Data

I’m an IT guy, and as such, I’m also a data guy, a numbers guy, I’m a guy who loves hard quantifiable numbers for just about anything. The more quantifiable something is, the more useful the data is to me.

Well that’s something that’s been challenged for me in the past couple of weeks, and it’s been challenged a lot. I fill out sleep logs and was told by my doc not to use hard numbers form sleep apps or Apple Watches, but rather to say how I felt about the night.

I’m in a class that talks about intuitive eating and they discourage us from weighing in. In fact, the class leader ask us not to weigh in at all for the next 8 weeks the class is going on.

My health apps want me to record mindful minutes and blood pressure twice a day and now I’m being told even that even that may not be all that important.

So all my data is getting dumped in favor of how I feel, and how I sleep, and how I do other non-quantifiable things that cut across the grain of my existance. To be honest, I don’t know how to feel about it all. It’s a heck of a process to get through and ditching my numbers, which have been such amazing indicators makes me feel a bit like I’m floating in the sea, or walking on a tight rope without a net.

Of course that isn’t the reality and good things are still going to happen, even if I’m not tracking day by day (sometimes multiple times per day) but my confidence is rattled, that’s for sure!

To be honest, where the data lives and where it comes from don’t have a tremendous input on how I feel. So for a little bit, I forsake the numbers and I trying to things the old fashioned way.