The (Mental) Health Part of My Report Card

 It's so hard to measure mental health. This shows simply what I can actually measure. But there is some really good news here:

My migraines, the only thing tracked in red, are on their way down!  I had three months this year with no migraines at all! I had two in January, but each of the other months that show any migraines reflect only one, though the number of hours varied. Sadly, my streak has broken, I had a migraine in early October. (But I got 5,000 steps anyway!)

The rest is fairly mundane. I meditated a lot in January, reflecting both participating in a challenge and also trying to deal with migraines. My anxiety went through the roof in May (thinking about my upcoming trip), and I used meditation to try to deal with it. So more meditation is, perversely, negatively correlated with mental health. 

My sleep is ok, and resting heart rate is acceptable. That's all there is to say about that.

The Activity Part of my Report Card

 My activity level through September was down overall from last year, pretty much any way I try to measure it.

June stands out as the least active month, and July and May tied as the most active. In May, I was getting ready to sail to Bermuda and started getting active. I was inactive (as my fitbit measures it) in early June. When I got back from the trip, I was zonked, and spent way too much time on the couch. Early July had me in Maine, hiking lots (some days more than I wanted) and when I got home I kept that up to some extent, getting ready for the Boston boat trip. The August stats reflect the lower activity from a week on the ship at the end of the month, though I did take some long walks in Boston before leaving. September, I started to turn things around on the activity front. 

One of the things about measuring, is looking only at averages can be misleading. That's why I add the high calorie days (>2,000 cal) and the very low step days (<5,000 steps). Back in my working life, I was going to get 5,000 steps just going about my work life, from the car to the office, around the block-sized office building to meetings, across the street to lunch. Now, to get 5,000 daily steps, I do have to work at it a bit. It's pretty much impossible to get there without leaving the property (unless I use the treadmill or the trampoline, neither of which have been appealing lately). Some days, I'd just as soon hang out with the dog in the house and yard.

I've read a few newspaper articles that suggest a strong positive correlation between more steps and longer longevity. There seems to be general agreement that very low average daily steps (<4,000) has near-term bad outcomes (ie, those people die soon) and there is almost a straight line increase in longevity as steps increase, up until about 8,000 a day. Above 8,000 steps a day probably has health benefits, but the relationship to longevity is fuzzy. (A very big note here: everything I've read on the subject from original sources notes correlation, not causation. Many newspaper headlines are sloppily along the lines of "Want to Live Longer? Walk More!". No one has shown that a person working to increase the average number of daily steps will by doing that improve their own longevity. Perhaps as your body winds down to die, you walk less.)  I care less about longevity than my quality of life, and fitness is so very important to that.

My trend on those very inactive days has been in the wrong direction, even giving myself a pass for June and August multiple days on board a fairly small ship with no where to go, and a need to hang on to keep from falling. I decided to aim for zero days of less than 5,000 steps in the month of October. While the dog is very happy to be out ranging in the back yard, he also approves of walks. To get my 5,000, I need two or three times around the smallest block here, with separate trips usually spread out over the day. I have also have a goal of having October average 8,000 daily steps, which means each day of only about 5,000 steps has to be offset with days of 11,000 steps or more. So far so good on both these measures, though 10 pm sometimes has found Bixby and me taking another spin around the neighborhood to hit the target.

I may have noted before that "miles" come from my Garmin running watch. Those miles only come from deliberate walks of at least a mile, not from incidental steps accumulated during the day. Those have trended up, as I go out more often on a trek or a run, sometimes with my girl.

Workout days suffered during my weeks of summer travel, but are trending up. I've noted that I just don't work out well on my own, and I'm regularly working with my long-time personal trainer. I definitely can tell the difference, that I'm getting stronger. I will do a shorter workout on my own, mostly on days I have been otherwise pretty inactive. I know my body feels better when I move. I'll often do squats or balance exercises while waiting for something in the kitchen, or sometimes when watching TV. Those things don't get recorded here, but my body knows and appreciates it.

Why a Report Card?

I compiled my stats for the last two months since last I reported. I have some categories for the way I look at things - activity, mental health, amusements, weight, and money. I've been posting the first three here. As I took a look at this, and looked at comments from previous report cards,

I also spent some time thinking about why these particular stats.

In my working life, I spent a lot of time with metrics. How you measure them, how you interpret them, what you use the information for. There was a fad in the 1990s for the "balanced score card". The basic idea was it was useful for companies to measure not only traditional things like finances and productivity, but also other items that could prove important to the company, like human capital and customer satisfaction. The theory was that things you paid attention to were likely to improve, and if your company believed these "softer" things were important, you would pay attention to them, try to improve them, and reward your people for doing them well. But softer things are harder to measure directly. Often they need to be measured indirectly, inferred from other items. There are tradeoffs around how much effort should go into counting the hard to quantify. And there are debates around whether the things you can count are shedding light on what is really important. So there is art as well as science to this process.

When I first started this blog, I focused on diet and exercise. I've been tracking my weight more or less daily since 1998. During my first Big Weightloss, I tracked not only my weight, but also my exercise times, recorded manually, into a spreadsheet. The first personal activity wearable trackers hit the market in 2010, just as I started this blog, and I was an early and enthusiastic adopter, poring over the statistics they produced. I learned my memory is not a good record of what I've actually been doing, and wanting to see a positive change in the numbers can be a good motivator for me. So I'm sold on personal measurement for personal improvement.

The approach of the balanced scorecard is attractive to me. Fitness is very important to me, so is my weight (possibly more than it should be). But clearly a well-rounded individual has more to them than fitness and appearance. But how to measure these?

So the things I choose to show here are partly chosen simply because I can count them. Just as I have a wifi scale that records my weight automatically, and a fitbit that does the same with my sleep and steps and other items, I've aimed at things that can be measured with minimal effort. I meditate using an app on my iphone that keeps stats for me. I track my migraines on an app as well - it'll produce a report I can share with my doctor.

How can I measure personal fulfillment and social connections and creativity? I need to start by trying to get more specific about what are my goals. So in no apparent order: I want to stay mentally engaged, including with current culture. I want to stay socially engaged, keeping up with good friends and finding new people. I want to travel. I want to sail. I want to be a good steward for my little slice of the planet. I want to support my family. I want to be engaged as a good citizen. I want to lead a bigger life than I do on the couch with my ipad. 

Also, I don't want to be creepy by recording every interaction I have with friends and family! 

So that's what's driven the categories I'm recording under the general heading of "amusements".  What can I measure with a minimum of effort that reflects the above aspects? Many areas are not measured at all, but several are, at least indirectly. 

Because most of my reading is on the kindle, and the kindle can be connected to automatically record finished books in Goodreads, I can count my books with a minimal of manual entries. I found an app for recording movies watched - it's a manual entry to note what I watched (but all the info about the movie is in the app, I just check a box that I watched it), but otherwise similar to Goodreads - it keeps the records and produces the stats. 

Blogging, taking pictures for blogging, making graphs for blogging, thinking and planning about blogging, is one tangible bit of my creative life, and it can be captured neatly by looking at the number of posts I've done. "Trips downtown" shows when I'm leaving my couch and my block to venture further afield. Sometimes it's to see friends (that's mostly from the Before Times), sometimes it's to shop, to go to a museum, or to take a walk. Number of nights away from home measures longer travel, and days at the boat is self-explanatory.

Dog Walks

After I retired, and continuing through the pandemic, I got in the habit of driving downtown on Sundays for a sunrise walk. I don't do it often, and until this last week I hadn't done it since acquiring Bixby. In fact, my last time was the morning of the day I acquired Bixby, in December of last year.

Having a dog to walk with was one of my main goals in getting another dog, but Bixby has been challenging to get to the point where I was comfortable walking with him far from home, or far at all. The problem is he is a scaredy-dog, afraid of all people and dogs he doesn't know. This turns into barking and lunging at potential dangers. I've worked hard with him, under the guidance of a trainer, to counter-condition him. Instead of "stranger-danger" I'm trying to condition him to "strangers=treats!".  Now, most days, around the neighborhood, we can walk around people, and with a sufficient physical distance, can even pass other dogs. It seems like after some time, or after a surprise close encounter, his anxiety tank is full to overflowing, and he's like a two year old having a temper tantrum, unable to control himself at all. The trick is to prevent his tank from filling up. When I see him approaching the limit, the only solution to prevent a melt-down is to pick him up and hold him, oriented so he can't see the approaching danger, and move away from it. I've acquired a shoulder bag that can act like a baby sling, holding him close while still having at least one hand free. I use that also for rest breaks - he is, after all, a very small dog.

So last Sunday we did a sunrise tour of the monuments. It was perfect weather, and I (at least) had a great time. We parked literally at sunrise by the Smithsonian, and spent about an hour and a half total walking and sniffing, accumulating 3.5 miles. At first, there were very few people and no dogs. By the time we were done, after nine o'clock, the mall was getting crowded. But in the whole time, he never had a meltdown. I'm not sure Bixby had a great time, because he was on high alert so much. But he has serious FOMO so I'm sure it was better than leaving him behind.

In the sling - my arms aren't long enough for a good view

Flamingos Spotted in the Wild on Morning Run!

 The flock was on a hillside; the solitary was under a viaduct:

In other news, I've started my first slow steps toward running again! It's been two years since I was doing any significant running. I made an actual effort in the summer of 2019, right after I retired, but it all went away in the fall after my mother died. But I'm signed up with my girl for an actual 5K race at the end of October, and I want to make an effort to train for it. This is the incredibly fun Dead Man's Race at Historic Congressional Cemetary, which I have done before.

Me in 2015 at Dead Man's Race
Possibly the most fit I've ever been

I've been walking quite a bit more recently, and when my girl took up running this summer, I got the bug again. My running is Slow AF, but the mechanics of any running are different than the mechanics of walking, so there is a distinct difference between the two. A customary Slow AF approach is to run/walk very short intervals - right now, for me, it's literally 45 seconds of running followed by 60 seconds of walking. But by putting the walk intervals in, I can right from the start of training go a reasonable distance.

I have a target of finishing the 3.1 miles in less than hour. Most of my daily dog walks are at closer to two miles an hour than three miles an hour, and very fast walking isn't comfortable for me. With the run/walk intervals, my walking is naturally much faster than dog rambles, but three miles an hour would be a challenge for me to sustain outdoors (I can do it on a treadmill, level). But interspersing run intervals gets me there nicely - I was just over an hour today.

An added bonus to running:
nerding out on my stats and performance

My goal is to run three times a week for the next three weeks leading up to the race. On the off days, I'll do walks with the dog. Maybe after the race, when I have a base, I'll try running with Bixby. Right now, I don't want to have to focus on managing him while I focus on running form.

In Our Neighborhood

 Spotted a block away:

Fall Rituals

I've tried to up my game at making things "nice". That includes changing displays through the year. This rotating also works for my desire to have stuff but to not be cluttered. While I'm not strictly seasonal, this village strikes me as appropriate for Fall.

The black horse at the left was a recent impulse buy at Ikea. It'll be put with my other swedish horses when I dig them out with my Christmas decorations, but I don't want to forget it. For right now it's looming over the Bergen townhouses.