Like A Trader part 4: A portfolio of healthy habits

I found out from Dan Ariely's Facebook fanpage that the compounding losses effect I wrote about in Like A Trader part one has been noticed by dieticians.

Apparently it is nicknamed the What-the-hell effect. The name comes from the fact that once we consume something we shouldn't, we tend to think "what-the-hell, this day's ruined so let's keep eating junk!"

As I mentioned, I suffered from this attitude quite severely and found a way to overcome it by using rituals, an approach absent from dieting literature I've seen.

In fact, it's strangely absent from lifestyle literature in general. Rituals, when mentioned, are more often than not presented by way of morning and evening routines, or ways to get into a productive mindset for working. It is rare to see them applied at other times and to solve specific problems.

This is a shame, because I have found them to be a powerful tool. However, they only represent a small part of the approach that has helped me most with diet and exercise habits.

The main feature of my approach I have decided to term a portfolio of healthy habits.

Part of the problem I've had in the past is that I have approached healthy lifestyle with the very broad goal of being healthy.

I'm not going to get into SMART goals (specific, measureable etc) here. That might work for some, but for me finding the right metrics to measure is a pain.

For health, I also think that specific goals can lead to too much focus on certain aspects of fitness and neglect of others, which does not make you fit. At worst, Goodhart's law may come into effect.

That's the idea that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a valid measure. Think that can't happen on individual level?

Look at bodybuilding. When muscle size and low body fat became the primary metrics by which health is measured, people began abusing steroids to achieve better scores.

Does this mean they are healthier? The many who have died prematurely provide good evidence against that being the case.

So my approach is not to make goals more specific. It is to remove what I see as a mental limitation. That obstacle is categorisation.

Under my goal of being healthy, I lumped together diet and exercise into one category: healthy behaviours. Seeing them as a single category caused a problem.

Being healthy became an all or none activity. Diet and exercise were inextricably linked, despite there being no rational basis to be. Failure in one meant giving up on both for the day.

Why should this be so? If I missed a workout, it should be more important to eat healthily that day. Yet although I knew this through reason, it was difficult to practice.

Worse still, the effect is fractal. For example, all exercise behaviours were lumped together in the exercise category, even though they didn't need to be. 

If I missed my main workout, there was often nothing stopping me from doing some quick deadhangs, overcoming isometrics or anything else that is highly valuable but takes only a few seconds.

Yet I wouldn't bother because something completely unrelated had already been skipped. It was like a domino effect: one failure in diet or exercise took everything down with it. 

Sleep often went too. Not out of worry, but out of violating my no caffeine after 4pm rule or staying up late to eat as much as I could now the day had become a 'cheat' day.

This is when I came up with my approach of seeing each individual behaviour the way a trader might see shares in a portfolio. 

No good trader ever abandoned their whole portfolio because of a single bad position. They cut the individual loser and move on to the next thing while holding onto the other positions that are working.

This took some getting used to. A helpful way I have found to do this is to use one of those goal tracking apps on a smartphone.

I'm not usually one for using technology this way and certainly wouldn't want to become reliant on it, but it has been helpful to make a list of healthy habits I would like to stick to.

Each night before bed, I tick off all the habits I did that day and ignore the ones I didn't. Big red crosses are not motivating, so I just don't bother filling in the things I missed.

But the act of having to tick each individual habit has really reinforced this view of separation. Sometimes I will count them up to see my 'score', but the real aim is just to see each habit in isolation.

It probably also helps to see them as equally important, even though in reality they may not be. One habit equals one tick, regardless of its contribution to my health. Sometimes self-deception can be good.

This comes back to clipping the tail that I spoke about in part 2. The most harm is caused by writing off the day and doing nothing healthy for the remainder. So doing anything healthy is better!

As I said when I spoke about rituals, even the smallest healthy step can put you back in control and influence your decisions for the rest of the day. It's the old foot-in-the-door technique.

Something motivating I have found when using a goal tracking app is setting the app to order the habits by longest streak. Although I have about sixteen healthy behaviours to track, only five are displayed on my home screen without scrolling down. 

This means that when I casually glance at my screen while using my phone during the day, all I see is my top 5 with the most ticks. This provides good motivation to keep up all my habits.

I'm sure this can be more broadly applicable and is not limited to health. It's certainly not my original observation. 

Another favourite philosopher of mine, John Gray, speaks in his book Straw Dogs about setting aside the restrictions of category and acting as each new situation calls for. Such is the Taoist approach to life.

However, my approach to putting this into practice is not one that I have seen written about elsewhere. 

I guess there is a similarity with the advice about not eating the whole elephant. This means that rather than being intimidated into inaction by big goals and projects, one should break them into tiny pieces and focus on completing each individual part.

The metaphor is somewhat helpful, but also implies an end to the goal and some kind of chronological order to complete the tasks in. 

I've tried to find practical tricks here for when these conditions are not met. For when, like trading, people presumably want to do the best they can for as long as they can and stick it out in a field where they regularly have to deal with individual failure and mental biases.