Cheat Day or Punishment Day
We all do various things in our life. But doing good things is what actually matters truly. Let us try to understand our reasons in doing these good things:
a) Situation — Sometimes you are compelled by situations to do what is right. Best example in current situation is following proper hygiene and social distancing which we all are practicing due to the fear of corona virus.
b) Biological — Many times our body makes us do things like eating, sleeping etc. Though eating good food and sleeping right amount of hours is something that we need to train our brain to do.
c) Instinct — People go for jogging or take a holiday break etc., just because they subconsciously feel like doing it.
To my knowledge, I believe that we somehow do good things in either of the above 3 mentioned cases automatically. However, for the vast majority of remaining ones, we need “MOTIVATION”. There are lot of external sources available to motivate you like watching motivational videos, listening good podcasts or reading good books. But the effect created by them fades away easily as well. So, it is very important for us to keep ourselves motivated internally.
To directly motivate yourself you need to provide incentive. Incentives can be either positive or negative. Companies where you work try to motivate you by providing positive incentives like Bonus, Increment in Salary, Promotion to higher designation etc. At the same time, there is also a negative incentive of losing the job. They do this to motivate you to work and finish the task assigned to you seriously.
Similarly, in personal life as well, people assign themselves incentive to finish a task. For example, people put themselves on a diet and go to gym in order to lose weight. It is difficult thing to do and people use cheat day as a positive incentive to put themselves through this difficult task every day. It is widely believed that negative incentives are far more effective than these positive incentives. So when I kept a target weight for myself, I decided to punish myself instead with daily exercise, post dinner walks, only staircase, diet etc. on non-compliance. I believe that the former is relatively less effective as you need to fight against your natural instincts every day and get to be yourself only for one day of the month. But it is just the opposite case in the latter.
So, I would suggest you to try this negative incentive strategy once and see how that works out. You have to just follow the following basic steps:
1. Decide a goal (eg losing weight)
2. Quantify the goal into easy but substantial targets (eg losing 6 kgs of weight in a year)
3. Divide the target into periodical steps (eg losing 0.5 kgs every month)
4. Identify activities required to achieve the target and divide them into two categories — Easy and difficult.
5. Follow the easy activities religiously every day just like you brush your teeth daily (eg light exercise, walk 8000 steps every day, no junk food more than once a week etc.)
6. Identify things you like in daily life and whose sacrifice will affect you (eg meat, TV show, tea etc.)
7. Periodically measure your performance (Measure weight every 2 days)
8. If you are on track, live as it is. But in case, you miss your target, you have to leave them out till you get back to your target. On day 1 punish yourself by performing difficult activities required. If you are still outside target, sacrifice things you like.
You can follow this strategy even in maintaining your monthly budget. Students can also use this strategy to prepare for examinations. The key in achieving success by following the above strategy lies in:
a) Keeping easy and measurable targets
b) Measuring performance regularly
c) Following the strategy religiously
I was weighing 86.5 kgs in June last year. But by following the above strategy, I weigh 81.5 kgs now and target is to reach 77.5 kgs by this year end and 70 kgs overall by March 2022. I hope you find this strategy useful as well.
