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Reasons for and against self tracking and quantification (edit)
Revision as of 01:35, 20 June 2022
, 01:35, 20 June 2022→Reasons For
==== Improve [[Fitness]], [[Mood]], [[Productivity]], and [[Cognition|Cognitive]] abilities ====
==== Improve [[Fitness]], [[Mood]], [[Productivity]], and [[Cognition|Cognitive]] abilities ====
For example: What is the optimum amount of coffee to improve productivity but not affect sleep? This is very similar to trying to improve a chronic health condition, except that it can be useful to anybody and does not deal with critical issues. Many professionals, especially coaches of [[Sports|athletes]], measure and try to improve every little thing to boost overall performance.
For example: What is the optimum amount of coffee to improve productivity but not affect sleep? This is very similar to trying to improve a chronic health condition, except that it can be useful to anybody and does not deal with critical issues.
People have gone through life always being mediocre because they did not try to improve themselves systematically. What if you are that kind of person? This method has precedents outside of personal science. Many professionals, especially coaches of [[Sports|athletes]], measure and try to improve every little thing to boost overall performance.
==== Protect your self ====
Even if you have no health problems and do not intend to improve anything, you should continuously monitor the vitals (same as in 'improve' above) that your doctors do not. Sickness can be subtle. It can harm you in a way that you do not notice but that could affect you a lot. For example slight dietary changes could increase resting heart rate and more noise could drastically reduce productivity.
Unhealthy products are ubiquitous. [[Digital addiction]] Games like flappy bird, apps like Facebook and Youtube, and many foods are designed to be bought, often without concern for the health of the customer. Technological innovation grows so fast that culture and regulators can not keep up.
Travel can be unhealthy in unexpected ways. Quality of sanitation and health care varies between countries. Health advisories about foreign countries are abundant. Digital nomads should maintain a diary of symptoms to notice uncommon diseases in addition to vitals.
Long term vitals monitoring provides safety baselines for self experimentation with exciting interventions like nootropics. Just imagine someone trying out long term fasting and not noticing a strong increase in resting heart rate. In addition, if you ever change your mind about experimenting to improve vitals you will have lots of data to compare against data gained during interventions.
Tools to save your life can also record data. For examples; Apple watch monitors for arrhythmia, medicine trackers for the goal of safety can also help monitor health conditions, and hiking is made much safer with GPS.
==== Motivate behavior change ====
==== Motivate behavior change ====