Sometimes I get extremely wrapped up in my own head about all sorts of things. I start doubting whether I’m any good at my career, whether my clients secretly think I’m doing a terrible job, whether I should quit my job and go do something completely different. I start beating myself up for not writing more or reading more.
It’s okay to feel bad sometimes. Honestly, sometimes feeling bad is the pre-requisite to feeling really good later. But I don’t like feeling bad for seemingly no reason.
Over the past few years I’ve done a pretty good job finding the minimum viable habits necessary to have a decently high probability of having a non-terrible day. Doing these habits doesn’t guarantee that I’ll have a good day but it almost guarantees I won’t have a truly dismal day.
What’s silly, though, is that I’ll sometimes find myself circling the psychological drain without having yet completed my daily habits (what I call my Anchor Habits and which consist of doing some sort of minimal deliberate exercise, reading at least fifteen minutes of a book, meditating for at least ten minutes, and doing one session of any length of writing). How can I look at myself in the mirror and say, “Yep, this is some righteous wallowing,” when I haven’t done the things I know tend to make me feel better?
If I notice myself wallowing without having completed my Anchor Habits, I must complete my Anchor Habits before resuming wallowing. If I’ve done my Anchor Habits and I still feel like shit, well, that’s how it goes sometimes.
End of Experiment Retrospective
Key Stats
Number of “Anchor Days” (days where I completed all four of my daily habits): 4 (the last time I had at least 4 Anchor Days it was August and the last time before that was April)
Total Anchor “Points”: 22 out of a possible 28 (average YTD is 18)
I didn’t mention this in the setup for this week’s experiment, but there was a pretty huge confounding variable that surely messed with my experiment a bit this week — a very short work week and the Thanksgiving holiday. This was obviously a pretty atypical week so I don’t know how much of what I experienced can really be attributed to the experiment. That being said, subjectively it seemed to help. I did a pretty okay job actually “doing the work” (doing my four daily habits each day) this week and I felt pretty good all week. I didn’t actually record any data about how I felt at the end of each day, so this is entirely subjective and likely biased by how I’m feeling in this moment as I’m writing this, but overall it felt like a pretty psychologically healthy and overall positive week.
As always, the two Anchor Habits I was least consistent with were Writing and Meditating. Neither one of these has a really locked-in time slot in my daily routine like Reading and Exercise do. I did start to circle 9:00 PM as my meditation time and having it be the last thing I do before I get ready for bed. Writing seemed to mostly get slotted into the after dinner time slot (when it happened at all) … but it was pretty inconsistent. In my ideal world I would give more of my “prime” hours (i.e. the morning) to writing so I don’t always feel like I’m scraping the bottom of my energy and motivation barrel when it comes time to write.
I consider the experiment a success and while I’m not going to officially do it again next week, this is an example of one of those experiments where I intend to more or less keep it going indefinitely even though I wanted to focus on it intensely for a week to help get it going again. The whole point of having daily Anchor Habits is that I do them every day. The key thing, though, is remembering to ask myself if I’ve finished my Anchor Habits for the day if and when I find myself in a psychologically dark place again.