The 3 Questions That You Need to Ask Yourself Every Day to Improve Your Health.
Do you track how you feel every day?
Maybe you should. It doesn’t have to be hard or add an extra thing to your to-do list, it’s very simple.
I focus on 3 areas that are key to health in my opinion.
Sleep, mood and nutrition.
These 3 categories can often impact each other. Your mood can be affected by your sleep and your sleep can be affected by nutrition. Now obviously you can dive right in and put a lot of effort and detail in each of these categories but you don’t have to. I track these 3 things throughout the day. I simply rate each category out of 10. It’s that simple.
I just use the notes section on my phone to keep track of my routines.
5:30 am/ 6:00 am - Sleep - It’s important to rate your sleep early so you have the best recollection of the quality of your sleep. I will rate my sleep out of 10 and also make a note of roughly how long I slept for.
12:30pm/1:00 pm - Mood - By this point in the day you usually have a pretty good understanding of how your day is going. How you feel, what mood you’re in and what has impacted that mood. I will rate my mood out of 10. 10 being extremely happy and 1 being down in the dumps. I will then rate my mood again in the evening.
7:00 pm/ 7:30 pm - Nutrition - I rate my nutrition after my last meal of the day, which could be earlier or it could be later. When rating my day's nutrition it’s not super specific. Again I rate nutrition out of 10. When it comes to tracking apps like MyFitnessPal I think they can be useful but I wouldn’t recommend using them all the time. Tracking apps are great for gathering an understating of what is actually in the food you consume regularly. I would recommend tracking a regular week of eating once in a while to understand in a little more depth what you’re consuming. I wouldn’t recommend constantly tracking your intake with apps. I think it can create an “unhealthy” relationship with “diet” and nutrition.
It’s at this point in the evening where I would assess my mood for the rest of the day.
After a week, I will normally assess myself for the past 7 days to see where I can improve for the next week and understand in more depth why I may be feeling a particular way. Another worthwhile area of your life to track is stress levels.
This whole concept revolves around the fact that we don't "check in" with ourselves as often as we should. When checking in you should take the perspective of an outsider looking in at your self. Try to have an un-bias look and do your best to leave the ego elsewhere.
Cheers,
Dan