Forget the data - I’m just amazed by the act of sticking to an activity. I’ve attempted “never break the chain” trick to try to build good habits but I always come short.
Saying all that to say I truly admire people like you!
> I’ve attempted “never break the chain” trick to try to build good habits but I always come short.
Chains are unstable[0]. Usually you miss a habit because something has gone wrong. This time, when something has gone wrong and you most need support, is when you lose all the support of the chain. In fact, you also have to deal with the shame of breaking your streak. "I always come short" is the inevitable outcome! There's no goal! They're good for taking 95% compliance to 99%+ (days without an accident counters, the best of the best at their activity), but not good for taking 20% to 80%, which is what most people need for most habits.
I had some good success (but not perfect) with what I call Fibonacci Streaks. You go for 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc. in a row. When you hit a goal, the counter starts over and you go for the next goal. If you miss, you start over at the first 1 and get some goals to hit again quickly. You could also have a variant where you try again for the goal you missed. In this system, the counter starting over is a normal part of things. Why Fibonacci? I considered doubling, but the jumps are a bit large. 1.5X seemed right, but gives fractions. Fibonacci is ~1.6X each step. I made a free sort of add-on app for tracking it in Todoist[1].
> This time, when something has gone wrong and you most need support, is when you lose all the support of the chain. In fact, you also have to deal with the shame of breaking your streak.
I find this stuff really fascinating. About a year ago, Garmin added a new feature to “pause” the Training Status measurements the watch takes. Apparently when folks where getting sick they became incredibly disheartened by their watch telling them their lack of activity is not conducive to improving their fitness. It’s almost reinforcing the bad habit instead of trying to frame it in a more productive way.
This has always been my problem with Duolingo. You get a streak going, forget it two days running because you're busy with work or the dog has to go to the vet or the kid needs taking to the airport - and bam, 80 days irretrievably gone.
When this happens, I set the whole thing aside for a year, every time, even though I shouldn't.
I can definitely relate to the frustration! It's been years since I've worked on the product side myself, but for what it's worth we do allow equipping up to 2 streak freezes now. I believe you can also restore a lost streak as an in-app purchase; I've never done so myself.
I've heard that so frequently I'm shocked they haven't done more about it. The data must be super obvious that people who break streaks stop for so long.
Without criticizing your Fibonacci Streaks idea, I don't think that your pessimism regarding chains is actually accurate. I think that voluntarily performing some practice every day becomes increasingly stable past a certain threshold of time. I have maintained a number of chains over many years. For instance, I have a daily diary in which I have written daily entries since early... 2019? I think I have missed 2 days, total, and in both cases, it was a case of simple forgetfulness due to some involuntary cause (e.g. taking a nap and sleeping through the night), and thus did not decrease my motivation going forward. At this point, I think daily journaling is extremely well-ingrained, and I do not think I will cease doing it any time soon.
The difficulty that people run into with maintaining daily rituals is that they have no way of reliably enforcing the ritual during a period of low motivation / energy. My approach is to find a low-commitment version of the ritual to be performed on days where you don't feel you can really give it your all. How I approach this with diary writing is simple: on nights where I feel I cannot possibly spend much time writing, I write an entry of the form, "It is incredibly late and I do not want to write more before I go to sleep." Nothing more. By doing this, I am able to maintain accountability without torturing myself.
I wouldn't call my views on chains "pessimistic". I have ideas about their nature (good when things are good, bad when they're bad) and think they're usually (not always) misapplied.
I'm really not persuaded by your story because you don't actually seem to be engaging in "never break the chain" behavior. Like, can you tell me exactly how many days in a row you've journaled? Like, if you had a counter going in Duolingo or put a red X on a calendar every day in a row that you wrote a joke like Jerry Seinfeld? You seem to be engaged in the system of "do the thing almost every single day, however small, forgive yourself when you miss it" which is a wildly more applicable and effective system, in my opinion.
You're right that if you refuse to accept any excuse for not performing [habit], the chain rule could be demotivating. But this is just a misapplication of the rule. The sensible reason to use the chain rule is to prevent a failure of volition. It's meant to address the problem where you say "I won't perform [habit] just this one day, because [reason]," and then before you know it, you've lost the will to ever [habit] again. If I ever decided not to journal, I do not think I would forgive myself. I forgive myself for the couple of incidents where I made no decision at all.
I think the last time I forgot to journal was... maybe a year and a quarter ago? I fell asleep before I intended to, and when I woke up, realized I had missed a night. I have never ever decided not to journal on a particular night, and this fact is enormously motivating. That is why the chain system is useful.
One interesting question is, how do I journal when it is extremely impractical? The answer is, I've done whatever was necessary to maintain the chain. Lacking a journal, I've used a pen and scrap paper. Lacking any writing utensils, I've used my phone. Lacking my phone, I've borrowed someone else's phone. The important part is that I made the sincere choice the perform the action, in however nonstandard a way, and this reminds me of my commitment. I've essentially inducted myself into my own religion.
Thank you, but I don't feel like I've put any special effort into this. It began as a way to calm myself down, then became a habit, and then it simply turned into this "don't break the chain" effect because the chain seemed to have actual value.
I wish I could form some actually positive habits this way!
Saying all that to say I truly admire people like you!