Quantifying Myself

Thanks Alexandra! Your account of your self-tracking has made me think about adding a calorie counting column to my self-tracking data. A question for you: how do you calculate the calories of the food you are eating. Obviously there are different ways to do this. What is your method, and why?

Fascinating. How long does it take you, per day, to input all of these little bits?

Does it measure your narcissism too?

Thanks for the questions!

Marie-Claire, I’d say it takes me about 3 minutes in the morning and 7 minutes at night to go through entering and looking at my data, then about 10-15 minutes once a week to look back at the past week, make sure the graphs are working, look for patterns, etc. It’s actually quite fun once you get going!

Gary, I started out measuring my food using standard measuring cups/spoons, and Googling at every meal to find out how many calories were in each of the components of my meal. The Google search usually ended up at http://caloriecount.about.com or http://www.thecaloriecounter.com. For packaged foods, it’s obvious to look on the package, but since I eat a lot of whole, unprocessed foods, it took me a while to get an intuitive sense of how many calories were in a dish of almonds and raisins or a bowl of caponata. I still occasionally look things up if I eat a new food. When I eat out, it is harder to estimate, although increasingly places like Starbucks (and even some restaurants) are posting the caloric content of their offerings online.

I love this. I’ve been trying to do variations of it for years but I can never stick with it — I always run into a period where I don’t have enough time, and then it gets easier and easier to not do it…

Stats I’ve tracked are similar to yours: mood, weight, food intake (calorie estimate), energy, RLS severity (my particular fun disease), sleep (amount and quality), which meds & vitamins i took, how much exercise, alcohol intake, menstrual cycle, etc. Not nearly as many as yours but along the same lines. I also never really started to graph & correlate them but you’re making me want to try! I also used Google spreadsheets; this way I can update from work as well as from home.

Now that I’m pregnant, at least jotting down bits of data has helped with tracking my weight gain and pregnancy symptoms too. But I haven’t gotten back to the whole spreadsheet.

This is an amazing project! I have done something like this in the past, but never in this much detail.

So you’re able to track all these things in CureTogether because you’re a co-founder? Unless I’m missing something, it’s pretty limited at the moment.

Also, looks like it’s in need of some user testing. I accidentally added a condition when all I meant to do was search for it (I admit, I searched for a condition and it came up with a second screen that I didn’t read, just assumed it said “No results, search again” - oops! Sorry!).

I love the idea of CureTogether, but with the functionality it currently has, it’s not useful to me yet.

Sandy Lane asks Alexandra in the comments if her system measures her narcissism, too. OK - that comment makes it past the filter not because it’s insulting; random insults and spam will be filtered out here. But in fact along with the insult there is a critical opinion worth taking up, perhaps in a separate post and discussion. The critical opinion is something like:

Self-tracking is a sign of narcissism. Or, perhaps: Self-tracking is narcissism.

I’ve had the chance to talk to a lot of people about self-tracking and this is one of the common responses. It is more common, by far, than “wow, I do that too! What have you learned?” Of course we created QS to share information and analysis among people interested in self-tracking, but one can be interested in a critical or a hostile way, and since these criticisms are uninfluenced by our own varieties of wishful thinking they might have great value.

I want to know more about this concern about self-tracking. One approach would be to divert ourselves with the important background material - for instance, the great jeremiad of Christopher Lasch, “The Culture of Narcissim.” But it might be more interesting to take this external criticism and do something with it using our own methods. Is narcissism a coherent concept? Can it be measured? If so, can these measurements be correlated with other measurable elements of human experience and behavior? And then, back to the question: does self-tracking correlate with narcissism?

This type of approach is not very witty; or rather, I think it does have a kind of wit, but the humor is intrinsic to the procedure. I’m willing to entertain the idea that self-tracking is correlated with narcissism, but I’m not going to take it as true without evidence!

I use http://www.nutritiondata.com/ for calorie counting. The “MyND” tab has some nice tools for tracking and tabulating.

Jane, thanks for your candid feedback on CureTogether! The tracking part of our site has only just been released, as of last week actually, with a new update to be released probably tonight. :) Thank you for the bug report too, I’ll get on that.

Gary and Sandy, I was wondering about the narcissism comment - mostly with interest, because I did bring up the subject myself. I think it would definitely make an interesting follow-up post! I’d be willing/curious to measure my level of narcissism, although I’m reasonably certain it would be on the low end, since I have battled low self-esteem for years. A quick search for measures turned up the NPI-16, a scale for assessing narcissism described in this paper: http://www.columbia.edu/~da358/npi16/npi16_jrp.pdf

Anne and Chip, thanks for sharing your experiences - tracking can be hard to stick to at times, but having a community to share it with and fun tools to use does make it easier.

I went through a period of doing something similar many years ago — so many years ago that I did it on paper. Alas, my charts are one of the things I decided I no longer needed when I moved recently, so I can’t share the hard data. But I can share a few things I learned from the process.

Most importantly, I figured out that my moods and general emotional state followed a regular pattern tied directly to my menstrual cycle. I was invariably very depressed and easily made angry just before my period - classic PMS, I suppose. And I hit a significantly creative and emotional high about mid-cycle, when I was probably ovulating. I learned not to make serious decisions during either of those times, because my emotional reaction at both times was skewed — especially just before my period.

Cynthia Heimel has a very funny essay in one of her books about the clothes choices you make just before your period starts. And she’s dead on: I used to get a desire to buy some new clothes just before my period started — even though I actually hate clothes shopping — probably because I felt like I looked ugly. And any clothes I bought then — as Heimel points out — never looked good on me. I took that knowledge and projected it out to more significant decisions. For example, don’t quit your job when you’re in the throes of PMS; if it’s still driving you crazy when you’re not at the mercy of your hormones, then think about quitting.

Anyway, I found tracking data — and I included moods, productivity, weight, menstrual cycle, exercise, food, and other things that sound similar to your project, though I didn’t go so far as actually counting calories and tended to estimate things — helped me understand myself better and make better decisions. Now that I no longer have a menstrual cycle — and btw, I love menopause — I should probably try this again, to see if I can find any new patterns.

I don’t think this is a narcissistic practice, though I suppose narcissists could take it and use it as another way of showing that they’re superior to everyone else. I found it instead to be a useful form of self-therapy — a way of understanding certain things about myself so that I could either deal with them or not worry about them.

Wow for the first half of your graph it seemed that exercise and mood directly correlated. THen them mood dipped when exercise was applies.

I guess you figured out that exercise is chumps.

I’m excited about CureTogether and really hope those additional tracking fields become available soon.

To the narcissism comment, I’d like to say that I’m aghast at narcissistic behavior every day that is socially condoned, but, at least for me, tracking my health helps me to do the work that I want/need to do.

I take care of a lot of people and have a full life that includes community work in addition to my career responsibilities. To the extent that I’m not depressed, overweight or caught in the healthcare system, everyone around me benefits.

It’s far more narcissistic, I’d say, to “take care” of yourself with trash tv and bonbons, as so many people do.

Is it possible that your mood lowers when you eat too much rather than thinking that you eat too much when your mood lowers?

—Lee

Nancy Jane, I love your idea of tracking as a form of self-therapy. It is, for me, a way of taking an honest look at myself, seeing what needs to be improved, and understanding my patterns. The result is often taking action to make improvements to and optimize my health, so in that sense the therapy seems to work! Or at least I feel better knowing I’m learning about myself.

Timm and Lee, thanks for your astute observations. My best guess is that exercise and mood feed on each other in a positive spiral, and eating and mood feed on each other in a negative spiral, so it’s hard to say definitively which causes the other, except based on my subjective feeling at the time.

AnneShirley, I agree that tracking helps me to keep everything in balance so I can juggle the many balls I always have up in the air. It will quickly tell me if I am not getting enough sleep, for example. So the time it takes to do it does seem to be worth the effort.

Great comments, everyone! :)

Interesting comments - and great suggestions for specific behaviors and data to track. I’m new to tracking. Like others here, my motivation seems to arise from a quest for greater understanding about my own behavior - a will to cure, so to speak. Particularly interesting is the sharing aspect of the ‘personal informatics’ movement that is nicely profiled in the linked WSJ article. FWIW, I don’t see it as individually narcissistic as much as a sign of a more organized, collective self-regard. I suspect it says more about privileged Westerners and our advantaged position in the hierarchy of needs as it does about any one of us.

I have found daily tracking to be a real challenge (as one poster mentioned). I TRY to track my daily objectives and task accomplishments; wake and retire times; exercise achievement (miles ridden daily); waist (in contrast to weight) and - more subjectively - diet and productivity. I use a week wrap-up to evaluate progress towards better habits. I haven’t yet punched this into a spreadsheet but instead use a paper sheet that I’ve cobbled for the purpose. I’m curious if others struggle to ritualize their personal informatics program as I do, or if like riding a bicycle.

Welcome Mark -

I also have been enjoying this discussion. In talking with many self-trackers, my impression is that there is a pretty clear division between two types/temperaments. There are people for whom collecting data is itself a rewarding activity. The data feels like a valuable possession, and the systems for gathering it up have inherent interest. I’ve even talked with Seth Roberts, the psychology professor and expert in self-experiment referenced in earlier posts here on QS, about what he sees as an occupation hazard among academics with this temperament - sometimes they get so into collecting data that they never get around to doing anything with it!

There is another type of person who is after an answer, and collecting data is just a step - and often not a very pleasant or appealing one - on the way to this answer. The drive to get an answer is so strong, however, that the data-averse or data-neutral person gets into collecting data because they have to.

One of the things that seems to be going on here in the QS space is that people with both these general temperaments are conversing/sharing information. It makes for some fun discussions, because there is a push both towards DATA and towards MEANING.(Of course in any individual there is a mix of goals - I am drawing very general distinctions, here.)

In answer to your question about the struggle to ritualize the program: I definitely share this problem. Cure Together, Zume Life, TweatWhatYouEat, and others who have presented at the QS Show&Tells and contributed to the conversation are trying to make this easier. Some mix of increased automation and increased meaning/interpretation rewards may help.

I was wondering if you have the mood scale/questions documented anywhere…

Thanks to Mark for your comment and to Gary for your insight! I definitely enjoy tracking for the most part, so I would fit primarily into the data-loving group. My process to create a ritual was to sit down and write out everything I could think of tracking, then create a spreadsheet, then build it into my morning/evening routine of checking email and reading blogs. I leave my health tracking spreadsheet (hosted at Google Docs) open as a tab in my browser so it’s always there, along with my Gmail, Google Calendar, and BaseCamp to-do list. Having these things open reminds me to get to them every time I open my laptop.

The hard part for me in terms of motivation is not so much developing the ritual but sticking with it on days when I deviate from my ideals. There is a harsh honesty to tracking that can be hard to face. Yesterday, for example, I really didn’t want to record the 3500 Christmas calories I consumed! The desire for a “perfect” chart with smooth lines and a big helping of self-control is another one of those illusions that set you up to feel like a miserable failure. It works the other way too: on days when I stay under 2000, I definitely feel a rush of short-lived victory.

Tracking myself is like standing naked in front of a mirror: there’s nowhere to hide, and new lumps and wrinkles become visible. But along with this undoctored reality comes the opportunity to learn about myself, understand myself, and ultimately love myself. If there were a way to expedite and replicate the path from tracking to self-love, it would really take off in the mainstream culture.

How exactly do you measure your mood? What factors go into it?

In response to this post, I have created http://trackeverything.org, which is an application that lets folks track arbitrary data about their own lives and have it displayed visually on a graph.

Here’s a write-up on it: http://newprotest.org/details.pl?1338

Thanks, Jovial!

Hi Shane, Thanks for the question about mood. It’s basically just what I describe in the post. I subjectively assign 0-5 ratings to the 6 mood measures, then calculate the overall mood using the given formula. I’d be interested in finding a more objective way of measuring mood at some point (suggestions, anyone?), but for now this is serving my need to have a general sense of where my mood is on any particular day. Hope that helps. Happy New Year! Alexandra

Yay! Aspergers!

As a result of this post, I made http://trackeverything.org to allow people to easily track and graph arbitrary date about their own lives. Thanks for the inspiration!

Amazing. Tell me how you track the weather? Do you have a single number you track (e.g., high temp), or is it a qualitative number (how much I liked it, 0-5)?

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pbP5Atkdj-d9wVxxvcUR6bQ

tracking weekly