Choosing a body or rhythm habit, safely

Step 1 Warm-up recall

Open your protocol: what is your decision rule, and which days count as weeks 3 and 4?

Your answer

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Step 2 Learning goal

By the end of this lesson you can:

• say what makes a habit low-risk enough for a self-experiment (Foundation);
• calculate the mean of your recent ratings (Core);
• keep the protocol unchanged while reading weeks 3 and 4 (Core).

Step 3 A familiar example

Someone decides to run every morning, injures a knee in week two and stops. A gentler plan they could have kept for four weeks would have tested the idea better.

Step 4 Clear explanation

This course lets you choose any safe, legal habit. For a body or rhythm habit, low-risk choices include a short daily walk, a fixed wake-up time, or a short period outdoors. A habit is better for a self-experiment when it is gentle enough to keep for four weeks, easy to log, and unlikely to harm you.

Time outdoors is a plausible candidate, but this course has not verified a review on it, so its evidence is graded Untested here: you would be testing an idea, not following a proven rule.

Mean of recent ratings. Add your last five daily ratings and divide by five. Weeks 3 and 4 feed your decision rule, so keep rating at the same time of day, using the same scale as your baseline.

Do not change the protocol. If the habit is causing pain, worry or harm, stop it and speak to a qualified professional; that is a safety decision, not a failed experiment.

Step 5 Worked example (4 marks)

Your last five daily ratings are 6, 7, 5, 6 and 6, and your baseline mean was 5.4.

1. Sum = 6 + 7 + 5 + 6 + 6 = 30. (1 mark)
2. Mean = 30 ÷ 5 = 6.0. (1 mark)
3. Difference from baseline = 6.0 − 5.4 = 0.6. (1 mark)
4. Five days are too few to apply a decision rule based on weeks 3 and 4; keep logging. (1 mark)

Step 6 Learner practice (instant-marked)

Step 7 Recap

• Choose a gentle, easy-to-log, low-risk habit.
• Time outdoors is graded Untested here in this course.
• Do not change the protocol; stop if the habit harms you.

Step 8 Exit ticket (ungraded)

Write how your last five ratings compare with your baseline mean.

Your answer

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Step 9 Go further (Extension)

Add a note column to your log for sleep hours, so concurrent changes can be checked in Module 8.