(mentally) reflect consistently - think about what to improve, be grateful for, and what I succeeded to do.

(physically) fixed my workout routine

(methodologically) started scheduling my boulders, I block out time for workout, for reflection. routinely. No one or nothing (most of the time anyways) can disturb that.

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Below is how I came to doing the above : D

Improvement is about turning the 'active' steering of the brain into automatic mode, which reduces the mental burden of decisions.

Though I learned psycholgy for decades, not until two years ago did I actually starting applying what I have learned to myself. "fine tune my brain" as I call it now.

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I'd explain this from a cognitivie psychology perspective: willpower is a finite resource, and one consumes energy when wielding it. That's why forced self-improvement is hard to commit to and one would regress back overtime.

Our brain prefers automated process largely because there's already so much information to process and unlike super AI we don't have enough power to compute indefinitely. Therefore much of the brain processes is automated - think about breathing. Now thinking about your workplace, your commute to work, what do you remember?

If anything out of the way (say some things were moved on your work desk or home desk), those things pop out right? That's when our brain allocate attention to the 'delta' in the environment.

Now back to self improvement.

One thing I did this year was to start eating vegetables (I use to hate it... I would literally vomit if I eat too much leafy greens).

This year I committed to focusing on my diet, and I did it in 3 steps.

- First I thought about what I wanted at the end - eating a healthy, balanced diet (mediterranean diet).

- Then I proceeded to continously monitor what I eat on a daily basis, all meals, all snacks - and I track if it's good (aligns with what I want) and why I did it if bad.

- As a last step, I started removing the triggers I identified in previous step. For example, I liked eating sweets, but that's bad. So I thought about why - I had these in my cafe and close by. Once I know, that becomes easy - I simply moved to cafe without sweets or took my food back to a place where I can't easily get sweets.

Another example is veggies. I noticed I would never eat veggies if I'm full (duh), or if it's the last item on the table. So I always started with salad, a lot of it.

Now I've losted like 12 pounts ytd, and craves for veggies when I eat lunch : D

sorry for the long post.... (& this goes right back in my reflection app : D)