Gong #1

So I finished my first (possibly last, more on that later) Gong yesterday.

It's a 100 day dedicated practice where you pick one thing for each category: diet, exercise, sleep, mindset, and do it for 100 days. You need to make sure what you choose is doable. You can factor in recovery days for exercise.

If you miss a day, you have to start your 100 days over from the beginning.

I can get obsessive, so I did not miss a day.

Here's what I did:
Diet: eat protein at breakfast every day. I kind of slacked on this one because I didn't specify how much protein and I discovered most things I eat have at least a little protein in them.

Exercise: nothing new, kept doing what I was doing since it works for me. (This is a legit option.) That translates to yoga with rare exception, at least 1 mobility exercise, and some other stretches every day and body weight workouts every 3rd day or twice a week.

Sleep: go to bed by 1 AM. There were two days I was exactly at 1 AM, and honestly I would've been better off going to bed late. The rush of meeting that self-imposed deadline ruined my ability to fall asleep and made for bad nights. Curiously, even though I've been doing this for 100 nights now, I can't say it's become a real habit. I'm more aware of when I need to call it quits to meet that deadline, but I'm not particularly more inclined to do so.

Mindset: Here I practiced a 4 count breath: breathe in for 4 counts, hold 2, breathe out for 4 counts, hold 2. Repeat. I think of doing this more readily when I feel stressed out which is helpful. It has a calming effect. This is good stuff which I will continue and try to do more of during my day.


If you were going to try this with 4 entirely new habits, I think this would be really challenging.

In future, I'd rather a less strict approach because I got too literal to my own detriment a few times with this gong. I'm not the type of person who misses a day or two or three and completely falls off the wagon if I really want to build a new habit.

Ultimately a gong is a contract between you and yourself in which you do what will propel you into a better life. That part I'll hang onto.


Two years ago on TTaT: Life of Art SitRep #105 Enough