> the moment we fell off the streak, it broke completely. […] Going back to having a 1-day streak compared to a 10-day, 50-day, 100-day, etc. streak is so daunting that most people (us included) find it hard to start again. […] We didn’t do math for a while.
I find this super interesting, a fantastic example of how weird our brains are and how good they are at tricking us out of effort. I always liked the idea of the Seinfeld chain for habit forming, but never tried it long enough to experience the breaking of a super long chain. I bet a lot of people who try it have a similar experience to the author, which is really funny in a way because it totally worked amazingly well for a long time. The chain isn’t supposed to be the ultimate reward, except that if the mental hack for doing it every day is make a chain, it’s easy to see why this happens. But still funny that our brains will let one tiny slip become more important than months and months of progress, even when it’s not. Clearly a way to handle inevitable breaks should be built in and provide motivation to start again, maybe an anti-chain for misses, or a progress meter, or something else. Maybe if I try this I’ll force myself to have some breaks early on, to practice restarting. This kind of subconscious battle with ourselves is what makes diets and exercise hard… all habits we wish we had but don’t, and it’s fascinating what different mental tricks work for different people.
One thing I've seen to help with this is the idea of "recovering" a streak. For example there's an online puzzle site (puzzmo.com) that tracks how many days in a row you completed a puzzle. If you miss a day the streak counter resets to zero, but if you then complete it seven days in a row, the counter goes back to whatever your old longest streak was.
Of course, this is completely arbitrary and silly, but it does take the sting out of losing a super-long streak. A new goal of seven consecutive days feels reasonable; a new goal of 300 consecutive days feels impossible.
I find this super interesting, a fantastic example of how weird our brains are and how good they are at tricking us out of effort. I always liked the idea of the Seinfeld chain for habit forming, but never tried it long enough to experience the breaking of a super long chain. I bet a lot of people who try it have a similar experience to the author, which is really funny in a way because it totally worked amazingly well for a long time. The chain isn’t supposed to be the ultimate reward, except that if the mental hack for doing it every day is make a chain, it’s easy to see why this happens. But still funny that our brains will let one tiny slip become more important than months and months of progress, even when it’s not. Clearly a way to handle inevitable breaks should be built in and provide motivation to start again, maybe an anti-chain for misses, or a progress meter, or something else. Maybe if I try this I’ll force myself to have some breaks early on, to practice restarting. This kind of subconscious battle with ourselves is what makes diets and exercise hard… all habits we wish we had but don’t, and it’s fascinating what different mental tricks work for different people.
Of course, this is completely arbitrary and silly, but it does take the sting out of losing a super-long streak. A new goal of seven consecutive days feels reasonable; a new goal of 300 consecutive days feels impossible.