If you want to get up early, and oversleep once, chances are, you’ll keep your schedule for a few days, then oversleep again, ad infinitum. Better to mark that first oversleep as a big failure, take a break for a few days, and restart the attempt.
Small failures always becoming huge ones also helps as a deterrent—if you know that that single cookie that bends your diet will end up with you eating the whole jar and canceling the diet altogether, you will be much more likely to avoid even small deviations like the plague, next time.
It seems to scale to willpower: For some people, “a single small failure once per month” is going to be an impossible goal, but “multiple small failures OR one big failure” is an option. If and only if one is dealing with THAT choice, it seems like a single big failure does a lot less damage to motivation.
If you’ve got different anecdotes then I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree. If you’ve got studies saying I’m wrong, I’m happy to accept that I’m wrong—I know it worked, since I used this to help fix my spouse’s sleep cycle, but that doesn’t mean it worked for the reasons I think. :)
I agree, you can get over some slip-ups, depending on how easy what you’re trying is compared to your motivation.
As you said, it’s a chain—the more you succeed, the easier it gets. Every failure, on the other hand, makes it harder. Depending on the difficulty of what you’re trying, a hard reset is sensible because it saves time from an already doomed attempt, >and< makes the next one easier (due to the deterrent thing).
If you want to get up early, and oversleep once, chances are, you’ll keep your schedule for a few days, then oversleep again, ad infinitum. Better to mark that first oversleep as a big failure, take a break for a few days, and restart the attempt.
Small failures always becoming huge ones also helps as a deterrent—if you know that that single cookie that bends your diet will end up with you eating the whole jar and canceling the diet altogether, you will be much more likely to avoid even small deviations like the plague, next time.
It seems to scale to willpower: For some people, “a single small failure once per month” is going to be an impossible goal, but “multiple small failures OR one big failure” is an option. If and only if one is dealing with THAT choice, it seems like a single big failure does a lot less damage to motivation.
If you’ve got different anecdotes then I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree. If you’ve got studies saying I’m wrong, I’m happy to accept that I’m wrong—I know it worked, since I used this to help fix my spouse’s sleep cycle, but that doesn’t mean it worked for the reasons I think. :)
I agree, you can get over some slip-ups, depending on how easy what you’re trying is compared to your motivation.
As you said, it’s a chain—the more you succeed, the easier it gets. Every failure, on the other hand, makes it harder. Depending on the difficulty of what you’re trying, a hard reset is sensible because it saves time from an already doomed attempt, >and< makes the next one easier (due to the deterrent thing).