Day 372 & Habit Formation Speed &

March 05, 2015 by The Science of Self Help

Day 372 Record Keeping
Day 341 Fixed Meditation (brought up neg emot to quell - HARD)
Day 287 Bodyweight Exercise (bridges - HARD)
Day 214 Writing (didn’t do - very difficult to summon up willpower)
Day 387 Eating = 75
Day 22 Dynamic Meditation = 70 (30 minutes)
Great sleep, great wakeup. Very sore. This is a good thing, a reflection of pushing my workout habit. Unfortunately my willpower was very depleted today.

Increased Speed of Habit Formation

Today I talked to Lydia about habit formation. This planning is working for her - she’s recording and flossing, and it seems to be really working for her. She mentioned that her flossing habit is almost a habit at 50 days, and her recording is almost a superhabit at 100 days.

I mentioned that my dynamic meditation is coming quite quickly, and I started to think about it in terms of what it would mean for a habit formula. It seems as though my ability to form habits is increasing (Time to Habituation), and the Grit Scale might just be used to represent that in an equation.

I’ve only taken it three times, but it might behoove me to take it every time I start and achieve a superhabit.

Dynamic Med Notes (30 minutes):

x5 fidgeting or almost fidgeting
x3 an arising of nervousness

Notes: Another spontaneous arising. Makes me think that doing it multiple times in a day will help foster that spontaneity

I had a cheat day and the sugar spike noticeably effectd my mental capacity to keep at a more relaxed level

metaphor: it feels like a solvent - the ability to take an incoming experience and detach that cohesion to my internal mental state.

Just like habit amnesia, I have a dynamic meditation amnesia with this - I’ll forget to observe my thoughts and prevent arisings. It can be very annoying when it doesn’t work out positively, but absorption is a case where I just forget everything and it prevents negative arisings.

Art of doing two things at once is important. It’s very difficult to focus on work and this. Or even watching a tv show and this. Doing three things is almost impossible - I’m hoping this will get to the point where it’s just automatic.

Day 89 & Coursera Stat Course & A Habit Equation

May 26, 2014 by The Science of Self Help

Day 89 Record Keeping SRHI = 67
Day 57 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 75
Day 3 Burpee SRHI= 31
Day 103 Eating SRHI = 58 - Failed to do yesterday
Bad night sleep, great wakeup.

A Habit Equation

I’ve been flailing around the internet trying to get help with mathematics in order to fully express my ideas on habit formation in an equation and graph form.

So far I’ve got graphs of SRHI v Time. But I’m wondering where Endurance fits. Ideally I’d like to have a fully expressed equation - one that describes how long a habit takes, when you’d get into the “danger zone"

I’m guessing this would have variables for the Total Time for the habit to manifest, Endurance, SRHI, and the time that has elapsed. I’m guessing there will have to be a coefficient or constant…I don’t know what this would be - for individual Endurance and the willpower required for a given habit on changing scale based on self report indexes. Like how there are books with friction numbers for different surfaces.

Initially I thought that Endurance would act like velocity - Willpower across Time, but now I’m not so sure.

Coursera Stat Course

In my flailing I found another course on Coursera called "Experimentation for Improvement” which sounds right up my alley. It uses statistics to efficiently use experimentation - so instead of just changing one variable, which can be very slow, you speed up the process. Well, changing one variable was just what I had in mind for this project - the thought that there is a better way blows my mind. I’ve signed up for the course, which starts in early July, and I think it will really help me out, even though it’s not what I need to make sense of my data and create a habit equation.