Patrick McGoohan proclaimed to us in The Prisoner
that he was not a number, he was a free man.
Well I am happy to be reduced to numbers, not just
a single number but a collection of numeric data that defines me.
I was always
pretty good at maths when I was at school. It was a subject I took right
through to graduation because I knew I could pass it without any great effort
because it just made sense. That gave me the time to concentrate on the
subjects I was really interested in: Music, French, History, English and Drama.
The
idea that mathematics could actually be useful to me never entered the
equation, my future was mapped out and the logic of maths was not really
featuring there.
Lately I have had cause to be grateful for my mathematical
aptitude all those years ago, and for the fact that my innate ability to understand
numbers has stayed with me. Why? Because I have discovered a movement
called Quantified Self and, just like maths in my teens, this makes sense to
me.
The Quantified Self movement is all about measuring and acquiring data on
various aspects of your life - most commonly - the steps you take each day, the
food you eat, your heart-rate amongst others. A large percentage of the
population, at least in the "western world" is doing at least some of
this every day and not understanding that they are quantifying their
lives...taking aspects of existence and transforming these into numbers.
Quantification
in this form has been around for at least as long as medicine. Every time you
go to the doctor you are reduced to a series of numbers:
• Weight
• Blood
pressure
• Height
• BMI
• Blood
composition
• Respiratory
rate
• Body
temperature....
If you have been in hospital, particularly after
surgery, you will be familiar with the quantification of pain. You will be
asked to rate your pain on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the worst pain you have
ever felt and 1 being no pain at all. The introduction of this simple method of
judging pain, which is very subjective, was a breakthrough in the medicine of
pain control, the numbers are very powerful.
People suffering from chronic
asthma will know the drill of taking peak flow readings to keep track of the
state of their breathing; diabetics monitor the level of blood glucose several
times daily.
All these numbers tell your doctor a huge amount about your
current state of health, the movement of those numbers over time tells even
more. This is immensely powerful data about you.
When you quantify yourself,
rather than letting someone else be the custodian of that information, you take
a lot of power back. Unless you have a laboratory at your disposal you are
probably not going to keep a track of your blood composition, but just keeping
an eye on the basics can tell you a lot.
There are some pretty clever
gadgets out there to help you measure these numbers. My personal tracker of
choice at the moment is a FitBit One, this little device measures the
steps I take each day, the number of flights of stairs I climb, the calories I
burn and takes a fairly rudimentary stab at assessing the quality of my sleep.
I am also able to diarise my eating enabling the FitBit dashboard to tell me
whether I am in credit or deficit in the calorie stakes.
There are a myriad of
other devices and apps you can use to measure these and other aspects of your
life, take a look at some of these and see what takes your fancy:
• Pebble
• Basis
• Lark
• WakeMate
• Zeo
Why do I measure? Initially it was all part of a
get fit and lose weigh regimen, but then I realised that the benefits to my
health extend much further than that primary goal. Monitoring and measuring
allow you to notice minuscule changes in your physiology before these
impact on your well-being. Tracking what you eat and what you do and the
influence these have on your body and your emotional state gives you
opportunities to avoid negative influences and boost the positive.
I was
looking at an info-graphic the other day that
predicted that we would see the first human reach 150 years of age in around
100 years time.I wouldn't mind betting that this current 50 year old is a
'quantified selfer' right now.
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