My Dick Brain When I Miss A Journal Entry
And any other streak like my step counts, workout, or Duo Lingo.
Is it just me, or when you miss a streak for anything, does your brain say, “Well, now it’s ruined?”
And then you stop doing the thing.
If it’s journaling, you miss a second day because you “can’t be bothered catching up on yesterday’s entry.”
If you’re not active for just one day, suddenly you feel like it’s a lot less painful to have another day of being inactive — hell, you’ve already gone through the pain of missing your 10k step goal; what’s another day, right?
Habits are fickle, and our brains are dicks. When we miss one day, the compounding effect starts, and all the momentum we had comes to a stop — it’s Newton’s first law.
An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion…
…unless acted upon by external, blah, blah, yada yada, the point is that it’s challenging to deal with this, and our future self hates us when we do it.
Our higher-order-thinking-non-monkey self knows that one day over the long run is nothing. I repeat, three hundred sixty-five days where you miss, say 15 of those days is nothing.
