For your X’s, might I suggest adding what you did achieve. It may help you if you see patterns over the days and weeks that for example 8 pomodoros are to much and you usually seem to get 5-6 for example. Try out your original goals for a while, but don’t beat a dead horse. You’ll just discourage yourself. Lower the bar inch by inch till you’re just challenged enough to make a difference but not too challenged that you’ll likely quit.
My buddy from a half of a diploma course I completed told me he read somewhere that you can start meditating for only 30 seconds every day just to build the habit. The habit is much more important in the beginning to build then to reap the benefits.
You need to meditate 5 minutes per day minimum or 15m 3x per week minimum to gain the health benefits.
This doesn’t matter at first though because honestly, for most people 5 minutes is too much at first because a lot of people struggle to quite their minds.
Again, this is just an example.
Ever since he told me this, I have implemented it to any new habit I’m trying to build.
Oh, I need to eat 2500-3000 calories per day at my age and sex. I was originally averaging at 1100. At first, my goal was 1500, but after 1 month I felt really sad and broken because I couldn’t achieve it. I looked at the scale too much to see if I hopefully gained weight. This didn’t help.
Then, I said, you know what, why don’t I just try to counsciously get 1100-1200 calories per day, that way I’m actually creating neron pathways vs stuck in a comfort zone, and the range with a +100 to feel okay if I can only dick at the same amount of calories most days.
I actually quickly got up to 1500, now I’m between 1500-1700 on average. I even started having some near or just 2000 days. And basically never below 1500 too. The odd 1300 but that’s definitely less than once per week.
I’m telling you all this so you can see inside my head and try and grasp habit building.
Thought I’d just share my experience to try and help you and most/all others in this challenge with habit building.
Below is mostly ramble
TLDR this next part. Ghe power of habit is one of my favorite books. Just skip the part that starts out about a husband and wife sleeping together and the husband goes to court to prove that it was his habits that he did such bad thing.
The power of habit is a great book too…I had to black sharpie marker 4 pages in it though because there was a story that would give most people anxiety let alone people already with anxiety like me. If you do read it and want to skip this part, it starts out with a husband and wife sleeping & a husband going to court to prove it was his habits that did such negative thing.
My Spiritual wife got me the book, and we were both really sad after I got to that part and couldn’t finish reading it as it made me not want to go to sleep for 2-4 weeks. She just felt bad because she wanted to get me a book to help me and it didn’t…i eventually gathered myself and went back & sharpied out the pages then finished the book… Now that I think of it, I think I’ll pick that book up again on top of the miracle of mindfulness. It’ll be a good combo, 1 spiritual & calming, the other success focused and motivating.
Just rambling at this point…
Good luck all!
5/6 Check-in
Bed by 1am, wake by 10am - progress… It’s 4:30… Would have liked 4, but I got rambling on here. On the plus in sure I shed some good insight for people. Yesterday bed was 620am so 430 is good improvement. Tomorrow I’m really going to push for 1am but will be satisfied with 2am if I must.