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.

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And here’s my record keeping habit:

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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.