Lift-ed

The piece of technology that has had the largest impact on my life is an app called Lift. It is an extremely simple app, but it has allowed me to start and maintain a daily meditation practice, along with a range of other healthy and productive apps. The app allows you to create “habits” which you then can track daily.

I have read a lot about the science behind building and maintaining habits. One of the most important things for building a new habit is to participate in something called a habit feedback loop. Basically, whenever you embark upon a habit there are a few steps that you repeat over and over. Essentially it works like this:

1. A trigger for the habit
2. The action of beginning and completing the action
3. Sensation or feedback from completion of action

The volume or intensity of the sensation for step #3 is the most important for maintaining a healthy habit routine. Advertisers and product designers have been aware of this and manipulate consumers based on the science behind it. The idea is that if you can provide a pleasurable feedback that becomes inextricably tied to the habit itself, people will become habituated to using your product as a part of this habit-feedback loop.

For example, take the habit of brushing your teeth. The habit begins with the trigger of waking up or walking into the bathroom. It then moves on to the actual action of putting the toothpaste on the brush and then brushing your teeth. When you are done, you get a tingling sensation in your mouth that feels clean and signifies that you have successfully completed this habit.

Believe it or not, this clean sensation is not inherent to your teethe being clean. Instead, this clean sensation was specifically designed by toothpaste companies in order to get people hooked on the sensation of brushing teeth and not feeling like their teethe are clean until they have that familiar sensation. The business of advertising many different products relies on engineering the product in order to fit into people’s habits.

Lift allows people to design their own feedback loops for any habit they so choose. The sensation for step #3 of the feedback loop is done by clicking a big check mark that afterwords turns green. There are also a few other features that allow you to view your progress and go on various hot streaks. A social layer is also built into the app so that people you follow can track your progress and cheer you on as well.

When first starting to change your habits it is essential to start infinitesimally small, usually with only one tiny habit that only takes a few minutes to complete. When I started using Lift over a year and a half ago, this habit was flossing. I only concentrated on flossing once a day for one week.

After this week, I added the habit of meditation. I only started with one minute a day. After one week I bumped it up to 2 minutes a day. I did this until I got to a daily habit of meditating for 25 minutes. Meditation allowed me to exponentially increase my health habit building and a year later I have over 20 habits that I complete on a daily basis. These include such things as completing one Duolingo lesson (another app for language training) in four different languages, doing yoga, creating something daily, reading a chapter in a book, and now doing one Kata!

Lift is a huge tool for me to maintain a daily practice of writing code and my goal is to one day be able to build an app similar to this all on my own.