The habit I decided to track for this assignment was one of the bad habits I have had since I was young: biting my nails. Over the years, the reasons why I have started biting my nails after a period of not biting them has changed, however, they usually all tie back to stress. For this assignment, I decided to track this behavior over the course of three days to see if there was anything in particular that was causing me to revert back to this habit. I decided to log what I was doing every 25-30 minutes, since I noticed that I spent quite a bit of time doing the same thing last time; a longer time interval would still be able to encapsulate what I was doing accurately.
This time around I had a better experience logging my behavior, I did not feel as annoyed while opening my notes app to jot down what I was doing. In addition, I noticed that logging behavior for a habit I was genuinely curious about made me more inclined to keep up my little daily journal. I even provided longer entries instead of 4 word sentences describing what I was doing. I also realized that I must have been really oblivious to not doing something like this earlier for a bad habit I have had for years.
Nevertheless, I did gain some meaningful insights during my Measuring Me experience. One of the things I learned is that stress levels really have to rack up for me to start biting my nails. Slight stress is not enough to get me to bite my nails. I noticed that I normally would start biting my nails towards the end of the day, when I realized that the day was ending and I had barely done any work. However, I exacerbated this stress by trying to de-stress myself by going on my phone. This led to me to realize that I have another bad habit: I open my phone immediately when I am stressed. It is an immediate reaction that I do because I believe going on Twitter or Instagram will help me keep my mind off things, therefore, helping me destress. This actually feeds into my stress and nail biting by making me waste time and have my assignments pile up, stressing me out. In other words, I am the main culprit of this bad habit crime.
If I were to repeat this exercise, I would try to choose a couple of different ways to deal with my bad habit and study how this changes the recurrence of this bad habit throughout the day or over the next couple of days. For example, when I realize I am biting my nails, I should immediately do something I don’t want to do like eat a whole lemon (LOL) and see if after this I stop biting my nails for a prolonged period of time. Will this also reduce my stress levels? This is something I would also like to measure in the next Measuring Me. To do this, I would take a stress test to see how stressed I am at the moment. I can do this three times a day: one in the morning, one midday, and another at night before going to bed.
Connection Circle:
Feedback Loop:
