We have seen my tracking the tackling of my migraine problem. Recently I’ve had a recurrence of a particular variant whose trigger I have narrowed down to inadequate water intake.
The idea now is to make water consumption a habit.
- The consensus around enough water seems to be 2.5L a day for men in tropical climates. Although I spend most of time indoors, Bombay is humid. So I have set my daily consumption target to 3L.
- The consensus around building a habit is now 66 days on average but up to 254 days. Everything I can find online seems to reference a 2009 study that states
The time it took participants to reach 95% of their asymptote of automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days; indicating considerable variation in how long it takes people to reach their limit of automaticity and highlighting that it can take a very long time.
So I have set myself a target of 250 straight days of this level of water consumption, that is until 18 March 2021. The study abstract also says “missing one opportunity to perform the behaviour did not materially affect the habit formation process” so I won’t obsess over a perfect streak.
- To track water consumption, I’m going to simply use the shortcut I wrote in February 2020. It’s easy to launch from Launch Center Pro and logs to Apple Health, so I can look up my day’s consumption quickly. I have already logged ~5000 expenses for over 3 years via a similar LCP Shortcut, so the logging habit is already ingrained.
- Finally, to measure if water consumption has a material effect on that variant of the headache, I have modified my headache log script also log the variant in addition to the pain-level. Unfortunately we don’t have a baseline frequency of the occurrence of this variant. We will report in briefly every month.
This is part of what I wrote last week about walking the talk, as I write about how people are using the Internet to achieve exponential results in their lives.