October 23: Thoughts on Habits

[kinetic_elaboration]

I had a helpful conversation with @riotsquirrrl about, basically, how my brain works and how it could work better, as far as doing things I need and want to do, building habits, etc. Here are a few conclusions from that convo, mostly just so I don’t forget:

It can be difficult for me to start tasks or sets of task but it can also be hard for me to finish, because when I get into the frame of mind that allows me to work studiously on the thing, I don’t know how to get out of it. I do feel good for what I’m accomplishing, sort of, but it’s more specifically like being on a track and not being able to get off. There’s always more to do, more to think about, more to get straight in my head, on whatever it is. It’s hard to feel like the task is DONE, even if all I set out to do was some discrete part of it and that part is finished.

This means, among other things, that I don’t really feel happy for what I’ve done. I don’t feel any satisfaction because the only thing I’m thinking about is what I DIDN’T do, what I need to do next or next time, or what I failed to accomplish. So, like, why start things? You’ll only feel just as badly off as when you started! It’s not a good groove to be in.

I’m trying to train myself to stop, recognize the completeness of the thing (even if it is complete for now–because there is always more…), appreciate the accomplishment, and thus learn to associate doing the thing with good feelings and not bad ones. But this is hard.

I guess part of it is just taking the time. Like including that as a step: debriefing to myself about the task, sitting with it.

I also appreciate praise, from myself or others. It’s just a mind-training thing: maybe I expect too much too fast, as far as learning to appreciate my own efforts.

I’d like to use rewards to help motivate me to both start and finish a thing, and to place in that reflective spot. We know it’s done because we’re having the reward now. But rewards have never worked well for me: I have a hard time associating them with the thing they are the reward of. The nexus is weak between task and reward. I think it’s because I get the rewards when I have time for the rewards, which is to say sometimes I just give myself the nice thing for no reason and other times I earn the nice thing but (today is a good example) by the time I’ve done the earning, it’s late and/or I’m tired and/or I don’t care about the reward, so, whatever. I don’t know exactly what to do about that other than to prioritize the rewards more, and, more specifically, be realistic about what I’m asking myself and the time available. In other words, build in time to experience the reward.

We also talked about, like, the concept of summarizing accomplishments. I do find lists pretty helpful and one thing I like about the lists is seeing the items crossed off: not deleted, but still there, struck through. Also the most consistent ‘reward’ I get is the satisfaction of the strike through, and it does help me.

But there’s something distinct and valuable about the summary afterwards, too. I have used it before: I use it at work, and I used to use it when I would have days when I’d clean a lot in the apartment and it was satisfying to look back later at just how much I’d done, in list form. I think I stopped doing that out of laziness, out of a sense it didn’t matter. But that’s defeatist talk!

I think it could help me to feel like I’m at the end of something, like, I know we’re done with working on whatever the thing is because we’ve stopped and we’re writing down all the stuff we did. And with the reward/work nexus, possibly, for the same reason. So much effort is or seems ephemeral, at least for me. You’ll just have to do it again later, or it isn’t visible, or there’s yet more work behind it that seems more important because it isn’t done yet. But I’m trying to train myself out of thinking that way.

I’d also… I don’t know, like to have good habits again. I used to be way better at habits. I had more of them and I kept track of them… So much of this stuff that I used to do or that became too hard to do or that I just stopped caring about is pandemic casualties. It’s been a while and seems far away but it both was and wasn’t so. I know I can’t build every habit at once and I need to prioritize them. But, yeah, I don’t know, I’ve been thinking about habit tracking to some degree again.

…And the absolute worst of it all is that I need to sleep better! And it’s late again. UGH. Anyway.