Day 50, Continual Habits, and Food

Day 50 Record Keeping SRHI = 64
Day 18 Fixed Meditation SRHI = 54
Day 17 Dynamic Meditation SRHI = 48
Goodnight sleep, ok wakeup.

Today’s fixed meditation was, for a lack of a better world - smooth. All the visualizations and mental gymnastics I do for it just came naturally. This is one of the first times where it has come that smoothly - usually I feel sluggish, forcing my mind to move. So that’s good.

Yesterday I felt I got more into the groove of the Dynamic Meditation after days of feeling depressed and not really being able to concretely control emotional outbreaks. This morning I caught a negative emotion before it started and dealt with it completely automatically.

I am curious if there is a better way of doing this. Continual habits tend to be really exhausting, what with monitoring them all day long. Would it be better to try it for an hour, then expand more and more? I really don’t know, but it bears some research - how do people correct posture? And by that I wonder if there are people who do it at a more rigorous level than simply “just sit up straight”.

I mentioned in a post from a few days ago that I would be curious to see the results of an SRHI on my healthy eating habit. I went to the store today and thought about going to eat at a restaurant that wasn’t healthy, and it felt weird - feeling weird when you don’t do a habit is one of the questions on the SRHI. So I just took it, and I scored a 63. So it appears…APPEARS this is a pretty solid habit - we’ll see as the days go on. It definitely feels more solid than anything else, but I experienced a dip in motivation at about the three month mark, and this is only two months in. 

But, I’ve never felt that weird feeling when thinking about a cheat meal before.

Day 27 and Basic Habits

SRHI=43

Great night sleep, great wakeup

Throughout this project I want to put attention on basic tasks that we all generally want as a habit. You always hear people talking about how they want to workout everyday, or start flossing, but we rarely turn our full attention to just how few of those statements we actually follow through on. And sometimes even if you do, it’s hard to remember the habits you’ve stated. 

When we say “I really need to improve my posture” I rarely really think about it. It’s something to say and mean in the moment, but all too often it takes a back seat.

Luckily gamification is bringing some of these to light. KWIT is a gamified program to quit smoking. I haven’t used it, but it seems to be a great setup with achievements, a social element where you can share those achievements, and even a running statistics list to show how much money you’ve saved. 

Lumo Lift is another one for posture, one I believe I’ve mentioned in the past. I’ve ordered mine, and it is something I’ve vowed to work on many times in the past.

Unfortunately flossing has not, as far as I know, been gamified yet - makes me really want to start a “learning coding” habit - but if I’ve learned anything in this endeavor is it pays to be slow and methodical.

Day 6, Lumo Lift, Categories of Habits

SRHI = 29

Remembered in the morning again - It’s interesting the stages you go through with this - First forgetting entirely and “catching yourself” later, then remembering as soon as you get up, then getting a degree of autamaticity about the whole thing…

A few months ago I was indundated with ads on Facebook about Lumo Lift, from http://www.lumobodytech.com/

Basically it’s a device to help with body posture. It’s a device that syncs with your smartphone to remind you when you are slouching.

It’s a great idea to combat a different habit - the correction of a general state of being that you should do all the time. They way I see it, there are several categories of habits that should be attacked in different ways.

1. Habits of Instance - a regular habit, like flossing or working out - you do these once a day

2. Habits of Omission - a habit of not doing something i.e. not smoking, or not facebooking

3. Continual Habits - a habit like good posture or relaxing, something that ideally should be kept up at all times

I’m glad Lumo Lift got put on my radar because it really is one of those core habits like learning an instrument or flossing - everyone says they want better posture, but very few people ever actually go about trying to achieve it. As such I’m putting it on my list of future habits, and have ordered the device.