I had every intention of posting once a week and whilst I’ve kept that streak going for nearly 4 months, inevitably, life got in the way and my run is over. It’s not something to be disappointed about, though – in fact, it’s something to be happy about really, knowing that serendipitous events can occur and it’s not the end of the world.
One of the important aspects of habit building is consistency; and whether that means in timing or in method and technique, consistency is a fundamental part in creating habit loops that take you from conscious effort on a task to ‘something that just happens’.
I’ve managed to be consistent in posting once a week, but I could improve this by making sure it is the same day every week. You’ll probably notice that a lot of the dates are Sundays, and it might appear as if that’s the day I’d chosen on purpose but the more scrupulous amongst you might realise that it is a coincidence and the underlying reasons for my posting day being a Sunday aren’t that it is purposefully chosen, but that Sunday is the last day of the week and I’ve been so desperate to keep that run going.
The reason I didn’t post last Sunday specifically is because I was enjoying a weekend in London, fulfilling one of my lifelong dreams of seeing Metallica in the flesh (well, I say lifelong, it’s more since I grew out of The Spice Girls in the early 2000’s).
The chance occurrences actually happened this week, giving further credence to the theory my habit of blogging on a Sunday is just a last-ditch effort to keep a run going, but to avoid going off on a tangent – let’s get back to habits.
We’ve established consistency is important when building habits, and if you are looking for rules, there are various sources that will give you a number of days as a target for successfully embedding your chosen habit – 30 days, 61 days, 97 days – but in truth, the number of days is not so important as it is what you do when your streak ends.
If I’m trying to build the habit of going to the gym every day, and I’m working under the assumption it takes 30 days to build this habit, and I get to day 29 and don’t go the gym – what does this mean?
The answer is it depends what I do on day 30. If I don’t go again because I’m feeling dejected at having broken my streak, then in habit building terms I’ve set myself back about a week. If I do go again, it’s like having a checkpoint in a video game that I’ve just gone back to as if nothing happened – day 30 is just like replaying day 29 all over again and the habit building progress is not lost.
This is really important because it’s so easy to take that first option – think about the times people are on a diet, and they have a bad day, what do they do? They follow it up with another bad day (especially if it’s a Saturday, because who wants to start their diet again on a Sunday? Start Monday!) and then before they know it, all the progress is lost and they’re back to square one.
Tracking a sequence of successful days is good because it motivates you to keep going and for every tick you put on the calendar, you get another small dopamine boost, but be careful not to switch the focus from the goal to the streak – because when this happens, this where a sequence breaker is likely to be a habit breaker and you won’t achieve your goal.
The thing with consistency and what I mean by this is that it’s not so much about doing the thing well it’s more just doing the thing at all.
When it comes to doing the thing well, this is where that focus on the end goal is important, and this is what I mean when I say technique and method.
If I use writing as an example, it would be all well and good for me to write for 30 days in a row and declare that I’ve successfully built that habit, but If I’ve just written 30 days’ worth of incoherent nonsense, am I any closer to my goal?
Possibly – it’s likely that I’ve improved over that space on time, and writing something is always better than writing nothing, just as playing a song badly when you’re practising is better than not practising at all; but I think part of building the habit is also reflecting on what you’re doing well and what you could improve the next time.
If I write one page of disjointed ideas one day, the next day I could write one page around a single idea. If I did 20 reps of an exercise and injured myself one day, the next day I could do less reps with a better technique (bad example, don’t make the injury worse). If I played 3 songs on the guitar and played 40 bum notes one day, the next day I could play 1 song with 5 bum notes. You get the idea.
If you’ve been reading my blog every week, then remember – keep that streak going (I know, it wasn’t in your hands this time, I broke your streak technically) and if you missed one it’s fine.
