. Later I took it again at Day 103 and improved, scoring a 3.83. Today I took it and scored a 4.5!

9. I attempted many things unsuccessfully (and I think that’s great). I attempted a Walking Habit, ALMOST took BJ Fogg’s class on TinyHabits, and started a Coursera course on statistics and experimentation (but didn’t complete it!).

10. I tinkered with a bunch of stuff. I figured out how to make charts of my data, theorized on habit singularities, sandbagging, superhabits, endurance depletion, quarter mark danger zones, SRHI hacking and possible additions to the SRHI, employed BJ Fogg’s TinyHabits, created a travel protocol, moduling, plateau busting, different classifications of habits, and successfully completed a one month no bread challenge.

11. Learned about “crispiness”, the Zeigarnik Effect, and exchanged a few emails with habit researchers.

That’s a lot. And I fully intend to take this further. I want an equation for this - I want to start extracting useful bits for all the data I’ve collected.. I want to hone all these elements on what works and what doesn’t. And I want more habits!

But the next thing I’ll really be working on is a new blog - one that’s clearer, with a space for basic recording, as well as a place for important points. I think this has the potential to help a lot of people, and I want a blog that is more conducive to sharing it.

Cannot wait to start in on the new year!

Slacking and Superhabits

The last few weeks I’ve gotten the impression that I’ve been floating through many of my fully formed superhabits.

A lot of this has to do with my bouts of sickness and travel, where I have to slack deliberately in order to sustain the habit.

But now that I’m good, there’s been a slump. Specifically:
Fixed Meditation
I’m doing basic meditations. Relaxation, visualizations - these would have been difficult a while ago, but I need to PUSH. Bring UP bad emotions, then quell them. OR do some advanced stuff, like TUMMO. OR start doing what I don’t like to do, like single pointed meditation. OR do Vipassana for time. 

Bodyweight Exercises
I’ve been on type writer pushups - that’s awesome. But I’ll do 3, and stop. I can do reps like I did today - and it HURT. I should be used to that pain. I need a better cycle - I’ve started doing bulgarian split squats and that’s good. I need to push my bridges. I dropped my dragon flag progression because I don’t have a good stable spot, but that’s no excuse - I gotta solve that problem. And I HAVE to do what I hate, tabatas.

Writing
I’m totally slacking on the actual writing part of my cycle. I need to get back into that mentality of doing a first draft - like I can do no wrong. And then the next day NEEDS to be editing to a polished submittable piece. If I can get that cycle down, a HUGE weight will be lifted, because pitching is easy for me. So maybe I should just focus on that - forget everything else - first draft, then edit. again and again rinse and repeat.

Eating
I’ve been letting things slip here. But I don’t care as much - FINALLY it’s just coalesced into a habit. If I can keep it like that, I’m happy, and I can clean it up later.

Conclusion - this is something I’m going to have to constantly be aware of. Plateaus are a part of this business. Sometimes it may take something special to shake things up. Maybe I should do crossfit. Maybe I should drop everything and do writing/editing for a month. Maybe I should do a month of single pointed meditation. There is definitely a huge benefit to doing something like my No Bread challenge. 

Thoughts on Dynamic Meditation (so far)

Today’s 20 minutes got me really sensitive to the subtleties of this. I could feel a sliding crystallization of tension in my mind and in my shoulders. I used a specific technique to counter it - relaxation through anchoring. A thought I had day before yesterday was that I should get really technical about it - I should know tension and anxiety like eskimos know snow. Not only will the delineation of different categories of it help me focus, but it acts as Vipassana noting - separating my mind from being entangled in the feeling.

This type of dynamic meditation is very interesting in comparison to Vipassana and other schools of Buddhism. Vipassana is all about the controlled observation of the mindstream in order to gain visceral knowledge (jñanas) that change its (the mind’s) quality. In Vajrayana, visualization and ritual are used for the same purpose, and for some versions of Tibetan Buddhism mucking about with the Bardo - transitory states of consciousness like before death or dreaming - changes the state of the mindstream.

What I’m doing is purifying the mindstream through habit in order to prevent the arising of negative emotions. The more I think about it, the more I think I’ve stumbled on another school of Buddhism…if it works. I’ll have to come up with a name for it…

Either way, that purifying action is an important metaphor to keep in mind while proceeding.

Dynamic Meditation Revisited Party IV - Last Notes

I just did a 20 minute session while doing some work. It was pretty easy to track some of these things. Here’s what it looked like:

biting lip - anxiety - R
x3 minor anxiety arising - R
minor anxiety arising - x4 shoulders - R
x4 fingers - picking, flicking
x2 lip picking R
x2 caught minor anxiety
X5 laughing

As you can see a lot of these things happen in groupings. And a lot of these things have very clear physical markers - lip picking, picking at my fingers, shoulders tensing up.

The “R” was just my short form for Regular - as in I didn’t use any sort of specific technique - I just stopped it - these were all minor tensions in the mind stream.

“X2 caught minor anxiety” referred to catching it as it formed in the mind. And “X5 laughing” referenced that feeling of cheating at life, that true happiness that seemed to arise as I felt how easy it was to change this.

That feeling is really what I’m after - and it IS easy, but like the rest of this project, extending even the simplest things out across months (or in this case over the course of a full day over time) is very very difficult.

Buddhism and Dynamic Meditation

I’ve been reading a lot on Buddhism lately, and it seems as though some people view Nirvana as getting into this state of equanimity - of completely uprooting the possibility to have these negative emotional arisings at all.

In Vipassana, this uprooting occurs through visceral knowledge of the state of the world through repeated meditative practice. Through just observing the mindstream, you’ll gradually come to realizations - like realizing that we are not angry - anger has just visited us momentarily. This eventually (as far as I understand) will get us to this uprooting. 

There are other ways there - in Rinzai Zen you break the bonds of logic to attain sudden illumination, in Vajrayana you use visualization and ritual to get there (again, I’m still researching this stuff so please excuse my lack of understanding - and feel free to correct it). 

My method of dynamic meditaiton through habit formation is the “quit smoking” version of equanimity - that if you counter the urge enough times, the urge ceases to arise at all. The urge has to be countered minutely from second to second in the mindstream, but as far as I understand it, this might just be another avenue to Nirvana. Which is kind’ve cool.

Now all of this is theoretical - I’m very curious to see how (or if!) it will work - especially next to these thousand-year traditions.

Dynamic Meditation Revisited Part III- Implementation Intention & Mental Contrasting

The first step is Implementation Intention. This is kind’ve weird because it’s not a discrete task - rather it’s one that needs to be performed in life. But hey, why not apply it to something I’m really nervous with? Is that good or bad? I don’t know, but let’s try it

Implementation Intention:
I will perform 20 minutes of dynamic meditation at the beginning of the day when I do my first real task - my work habit on weekdays, and my writing on weekdays. I will start by putting up a word file to record things on the side of my computer screen to list out when the emotions arise and what I do to counter them. I will record this on my blog as well.

Mental Contrasting:
1. What positive changes can occur in my life if the habit is fully a part of my daily routine?

If dynamic meditation is a part of my daily routine I will be able to not be ripping myself up to accomplish my goals like I have been recently, and do so constantly in my life. So much energy gets wasted on just trying to maintain, and doing so has me barely able to do anything during a day. To be able to recover that would be amazing.

I want to be someone like Ari from Entourage, who is never ever really broken, like Vince, where every day, positive or negative is all good. I want to be like Arnold Schwarzenegger, who always looked forward despite overwhelming odds. For him, being weird was a positive - not being at the cool kids table wasn’t something to feel beaten up over - it meant he got to create his own damn table.

I want this so that I can accomplish all my wildest dreams without feeling ripped a part in thinking that I’m not accomplishing anything at all. I want this so I can accomplish all my goals, this project, and beyond. I want to be a force to be reckoned with, unshakeable, to uproot all this negativity from out of myself. I live a life that is fantastic, that people would kill for, and there’s no point in living it without enjoying it fully.

2. What could go wrong in forming this habit?

I could not do other habits - writing or work - that could cause me to therefore not do my 20 minutes of dynamic meditation. I could feel lazy and not want to get started on it. I could get bogged down on what the correct perfect formation of this habit is instead of just STARTING. I could forget to not write down my list of arising emotion in that 20 minutes - I got lazy about it last time around and it resulted in fewer and fewer results. I could not have access to my computer and not have a pen and pad to jot all this down - or just be too busy and forget to bring it with me, like when I’m traveling. I could abandon the habit in my breaking points or in the quarter mark period, where sustaining the habit becomes difficult to endure.