I chose to track an activity that I’ve been trying to add to my daily routine: stretching. Stretching multiple times a day, especially before sleeping (which is the activity that I tracked) does a lot for one’s health, and this benefit is something that I’ve wanted to realize. Especially after a long day or at least a few hours of likely having been on my computer with poor posture, a stretch before bed is something that I have lots of motivation for. However, in tracking the activity and the related factors, I realized that there are so many different factors that affect my behavior near bedtime, and most of them negatively correlate with stretching.
As seen above, there are at least 8 factors that affect whether or not I choose to stretch or not before bed, and these are factors that I observed after only 3 days of tracking. I thought that it was really interesting to see how almost all the factors led to not stretching at night except for one: exercise. Yet, even exercise would exacerbate “not stretching” by positively correlating with midnight snacks which negatively correlated with stretching. It seems like the odds are stacked against me, but I hope to be able to mitigate the effects of many of the identified factors and try to introduce factors that positively correlate with stretching.
Another interesting thing that I noticed was that the factors that had the most arrows connected to them were not actions but feelings. Feeling tired and feeling busy during the day had many other factors that were both positively and negatively correlated with them, so I made a pyramid model to examine the hierarchy that I had discovered. The activities that were listed seem to effect the feelings which seem to have the largest or at least most compounded effect on not stretching which was something I found to be quite interesting and something that could be more readily addressed. I hope that by changing my feelings or activities that affect how I feel towards the end of the day, I might be able to increase the number of days I stretch.
Going forward, I’d hope to implement some of this information that I’ve found and be able to better implement a habit of stretching.
