I’ve tracked my daily routines for 90 days and this is what I’ve found

I’m a freshly baked QS enthusiast, who is trying to figure out the reasons ‘why?’.

Having my gallbladder removed at the age of 14, dozens of allergies and an increased heart rate makes you wonder. At the age of 27 I’m living with pretty much constant bloating, my heart rate reaches 150bpm after few flights of stairs and frequent headaches are starting to irritate. I’ve seen gastroenterologist, allergologist, cardiologist and gynecologist and except for a proven hay-fever and a slight reaction to apples and chicken - I’m supposed to be perfectly healthy.

As a lot of my concerns and symptoms are related to nutrition, tracking every food intake together with the feeling afterwards is not quite enough. It’s extremely difficult to use the practise of removing a suspected ingredient from your diet, when you suspect almost everything and when you usually eat a lot of different ingredients at once. And what about feeling bloated when you haven’t even eaten anything?

One thing I’ve noticed when searching for a right tracking tool is that you are able to log whatever you want like hours of sleep, a variety of food ingredients, water, health symptoms and etc., but the data is usually not actionable.

I’m currently experimenting with interconnectedness of Sleep, Mood, Productivity, Health, Physical Activity and Food by tracking it all on a daily basis, using Feelsom app.

The way I track my well-being is by logging my inputs to Feelsom 3 times per day to cover the changes in my mood, productivity, and health during the day and adding information about my food choices for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. For additional data, I’m tracking my heart rate, step count and advanced sleep stats with Garmin watch (Forerunner 645)

I’ve just posted my experience here, though I’ll share some points that already got my attention:

  • I’ve noticed an increased heart rate in the morning, when I don’t get 8 hours of sleep.

  • I’m most productive when — getting 5 -7 hours of sleep, eating veggie based meals, feeling stressed (!?) and doing some exercise.

  • To feel good health wise — 7- 9 hours of sleep (7h having the biggest impact), doing some stretching and definitely avoiding turkey, tuna and potato chips.

  • For the best sleep quality (from falling asleep to waking up fresh as a cucumber) — not being productive and staying positive the evening before, avoiding turkey and tuna once again and getting 9 -10 hours of sleep.

  • For a better mood I need — a long walk, getting 8–9 hours of sleep, some comfort food and nuts (!)

  • To make the most out of physical activity — getting 9 hours of sleep, avoiding cabbage, garlic and beans and doing Pilates, because it gives an energy boost!

For full disclosure — Feelsom is founded and bootstrapped by me, a real person with real problems, and if you want to try it by yourself the app is available on the Apple App Store .

Giving the symptoms I provided, maybe you would have suggestions of what correlations could give me a better or deeper answers? Or maybe you personally have conquered the constant bloating and could share your experience?

Even with this amount of data combinations, I believe we’re still scratching the surface, so any recommendations are highly welcomed.

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Hi Gabriele,
Very interesting post, thanks for sharing. I don’t have anything relevant to add to your specific symptoms, but given you are a new to QS, I wanted to share with you some of my experience in self-tracking as well as a recent book in case it helps you get closer to understanding your situation.

First, I would start by referencing this response by @ejain in the thread What is next for Quantified Self. It echoes my own self-tracking experience over the past 6 years - discovering something new simply doesn’t happen often. Having said that, the truly new insights I’ve generated from my self-tracking data primarily came as a result of aggregating this data over extended time periods. For example, not a new insight (as I already suspected this!) but because I track daily health observations as well as hourly weather, I was able to confirm that my acute episodes of stiff lower back are highly-correlated to the relative humidity in the air during the observation. In the “truly new insight” category of examples, the key was not only analyzing over extended periods of time, but also tracking multiple domains - the “interconnectedness” as you say. In my case, my tracking spans spiritual, social, physical, intellectual, financial and environmental domains.

Second, there are also multiple references on this forum to the value of self-tracking as a process in and of itself, regardless of the insights generated from it. In my case, I have a few examples where I see improvements that I suspect are more influenced by my thinking about them more often and as a result of self-tracking.

Lastly, If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading Matthew Walker’s book - Why We Sleep. The book has completely change how I think about sleep, in particular the different stages of sleep, and the importance of sufficient quality sleep on our well-being.

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Hi Sergio,

Very interesting insight - do you track these domains manually or do you use specific tools for different domains?

I completely agree that self-tracking as a process is already beneficial - awareness is the first step towards improvement.

Thank you so much for the suggestions, I’ve read the book and already recommending it to everyone I know!