Great article, Andrei! I experienced the power of streaks my self and can vouch for the approach.
During Covid lockdown I started doing daily pull-ups and grew to 100+ days chain. When I discovered that sometimes life gets in the way… I caught the COVID. I obviously fell out of my streak.. and felt almost zero motivation to get back to exercising when I recovered from sickness 5 days later.
If you have any tips on what mechanics can pull you back, once you break your streak, that would be next level cherry on top.
Oh, I can relate to that! Apart from FOMO, the discouragement you get from getting back on the horse is a big drawback of streaks.
Restarting is hard, but every time I do I treat it like a game: what's my last high score? How can I beat it this time around? I've done streaks of workouts months long, only to have them broken, and the possibility of doing it for longer made getting back into it a bit easier.
I have an app called Streaks (heh) that I use to track my habit chains, and another motivating factor it has is showing the percentage of successful instances over the past 7/30 days.
Eventually, I think it's about identifying what keeps you going and creating a support system that plays on that.
Great article, Andrei! I experienced the power of streaks my self and can vouch for the approach.
During Covid lockdown I started doing daily pull-ups and grew to 100+ days chain. When I discovered that sometimes life gets in the way… I caught the COVID. I obviously fell out of my streak.. and felt almost zero motivation to get back to exercising when I recovered from sickness 5 days later.
If you have any tips on what mechanics can pull you back, once you break your streak, that would be next level cherry on top.
Cheers,
Sergey.
Oh, I can relate to that! Apart from FOMO, the discouragement you get from getting back on the horse is a big drawback of streaks.
Restarting is hard, but every time I do I treat it like a game: what's my last high score? How can I beat it this time around? I've done streaks of workouts months long, only to have them broken, and the possibility of doing it for longer made getting back into it a bit easier.
I have an app called Streaks (heh) that I use to track my habit chains, and another motivating factor it has is showing the percentage of successful instances over the past 7/30 days.
Eventually, I think it's about identifying what keeps you going and creating a support system that plays on that.
This reminds me of the take from 'Atomic Habits', where the author suggested to turn a habit into the part of your identity.
I am the person who exercises daily. It's part of me. That's who I am.