Some of you may have read my post How to Change a Habit? Seize the Opportunity, in which I gloat about being two months free from coffee. Well that was then, and this is now, and ever since Anne and I went to Connecticut I have been on a 2-3 cup coffee diet and haven’t looked back. I no longer miss that delectable first sip of coffee in the morning, but my nighttime teeth grinding is slowly coming back, as well as the feeling, when I wake up, that my sleep wasn’t particularly heavy. I’m back where I started.
That’s where the creepy and obsessive notes to myself come in. One is on the pantry door, reminding me to eat healthy, and the other is on a cabinet above our Keurig, reminding me to stay away from coffee. I figure if I can block out the voice reminding me of my goals, it’ll be harder to ignore a physical piece of paper. It probably works about 75% to 85% of the time. And the coffee note is one day old, but I did make tea this morning instead of coffee. So that ones been 100% effective so far.
This isn’t some magical solution, but compared to the stuff I’m finding online (advice like – train your brain to be focused, keep going (?), remove distractions) it is surprisingly tangible and practical. I wrote about a similar hack in my post on the Mianus 50M Race, where I wrote the distance of the run on my fists in sharpie – two large 50s staring back at me any time I checked my watch and started to think about quitting. There is something very effective about having to bypass a message that you know to be true. It’s the difference between finding a random $100 bill on the ground and finding a $100 bill in someone’s wallet. The first you know you shouldn’t keep, but the second you’re essentially being told you shouldn’t keep.
On the other hand, one common thread across various discipline-related posts is the importance of going easy on yourself. That’s one of my key pieces of advice in How to Start Running. By putting up these messages around my kitchen I’m just further beating myself up every time I eat chips instead of almonds, or when I eventually go for that first coffee. So maybe I’m just losing it.
How do you stay disciplined?