Can you count your way to happiness?
Like many Americans, Paul Grana tracks the amount he exercises: The miles he runs, the amount he goes to the gym, the crunches he performs each month. But unlike many Americans, Grana also monitors in scrupulous Excel spreadsheets the number of alcoholic beverages he consumes, the book pages he reads, his hemoglobin count, how much he meditates, his commute time, how many hours he’s exposed himself to the sun and how frequently he’s intimate with his fiancée.
“The difference between what I do and [obsessive-compulsive disorder] is that -- I sound almost like an alcoholic -- but it’s that I control it,” Grana told America Tonight. “It doesn’t control me.”
Grana is a proud member of the growing ‘Quantified Self’ movement: People who’ve made a lifestyle out of tracking and recording their personal data, effectively attributing a number to almost every aspect of their lives. Seven in 10 American adults already track a health indicator of themselves or a loved one, such as weight, diet or exercise, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. More than 20 percent of these trackers use spreadsheets, devices or apps to help them.
Paul Grana
But hardcore QSers, as they call themselves, embrace numbers like religion, meeting up with other QSers at regular ‘Show & Tells’ to share techniques and revelations.
“I want to sort of understand the cadence of my life and try to manage what that cadence is,” Grana said. “And if I’m not sleeping enough, if I’m not being active enough, if I’m drinking too much, whatever it is -- just like nudge myself back to whatever the range that I want to be in.”
Gary Wolf, who co-founded the Quantified Self movement with a fellow Wired magazine editor in 2007, estimates that there are tens of millions of people around the world using computers to track themselves. That number, Wolf said, is likely to balloon to the hundreds of millions “in a blink of the eye.”
“I do think that what’s going on in the world of the Quantified Self is based on some fundamental human practices and desires and needs to take stock of one’s self,” Wolf told America Tonight. “What did you do three weeks ago today? This is basically an impossible question to answer without using a tool. Now your tool may be a diary and you can go back and look and that’s very useful. But there are tools that make those kinds of observations much easier.”
QSing your way to well-being
“I track my weight. I track my food intake. I track the number of steps I take and how many hours I sleep,” said Maria Benet, who doesn’t match the image of the young, male techie QSer. Ten years ago, when she was around 45 years old and 50 pounds heavier, Benet said her knees hurt so badly she couldn’t even walk up the stairs. She was put on blood-pressure medication.
“And I was staring down a road of medications and a host of illnesses that supposedly come with age,” Benet said. “So I took my health very seriously to change my life – and it paid off.”
Strapped up with a heart-rate monitor, a Garmin smartwatch and a step-counting Fitbit, Benet is part a new generation of self-empowered health buffs, seizing knowledge from the all-powerful medical establishment and putting it in their own pockets.
Self-quantifying, most will tell you, is about feeling better, and the most popular ways to do that involve health and fitness – from insulin dosing for the diabetic to wearable posture-sensors that will ping when you slouch. In fact, as The New Inquiry notes, with its data-monitoring and show-and-tell meetups, Weight Watchers may be the original QS program.
Benet’s doctor beamed that if everyone took this kind of data-based ownership of themselves, health care costs would be a whole lot lower. But not everyone greets the trend so optimistically.
“I’ve heard doctors express concern that…people who are tracking themselves are more resistant to expert advice from doctors who know what works,” said Wolf. “Because they pay attention to clinical evidence, and Quantified Self data isn’t clinical evidence.”
Outsourcing awareness
Others criticize the way some QS tools can become less about bettering themselves than about besting the competition. Many apps allow people to share their personal data, which can be a great motivator, and help build community. But it can also unlock some of humanity’s less-than-constructive impulses.
“Sometimes, I do track some of my data in two or three different apps,” Benet said. “Why do that? I mean, it becomes something totally else. Then, it becomes this big job.”
The same critics slam the over-sharing culture of thumb-twiddling tweets and food-porn Instagrams: All that tracking, recording and sharing pulls you out of the moment and kills the serendipity of life.
“It outsources our memory or our awareness,” said Benet, “because if we have the gadgets to record the moments for us, the pictures, the numbers, we are apt to pay less attention to the world, and we entrust machines to do that for us.”
But for devotees of the QS movement, data is about increasing awareness and understanding. There’s the guy who tracked what he did every 15 minutes for six months to see how he truly spent his time. Then, there’s the guy who wanted to know what he could learn about himself if he was rejected at least once a day for a month. And there’s the woman who found her late grandmother’s detailed diary, mapped out the movies she watched, the diners she frequented, and the boys she necked, only to realize how much they had in common.
“If we start to track ourselves, we feel like we get a sense of order and control for our own health, our own psychological outcomes,” said Clayton Critcher, a psychologist and professor of marketing at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, who has been studying the QS movement. “And this is also what makes us feel more confident going through what is inherently an uncertain world.”
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