Welcome to Day 2! Thank you for coming back today. How did your sleep go last night? I imagine you laid awake for a long time, cursing me. I hope you stuck with it anyway, but don't worry if you didn't. These are all experiments, and the final judge of what works and what doesn't is YOU, not me.
Find your notebook or paper and add to your page on SLEEP, or start a new page if you like. Get your frustrations out on the page. Were there any parts of the routine you particularly liked? Are there things you know already you want to stop doing as soon as the three nights are up? What time was it the last time you checked the time? What time did you wake up this morning, and how rested did you feel? Make sure you put down the date.
Now let's put all that aside until your bedtime routine starts tonight. I want to introduce you to the one tool that is mandatory in this course - Habitica. It's an amazing tool that incorporates all the best research on forming habits. As I said in the introduction, this course is not about encouraging you to "try harder" and do amazing things in a single bound... it's about forming habits. Habitica will give us one easy portal to keep track of and implement the habits you decide on. Let me stress that part - you decide on the habits. There is nothing built in to Habitica that insists you need to do anything in particular.
Today, your task is simple. You're going to sign up for Habitica, and add your bedtime routine as a "Daily". Set it up so that it is a checklist, with the elements of your routine as items on the list. Once you've created it, you can edit the item to make sure it has a difficulty of "Hard". Now throw the post-it note in your paper recycling. In your notebook, add a heading of HABITICA and write down your login information. Also think about, and write down... how are you going to remember to check it in the morning? Do you need to set a reminder on your phone? A post-it note on your computer?
There is a column for To-Dos that's pretty obvious. If there are things that are bugging you that you think you "should" be doing, add them here. It's easy to write something in the "Add a to-do" box and hit Enter, and it will pop onto the list.
One neat thing about Habitica is that you can access it from your computer, iPad, or phone. (You probably expected that, but remember... I'm old! This is still cool for me!) Once your routine is in there, you can access it from your phone rather than carrying the post-it note around with you. You can also capture To-Dos while you are out and about, which we're eventually going to start doing.
Tomorrow morning, after you wake up, visit Habitica first thing. It will ask you to check off any Dailies you did yesterday before you start your day. This is when you will check off your checklist items. You will get gold... we haven't talked about it yet, but look forward to spending it!
This is all you need to do today, but if you want to read on, I'll explain a bit about how Habitica is going to support you.
The expert in habit formation is Charles Duhigg, who literally wrote the book on how habits are formed [1]. He explains in the book that habits have three parts; the cue, the action, and the reward. You may have heard that it takes 30 days to form a habit, but it's not that cut and dried. Habits are formed more quickly, and are stronger, when they have these three components. The cue is what reminds you to do the action, and the reward is what strengthens the neural connection. Trying to form a habit by remembering to do the action consciously and not rewarding yourself afterwards is the hardest way to form a habit. We're going to use Habitica as both the cue and reward, which will streamline the process.
Soon we'll decide on rewards that you can spend your gold for. They can be ways of spending time - like watching TV or playing a favourite game. Or, they can be a treat that you eat or drink. Or, they can be something you buy that you've been wanting.
[1] Duhigg, Charles. The Power Of Habit. Random House USA, 2014.
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