How To Track Your Habits to be Happier

Your habits, addictions, and thoughts can be changed. What really matters here is the frequency, duration, and intensity of the habits and choices that you make.

As long as you are being kind to yourself and doing the healthy things with a higher frequency, intensity, and duration than the unhealthy things, you are on the right track. Ideally, its a ratio of at least 80% healthy. This applies to many different areas of your life. Some less obvious areas include relationships, conversations, and media. Pay attention to how you spend your time every day so you can start living happier and make things better for yourself and those around you.

Let’s take a quick look at what we mean by frequency, intensity, and duration:

• Frequency: This is how often you do a thing. For example, exercising four times per week (healthy), or drinking a six pack of beer five nights per week (not so healthy).
• Intensity: This is how hard you go for the particular activity. For exercise, this would be measured by how hard you are going. A light stroll would be low intensity, while sprints, heavy weightlifting, or HIIT workouts would be high intensity. For drinking, a glass of wine with dinner would be low intensity, while binge drinking a 12-pack of beer at a party would be high intensity.
• Duration: This is how long the activity itself lasts, and how long you have been doing it for in your life. A two-hour run would be a long duration and having played tennis three times a week for the last five years could also be applied to duration.

You can learn to increase your baseline level of fun and fulfillment, handle the challenges gracefully, see the world more objectively and positively, manage those parts of your personality that get in the way, and be upwardly mobile in the places that matter most to you.

At the end of every day/week/month/quarter (depending on how intense you want to be with tracking, which, by the way, is a good habit in itself) track your habits along with any improvements in frequency, intensity, and duration, and make a plan for the following day/week/month/quarter/year.

To learn more about this concept or have one of our expert clinicians help you track your gains and stay accountable, book an appointment below!