The OCD Quantified Self Playbook

As we become older, we (hopefully) gain wisdom through our experiences in the world. We hone our sense of intuition and learn to recognize familiar situations when they arise. This helps us avoid repeating mistakes and gives us a greater long-term perspective. We can build this wisdom through our own personal experience, through stories of other people (listening and reading), and through deeper self-knowledge.

We often think of self-knowledge as a reward unlocked by introspection, reflection, or meditation. We discover our strengths and our gifts. We learn our vulnerabilities and vices. We develop a stronger sense of taste—what we like, what is good and beautiful in the world. Equipped with self-knowledge, we can deconstruct the beliefs that drive us. What limits do we place on ourselves? What kind of person are we?

All of this is vitally important to become the best person we can be. All of this helps us live more mindfully and more intentionally.

So what does technology have to do with self-knowledge? Why does the Quantified Self movement aspire to “self-knowledge through numbers?”

Personally, my obsession with Quantified Self has been instrumental in nurturing self-knowledge. It has taught me so much about my body, my mind, and the levers that I can pull to feel a greater sense of control over my life. I can’t promise you’ll have the same experience, but I’ll share nonetheless.

It all started with a health problem.

In 2017, I began to notice uncomfortable symptoms related to IBS. I wasn’t eating or drinking recklessly like did in my early 20s, but perhaps something had finally caught up to me. After all, it’s fairly common for people to notice dietary issues as they get older and their metabolism slows down.

I tried cutting back on certain things, but nothing seemed to work. I decided to go to a doctor and try to get to the bottom of it.

I have no known food allergies, so that was ruled out. They took a bunch of blood tests, and everything looked normal.

Finally, they started me out on a bunch of different elimination diets to see if we could isolate variables.

I began food journaling and running 3-week diet experiments to see if we could figure it out.

No luck.

I tried some OTC treatments the doctor recommended, and they gave some temporary relief, but no sustainable path forward. Any long-term prescription would be the same. I wasn’t interested in symptom relief as much as root cause analysis. Exasperated and confused, I nearly gave up on the process altogether.

Then, in 2018, I had a bit of a wake up call when my sister was diagnosed with cancer. I needed to get my act together and take control of my health.

I decided to take a techie approach to the problem and start tracking a bunch of personal data on my health to see if I could figure it out. I was not foreign to the Quantified Self (QS) movement (my intro to this world came around the time of Gary Wolf’s TED Talk), but my interests were mostly in areas other than health. At that point, I already had an arsenal of tracking tools in place:

1. I tracked a bunch of different wellness dimensions in my Weekly Life Tracker
2. I tracked my computer use and productivity at work using RescueTime
3. I even had a home grown personal scorecard I put together for Product Management
4. I had all my finances connected in Mint
5. I kept all my favorites articles tagged in Pocket and automatically shared using IFTTT
6. All my reading was tracked in Goodreads

Okay, I was very much a QS power user by then, but I was also like many young men and mostly disinterested in health.

The anchor point of all health tracking for me centered around 2 main products: the Apple Watch and a wonderful nerdy QS mobile app called Gyroscope.

Using these two products initially, I started becoming more aware of my health data, including:

• How many hours of sleep I got
• Exactly when I went to bed and woke up
• When I was likely to stir or wake up in the middle of the night
• Daily Steps
• Minutes of exercise
• My resting heart rate while sleeping and while awake
• My heart rate variability
• Max heart rate during exercise
• My VO2 max
• My running pace (last time I cared was in high school track & cross country)

And Gyroscope, being a hub for health metrics, encouraged me to start effortlessly tracking new things:

• Weight
• Body Fat
• Mood (they have a really fun Tinder-style swipe by emotion interface)
• Meals
• Meditation (integrates with Headspace & Calm)
• Blood Pressure (I picked up this great device called Qardio)

So, what was the point of gathering all this data, and what did I find?

I was finally able to untangle the complex mess that was giving me issues.

• I found that regular exercise has this powerful effect of jumpstarting my digestive system, so I started getting up early (~6am) and running a 5k every morning
• I found that I needed to dial back alcohol and larger meals significantly
• I noticed which foods would have an impact on my heart rate and blood pressure
• I started putting more intention into breakfast, picking more proteins and fats
• I found that eating at the same time each day, and in smaller portions, was very helpful
• I generally started dialing down the carbs and increasing fruits

It wasn’t one thing that was out of whack. It was my overall health. It was sleep, diet, exercise, stress, all wrapped into one. The symptoms were likely related to an underlying genetic disposition, but the “check engine light” going off was really just my body recognizing that it wasn’t running normally anymore. Today, I feel healthier than I ever have in my life. And I feel like I have a little team of digital guardians supporting me, these sensors setting off small alarms whenever things stray from the path (like around the holidays).

Adding in the health data to my existing QS regimen has been so empowering. It supplements the intuitive self-knowledge of listening to your body by adding in real data, a quite persuasive one-two punch.

Recently, I’ve been looking at other areas of my life and adding in more QS tools to support my goals. I started running these 30-day Trial and Error Habits to test my limits and learn more about what works for me.

I started mindfully keeping tabs on my relationships with a handy app called Fabriq. I started meal planning each week to avoid the trap of depleted willpower that hits most of us around 5pm each day. And I started keeping track of my writing habits using this incredible new app called Roam Research (my favorite addition of 2020).

For all the current cynicism and negativity around tech companies (often deserved), I’m an unashamed optimist about the transformative power of software to change the world for the better. I’ve felt it transform my own health and wellness, and I can’t wait until these kinds of benefits are democratized and made accessible to everyone. Someday, you won’t need to be an OCD Quantified Self junkie to have thousands of data points on your health. We’ll all have our own little digital guardians looking out for us.