How Triggers Create Success | I Go 100
Michelle Toy makes a really nice point on her blog, as she preps her way to rowing 100 kilometers on a single day in mid June:
How you can keep yourself going on. Which is not a trivial thing, when you're erging (rowing on a rowing machine) for 1, 2,..., up to 10 hours a day.
She uses hot chocolate (HC).
HC is her pre-rowing ritual:
Whenever I drink the HC (hot chocolate), I know that I will be rowing immediately afterward. Even if I don't feel like exercising – if I drink the HC, the next thing I do automatically is row. It appears that I've created a connection in my mind where the HC triggers the next activity.
The NY Times health section had a recent post that also touched on this. You're more likely to stick with exercise -- surprise, surprise -- when you connect it to a concrete, tangible bennie. Much more so than if doing it for some theoretical or deferred benefit (like not dying as soon decades from now).
The students in tonight's rowing class with Xeno Muller remarked the same thing -- the session "just flew by," filled as it was with Xeno and the rest of us chatting (a little breathlessly) about rowing machines, business, healthcare, and the rest of the universe. Chatting was fun, socializing was fun, getting technique pointers from an Olympian was real fun. All tangible, "stroke the purring lizard and mammalian brain" positive feedback.
HC works pretty well, too.
