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Comment by rayalez | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it's harder than it sounds. I've made a simple list like that years ago, and I'm still struggling to stay on top of all items. Sometimes I succeed and I'm happy, but I keep failing regularly, it's a bummer.

Here's my list:

- Eat properly(no junk food, no coffee, no nootropics)

- Information diet(only "healthy" information during the day, 20:00-22:00 I can do whatever I want. Basically it means no hn/reddit/youtube/movies, reading and learning is fine)

- Daily exercise

- Daily fiction writing(250 words at least)

- Daily coding(or studying anying related to Computer Science.)

I will keep struggling to incorporate all these things into my habits, because that is what perfect and healthy life for me would be like, it's just it's surprisingly difficult for me.

By the way, if you have such list - can you share it?

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Can you re-frame "failed" to "practiced" or similar?

If I picked up a violin for the first time in my life I'd have no idea how to play it and I'd make a hell of a noise. But with lessons and practice I could, eventually, produce a tune.

The same thing happens with your reboot - you're used to something; you've changed that thing; change is tricky; you sometimes slip back.

That's not failure, that's rehearsal.

I gave up coffee and sodas and feel so much better. My energy during the day is more level and I don't get headaches much anymore. I do drink green tea mostly and maybe 2 cups of black tea a week. I have had 3 cups of coffee in 4 months when I just needed to drive to the airport at 3 am and similar. My concentration is better but I still like a good nap mid day. At 62 years old, a nap is a great thing.

I recommend giving up coffee. I tracked my habit and when I gave up it took me only about 10 days to completely stop drinking coffee. Soda as easier. I drink carbonated water now.

I was drinking 100+ oz of coffee a day most days. I had it easy giving up but I have heard that others with heavy habits get a lot of withdrawal symptoms. I had a few headaches and I quelled them with tea.

I started drinking green tea and black tea in the morning in high school. Then I ran out. Cue a few days of headaches, bad moods, falling asleep and cold-like symptoms.

Then a few years later I started drinking coffee regularly. Same thing happened when I quit.

Now, I drink green tea in the mornings occasionally and have had no problems with stopping.

If you don't have a need consume caffeine, don't start. It seems to follow the tolerance/withdrawal pattern at even small doses.

I've been drinking only water for years and I don't feel any different from when I drank sugared soda and coffee and everything else. Absolutely no different. I quit smoking and also don't feel different albeit my endurance and lung capacity is much better. Maybe I should go on a month long binge just to remind myself of this mystical awful feeling that people always mention when they've given up sugar.

Two months ago I also evicted anything that's not water during 101 days, meaning no soda, no coffee, no tea, no fruit juice, only plain water. At the end of these 101 days I wasn't feeling better, not that I was feeling bad before but it didn't changed anything during the day, I didn't felt more energy or anything else. Admittedly, it was tough to quit during the first two weeks.

The most interesting thing that occurred was my now intolerance to sweet drinks. Every so often I'll treat (barf) myself to nostalgic trip down high school lane, which consists of a mexican pizza and mountain dew from Taco Bell. I take one sip of the mountain dew (my drink all through my childhood) and throw it out as soon as I get to a trash can. I can't even drink zoke ceros or anything along those lines because they make me feel so bloated.

It's awesome.

There's a bowl of starbursts in my office that I'm currently fighting against. It's new. It's refilled every Monday. It's evil. I actually grabbed a handful on Friday to sneak home, luckily karma kicked in and all of the bags were missing the pink flavor so I didn't eat any.

Same thing happened to me. Every time I try a Sprite (used to be my favorite), I feel physically bad after drinking it.

>I've been drinking only water for years and I don't feel any different from when I drank sugared soda and coffee and everything else.

Did you drank a LOT of them? Because if you were just drinking some in moderation (as opposed to 1 or even 2 bottles of Pepsi a day like I did), it probably didn't matter anyway.

Also were you younger? Because if you did that "break" at, say 25, it's not like you'll see much difference. Your body can still tolerate a whole lot of abuse at that age.

I'm an American who grew up in the 90s, so I drank more soda than water for sure. In fact I don't think I drank water my entire middle school-high school career. Jugs and jugs of mt dew. Thankfully I had an insane metabolism back then.

I stopped drinking soda around 21 or so, I'm 31 now.

This just in: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/cutting-sugar-impro...

I'm doing my 2nd round this year of "30 days without coffee & tea" now (7 days into it). I primarily do it because I feel my more frequent heartburns were because of that, and because after a while coffee gives me the jitters and makes me very impatient, instead of energize me.

Looking at all the comments, and thinking about the effects I feel during this 7 days (and the experience of the previous 30 days), I will definitely want to keep that coffee low, no matter how much I like cafes, the drinking, the flavour...

By the way, for me it took about 3 weeks after quitting coffee cold turkey to stop thinking like "I'm a grown-up goddamnit, I can have a coffee whenever I want!". The 4th week then was really-really good.

Tea is works a lot better, and I'm lucky here in Taiwan for the awesome teas available. But have to be careful about that, a strong oolong (that I like a lot) just as a hammer-hit to the head as a cup of coffee sometimes....

My plan is very similar. Nootropics and caffeine are an integral part of my success, though! Haha Have you tried ytracking your success with each of these items? I have been doing so for the past few months and it is definitely helping me pinpoint where I need to redouble my efforts. I also set a theme for each month (either Health, Wealth or Social, cycling through those three). The thing is to focus on mastering one are at a time, plateauing in that area with solid habit formation and then tackling the next area. Can you share what practical steps you have taken to achieve any successes? ie schedules, habits, plans, etc.

Setting a theme for each month is an awesome idea!

Yes, I track these habits. There's an awesome app called TracknShare, super convenient. Here's how my list looks like: http://imgur.com/I9qK9iu

I measure writing by the number of words I write each day, and I measure CS in "Pomodoros"(from pomodoro technique, 20-minute-sized chunks of uninterrupted time).

Participating in /r/WritingPrompts really helps with daily writing. Prompts are a great place to start, and provide instant gratification, also it's really fun.

When I have an interesting and exciting project to work on - I can easily stay on top of CS, but if not it becomes super hard.

The main thing about healthy food - is just throwing away everything unhealthy, and replacing it wih a lot of delicious healthy alternatives. If I get hungry and I don't have some nuts/berries to chew on immediately - I know I will go and buy chocolate/pizza. So it's mostly about controlling my environment. If everything around me is healthy - it's not that hard to keep it up.

When it comes to coffee and reddit - I still haven't found a good solution, I'm addicted to that stuff.

Exercising isn't that hard to keep up, just set a goal that is easy enough to not be intimidating, and spend several days paying attention to it, because when I don't I simply forget.

Awesome, so you're tracking daily streaks then? That helped me form my meditation habit pretty solidly. I also measure productivity in pomodoros! It's dope to meet other people as excited about this stuff as me. Since you shared I'll go ahead and show you how I have my ratings system set up. I'm using Google Sheets, tracking each metric daily and then at the end of each week I enter the average of the values or the sum, depending on what I'm measuring. I then turn that into graphs, which give my brain some nice feedback about its behavior haha hope you find this cool!

http://imgur.com/a/95cet

@rayalez I couldn't reply directly to your last comment, the thread looks like it's too deep now. The biggest challenge is definitely the size and amount of things to track. If I slack on one day it's hard to pick up the pieces the next. The patterns are still hard to discern, but I'm definitely seeing that the biggest factor in my success day-to-day is amount and time of sleep. It's literally the biggest leverage point, so I'm investing more resources in perfecting that as well. The amount of projects that arise from this list of metrics can be overwhelming, so the ethos of "keep it simple" is the best way for me to make any headway.

If you ever want to continue this convo feel free to email me, it's my HN username at gmail. Maybe you could use an accountability partner or someone to bounce ideas off of? Either way, good luck with your project!

Wow, this is very cool and detailed.

I've tried to simplify my list as much as possible, because many details are hard for me to keep in mind, and when I have too many things to track it's hard for me to focus. Now the list of things Im tracking doubles as my daily goal list.

But I'm sure your way creates a lot of interesting results. Did you notice some interesting patterns?

I also used to use Emacs org mode for that sort of thing, it was pretty convenient. It has a neat todo list function, so you can track things and have a list of daily goals separately. (though it won't create charts).

Also yeah, once I keep up with all my habits for like 30-60 days, I will add "Social" and maybe meditation. It's great that you're doing this, I found it very helpful.

A coffee in the morning is OK if you like coffee. Once a week I either have two 8oz coffees or skip entirely, subjectively. Most days I have one or two teas in the afternoon, but none after 4pm. Food wise I never eat after 7pm, and usually dinner is light fare like a sandwich or soup and a salad. Lunch is the bigger meal, but I usually eat that after biking/running because eating before exercise gives me cramps. On days I don't exercise I don't eat anything before noon and just have lunch and a light dinner. No exercise, no breakfast calories are justifiable.

Sometimes when I was in the process of losing weight this way, that I would be a little bit hungry when it was time for bed. But this is ignored. If it's more distracting then I have ~150g yogurt, usually skyr, but sometimes plain greek and sometimes that I'll mix in a teaspoon of honey or jam. Most U.S. yogurt is a massive sugar bomb.

Often this has more to do with discipline (do the exercise, don't eat everything on the plate or don't fill it up to begin with, or don't eat out often) rather than motivation. Needing motiviation is understandable but it's a weakness to rely on it; having discipline is more powerful.

What is nootropics? If it is a drug, could you explain more about how it helps you?

Technically nootropics are drugs with no negative side effects that increase a person's capacity for memory retention, focus and analytic ability. Various noots have different properties, so a person can pick and choose what to take and combine depending on what abilities they want to reinforce.

What Nootropics are you using?

Right now my daily stack is a caffeine & creatine preworkout supplement (hot coffee took way too long to consume, giving me time to get lost in the internet abyss), theacrine (chemical structurally similar to caffeine), adrafinil (modafinil prodrug), noopept + choline, lion's mane mushroom extract, centrophenoxine and occasionally forskolin extract. I built this stack to sharpen focus and motivation, which are my biggest "psychic" areas of opportunity.

You consume all of those EVERY DAY? Jesus. That's a lot.

Really? I still feel like a mid-level supplementer, if not a straight out noob, compared to other nootropics users out there. You should see some of the more extreme stacks, they take into account neurotransmitter balance, metabolism, diet, antioxidative properties etc. Those can swell up to 15-20 different substances being ingested daily!

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