The Story Behind The Wellness Habit: My Personal Journey

From Personal Struggle to Holistic Discovery

I initially started my wellness journey by focusing on my physical health – what kind of exercise and routines fit me and didn't overstress my body. Beyond the physical, I also live with anxiety, and have been on and off medication for it. This personal experience led me to delve into calming techniques, breathing, meditation, and other practices. This journey ultimately led me further into the realm of wellness, discovering the 8 different categories, or "pillars," of wellness and how intrinsically interconnected they are, forming a truly holistic picture of well-being.

The Core Philosophy: Beyond Yes or No

Further research divided each major category into subcategories, each representing a nuanced facet of what makes up that pillar. To see how you fare in each subcategory, there's a simple question you can ask yourself. I realized it isn't necessarily a binary "yes" or "no" answer. For example, for "Gratitude" under Spiritual Wellness, the question is "Did I consciously appreciate one thing in my life today?" You could simply answer yes or no, but if you could answer in a range, you would be able to gauge how you think you fare. This offers a much deeper sense of potential for improvement and, crucially, it can trigger valuable self-reflection.

Turning Data into Insight: The Dashboard, Streaks & Insights

So what do you do with all that scoring? Turn them into analytics.

I built the dashboard as the heart of your holistic wellness tracker. It provides a clear snapshot of your overall wellness average, highlights your highest and lowest performing categories, and displays insightful graphs representing the moving average of each category in a combined line chart, and separate charts that detail the subcategories within each main pillar. Metric cards are prominently displayed to show how you are trending, based on your moving averages. This dashboard truly shows how you are faring on your wellness journey. But you must bear in mind that this is all based on your own sense of judgment and self-reflection, which I feel is essential in your wellness journey. You are responsible for your own well-being: Conscious and Deliberate. This makes The Wellness Habit more than just a tracker – it's a guide for your holistic health journey.

The graphs and charts can show you your scores, but you also need to keep track of how consistent you are. I then built a streaks section. It can tell you down to the category level how consistent you are in your tracking. I wrote in another article about the science of streaks and how it can help you along your journey.

Next, I built insights. These are basically correlation analyses between the categories and subcategories you have scored. I believe each one of us will have different insights, allowing you to discover things you never knew were related. I admit, there may be some funny and weird correlations that appear as well, and I will need to fine-tune this as we go along. You can read more about this feature in our article Unlock Your Personal Wellness Code.

My Personal Experience with The Wellness Habit

As I have become accustomed to using my own tool, this wellness tracker, I start eagerly awaiting when I can score a question. My jogging and exercise sessions; my breathing or "alone time"; my appreciation of something in my life… I don’t necessarily check my wellness score and want to "bump those numbers up." Instead, I use it as a great indicator of how I feel I fare in my wellness journey, using each question to keep myself accountable and to encourage deeper self-reflection.