On Streaks, Patterns, and Our Attachment to Them

The run streak said, “417 days.” It felt like an indestructible streak of daily meditation. Thankfully, my Headspace app carefully fed my ego to keep the pattern going. If I’m honest, there were points where I’m not sure I was meditating for the sake of meditation or for the sake of growing the number of the scoreboard. 

SIGH. 

And, then, I had a slip up. There were plenty of days where something about my morning routine changed outside of my control, but for 417 days I’d found a way to knock out five or ten minutes later in the day to salvage the streak. However, an early morning obligation while traveling got me and I missed a day. 

My heart sank the next day when my meditation finished and the big fat “1” rolled up on my screen. Almost out of spite, I bit down and started a new streak pretending I wasn’t heart broken. 

(You’d think with all this meditation happening, I wouldn’t have such petty, lowly human tendencies. But, here we are!)

After one brutal day of missing, I strung together another big triple digit streak over three hundred days in a row.

Then, POW! I missed again… 

Ending that second streak broke me. Somehow now all but one day out of more than 700 days of meditation felt like a failure. I didn’t meditate for more than a year after that. 

On one hand, the streak/pattern/habit helped me accumulate meditation that is so helpful to my wellbeing. On the other hand, it was my attachment to this external distraction that got in my way for more than a year. After all, meditating once a week during that time would have been much more powerful that abstaining altogether because of some scoreboard on my iPhone. 

All this to say, the million dollar question is simple: is your attachment to your streaks/patterns helping or hurting you?