How I track my habits on holiday
On a 10-day trip to Tenerife, the speaker tracks just three habits at 80% consistency: sleep, 10,000 steps, and 3 liters of water. He dials back expectations on holiday, pauses his Whoop sleep tracker to rely on intuition, and treats occasional breaks from discipline as recharge time before resuming full tracking after the trip.
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In today's episode, I'm going to cover how I handle tracking my foundational health habits whilst I'm on holiday. And the reason I'm thinking about this at the moment is because as of the timing of this recording, I'm going to Tenerife on holiday for 10 days in a couple of days' time. Now, since I started tracking my habits, my view on how to handle things whilst I'm on holiday has definitely evolved over the last year or so and over the last couple of holidays. It's settled into a really nice place that feels right and it works for me. And I just wanted to share with you where I've landed with it all. So before I dive into the tactical stuff, I want to share 3 things that define my approach for how I tend to think about my holidays when I'm— sorry, think about my habits when I'm on holiday. So number 1, it's critical to dial things back. It's not realistic to try and perform at the same level when you go on holiday or if you're on some type of significant trip. And a big part of why that is, is environment. Having a predictable environment is crucial to being able to be consistent with habits. And of course, that just becomes completely disrupted when you go on holiday. And it makes it virtually impossible to achieve the same levels of consistency whilst you're on holiday, even if you wanted to. And look, you're just going to have a hard time enjoying your holiday if you're continually getting bent out of shape by struggling to stick to unrealistic goals with your habits. And that's not what you want at all for your holiday. So that's the first thing. You have to dial everything back and you have to reduce your expectations. Number 2, taking a break from your usual discipline and consistency now and again is actually a good thing and it can help you regroup and recharge. So definitely a big principle I have is that the break is useful. Let me give you a bit of example of that. In my training, I train towards a 5-week block. Now weeks 1 to 4 carry They're almost identical structure and they increase intensity. They increase in intensity. And then the 5th week is a deload week. And I'm typically out of the gym doing different stuff. I'm still staying really active, but importantly, I have much less of a schedule. By the time I've done with the 5th deload week, I just feel recharged mentally and physically. And I'm just super energized to hit week 1 of a new block. And that's a really good example of how it can be really advantageous to taking a bit of a break from your schedule now and again. So that's principle number 2. The 3rd thing is that whilst a break is good, it's really important to not detach and go completely off script. If I were to jump ship entirely, well, jump ship entirely for my habits, I'm going to just feel crappy, both literally in my body but also in myself for living an unhealthy lifestyle. So what you want is you want to keep some type of light or reduced habit practice in place because it keeps the element of discipline alive. And that means that it won't be such an uphill struggle to pick things up when you get back from vacation. Sure, you might be a little bit rusty when you get back to things, but if you're anything like me, I dust myself off pretty quick and just get back to things. So it's important to keep at least some level of commitment to your habits whilst you're on holiday. So with all of those 3 things said, what's my approach and my plan for my upcoming holiday to Tenerife? Well, look, what's worked really well for the last couple of times I've been on holiday is I just pick a few habits to focus on. And I then try and make sure that those habits are not only the most foundational ones, but they're also the ones which are the most friendly to stick to when you're on holiday. And for me, 3 habits always rise to the top that fit into that category. So the first is sleep. I've talked a lot about sleep in previous episodes, and sleep is hands down my most important foundational health habit. And that's because of the direct impact it has on my physical and my mental health. But also because it has a lot of influence over the consistency of my other habits. When I sleep well, I just feel much better. I'm more confident. I have little to no anxiety, and more often than not, I'm just in a good mood and my energy is high. So sleep would be my first habit that I'm focusing on whilst I'm on holiday. The second habit is steps. Now, the biggest thing about steps is perhaps the most simplest way to stay active. I may do some other stuff when I'm on holiday. I may go to the gym depending on whether there's a good gym there or not. I might do some bodyweight stuff, maybe some mobility. There's usually a pool, so I'll do some swimming. But look, that's all a bonus and only if I feel like it or if I have access to kind of those type of facilities. Keeping steps as a habit just means that I will always have a baseline of activity all of the time. And that's really important for my mental health. Whenever I slip into a mode where I'm mostly sedentary, the bad stuff tends to creep in. So that's number 2, steps. And the third habit that I focus on is water. Now water is both an easy, it's an easy habit to stick to when I'm on holiday. And like sleep, when I'm hydrated, I just feel good. When I stop drinking enough water, I tend to feel tired, I get headaches, and I just find it easy to get stuck into a bad mood. And look, given it's usually hot weather on holiday, it becomes even more important to stay hydrated. So water tends to fit in with that. So there are 3 habits I usually focus on whilst I'm on holiday: sleep, steps, and water. Now, the other habits will definitely stay in the back of my mind for sure. And because many of them are now becoming second nature for me, they will still be upheld to some degree. But importantly, I will have no expectations of them and they don't get tracked at all. The second piece to this is the actual target of each habit. Now I think it's perfectly fine, perfectly fine to adjust either the actual goal for each of the habits or in fact the total consistency that you're aiming for over the period that you're on holiday. And I want to give you an example of that. So let's use steps as an example. I usually aim for 10K steps a day and I'm usually aiming for 80% consistency over the month. Now, I think it would be totally fine if you wanted to reduce that to say 5K steps for 80% consistency whilst you're on holiday. I think a lot depends on what type of holiday it is and what's realistic for you. Remember, you want to kind of focus on the foundational health habits, but you want to make sure that it's something that you can stick to on holiday and it's not going to interrupt the experience of just going on holiday. But at the same time, it's important not to abandon everything altogether too. So pulling back on the target is perfectly fine and it still achieves that. For me personally, I find the existing targets I have for sleep, steps, and water, as well as the 80% consistency, fine for my upcoming holiday. And actually it's usually just fine for any holiday I go on. For example, I use this approach for weekend trips and I've also used it for a 3-week holiday in the US and I was fine to stick to the targets that I usually focus for. So to summarize, the habits I'm going to aim to hit and track for my holidays are sleep, 6.5 hours a day, steps, 10K a day, and water, 3 liters a day. Now I'm actually going to go off script a little bit and I'm going to throw a bit of a curveball in for this holiday to Tenerife. And I've decided I'm not going to track my sleep. And instead, I'm just going to focus on tracking steps and water for this holiday. Now you might ask, why on earth would I do that? Surely sleep is the most important one to hold on to. I've already said it's my most important habit for a start. Well, there are a few reasons why I want to experiment with this. Firstly, I just want to take a bit of a break from Whoop. So Whoop is my wealth— my, sorry, my health wearable. And actually I'm just interested to take a bit of a break from the data. And then the other thing is I'm going to be getting a suntan on holiday and I just don't want the white strap on my hand that my Whoop will leave me with. So taking a break from Whoop is one reason that I want to experiment with not tracking my sleep. And then the other thing is that sleep is just naturally very high for me on holiday anyway. I'm not out partying, I'm not up super early, early. I allow myself a bit of a lie-in and I just have a lot of confidence that it will naturally come in above the 6.5-hour mark for 80% of the time, regardless of whether I track it or not. Now, look, maybe I will learn from this experiment that this is actually a bad idea. And in the future I will go back to tracking sleep whilst I'm on holiday. But I'm interested to give it a go and just see how it feels. So for Tenerife, whilst 3 habits will be important to me, I will only focus on tracking steps and water for 80% consistency. Sleep will still be something that I focus on, and I'll probably manually track it in my head to make sure I get that 6.5 hours, but I'm not going to track it like I do the other habits, and it won't be quite as much in my focus as steps and habit. Because I just think it's going to get taken care of by itself. All right, that's pretty much everything for how I deal with foundational health habits whilst I'm on holiday. So to summarize, pick 2 to 3 maximum habits that you will focus on and only track these whilst you're on holiday. Try and make those habits the most foundational, but also ones which will fit in with your holiday and only focus on tracking and hitting those whilst on holiday. Let go of all expectations for the other habits. And then when you're back from holiday, of course, get back to full tracking. I hope that helps, and I will see you after my holiday, hopefully with a suntan.
