Questions on Progress and Awareness

Right now I am lucid an average of 2 times every week using MILD, DILD, and occasionally WBTB. From your own experience, how much effort do you think is necessary to actually improve in LDing (by that I mean increasing the frequency of lucidity). I am mainly talking about long term here. I know that I probably wont notice too much progress in a few weeks, but what about a few years of consistent effort?

One more thing, I have been increasingly interested in finding ways to increase awareness throughout my day. I have tried repeating a mantra (I am dreaming) as suggested in a thread I saw but it seemed to quickly lose it's meaning on me. If anyone has any personal tips on increasing awareness I would appriciate it. Also, if Walms is around, would you mind sharing or providing a link to some information on the extended gravity reality checks I have heard of?

IMO, one of the best ways of increasing awareness is to stay aware only on the task at hand, i.e you are walking, pay attention to your hand movements, leg movements, usually you dont pay attention to these things, so doing so would increase your awareness. Pay attention to the sounds you are hearing, the colors you are seeing. So in conclusion, keep your awareness at the "NOW" moment.

Ive started using this at the moment to improve my ability to have pure natural DILD's. By this I mean DILD's that don't require dreamsigns or reality checks. I run through five dreams from my journal in my imagination and pinpoint times in the dream that I chose not to be aware that I was dreaming. For example if my dream is absurd in some way, which happens often, I say to myself as I'm replaying the dream in my mind, 'Hey this is just too weird, this is not normal life, I must be dreaming.' I do this numerous times for each dream as by their very nature dreams are normally absurd. On the first night I became lucid without the need for a dreamsign or a reality check. Last night was the fourth night and I had a dream of looking at my email account and I had an email that had been opened and I started to question that it had been opened and that I hadn't opened it. I am becoming more critical of my dreams I believe but only time will tell if I actually am or not. I believe that it is starting to work and I can envisage it taking some time to really manifest good results if it does have any validity. Try it and see if it does anything for you.

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll definitely try out both of these methods in combination with my current routine.