Everyday Systems

The February behaviour experiment went very well.

I was very encouraged that the avoiding alcohol was easier than I thought. I think a key part of that was not having isolated, anxious unstructured time that I had to fill, which always meant TV and alcohol. I am confident that I will be able to avoid alcohol for 21 days from today. It was nice to lose a tiny bit of weight as well, but I am not tracking that.
Doing daily exercise at home also went very well. I took a 'conserve-your-willpower' approach, that is, I would use my step machine whilst studying a DVD or watching TV. I would do a minute step exercise, and a minutes rest, and keep going until I had done 30 minutes. It does not deplete the willpower as going out for a large exercise session does. Another approach which worked was to do a minute's exercise and two minutes cleaning and tidying. I recommend these approaches to anyone who wants to do more exercise.

The March behaviour experiment has several small measures, referring to small good habits like being out of bed earlier, in work earlier, eating wisely, and going to work with no money in my pockets. I am hoping that tracking several measures will not cost too much in will power. My good experience with the non-drinking in Feb means I am hopeful of establishing these habits by 1st April.
The more challenging behaviour targets are about tango, writing, and emotional resilience.
The easiest is the tango. I am finding it easier to go dancing, rather than sit at home, telling myself 'I ought to go dancing' and feeling useless. I have some instructional DVDs to study, and tango dancing is available in London most nights of the week. I am not setting a target for how many times a week I dance and study tango, but I want to be doing it several times a week.
Writing is more challenging. I have a set of lectures on CD about the technical aspects of plotting, character, etc, which I have not completed. SInce I have taken on a lot of targets in march, the targets is to study the lectures in March, so that I am fully prepared for setting writing goals in April.
The most experimental target is about emotional resilience. For all sorts of reasons, I have found it difficult to cope with frustrations, am easily startled, difficulties concentrating, feel useless and worthless, and so on. The task for march is to keep a free-format journal about these feelings and behaviours, to see what comes up. Hopefully, this will lead to beneficial behaviours that I can track during April.

Behaviours to track during march
- What time did I get in the office?
- Did I eat wisely at work?
- Did I avoid spending money during the day?
- Did I write my resilience journal?
- Did I exercise 30 mins?
- Did I study tango?
- Did I go dancing?
- Did I study the writing lectures?
- Did I avoid alcohol (record number of units consumed.)

This is a lot, so there is a risk that it is too much. There is probably something about making somethings 'Good but optional'. Also, trying and failing is stilll good if it is done in a conscious way. We shall see what happens in march.

No booze, lots of exercise, studying writing, eating wisely. Still difficult to avoid passive watching of TV, even though no booze & exercising whilst doing it. Would be better to get out & put myself in social situations.

0 Units alcohol. Non-drinking, eating wisely, exercising and studying writing are going well. The challenge is around more avoidant behaviours, like passively watching the TV and avoiding social situations. I think there is something about having less challenging target, a wider range of ways of achieving the target and an approach of increasing the difficulty of the target next time around. The idea is to keep the target useful, but bring it in within the usual available will-power.
There have been times of strong emotional pain, loneliness and misery over the last two days, and desire to drink. So far I have avoided it, although it does not feel really solid yet. The approach I am taking is to call getting to, say, 7pm without drinking a partial success, which allows me to update HabitCal, and feel good about it, even if it is not a daily success yet. It helps me on the way.
There is something about increasing emotional resilience - that is, spending less time in painful reaction to usual circumstances, even if the usual circumstances haven't got any better. I think that generally doing more things that I said I would do - more experiences of self-efficacy - will help.

Day 4 0 units alcohol. Non-drinking going OK. I am beginning to think about it not in terms of how much alcohol consumed, but about how much did I cope with without drinking? How many times did I get through periods of emotional distress without it? I suppose the goal is for alcohol to no longer even seem like a good solution to distressing emotions, replaced by better ways of coping.

March 5-8 - 0 units alcohol.

It is becoming less necessary to check in & report that I have done what I said I would do. I can pretty much do the small daily habits without cost to my will-power. The focus now is to take action on the larger, more challenging goals of writing and learning the tango. These take more concentration and effort, and writing will consistently bring up difficult emotions. These action have higher risks of failure: daily porridge is an easy-to-measure goal; successful writing is much harder to measure. There are related processes of just increasing the time devoted to the challenging goal; changing from just taking action to taking action that progresses the goal; increasing the amount of challenging work one can do; finishing what you set out to do; and so on.

However, one lesson of the conserving will-power approach is to think carefully about how to structure challenging goals like these, rather than just diving in. Properly thought through, it should be possible to set goals that are achievable, and stretching without being daunting or overwhelming, and persevere with them until the practice becomes do-able with a sense of ease and pleasure, rather than draining one’s will power.