What is Thrive Tracking™️ and how is it different from health and fitness tracking?
Thrive Tracking is a way of measuring the results of anything you do for your health and well-being. You not only see your progress toward future health, but you also gain valuable information from your whole person about how to be well now.
Most health and fitness habit tracking apps give you feedback about what you did and how it measures up to a standard recommendation such as steps or daily calories. That feedback however keeps you stuck in brain-based habit formation, yet that is not how good habits form.
What goes in to building new habits?
Typically, health programs ask you to set a goal.
However, health is not a goal. A goal is something you achieve once, but health is something you want to be ongoing.
Habits are the foundation of health.
Neuroscientists know habits form through the Habit Loop
Do something, feel worse in your body now, your brain remembers to avoid it, e.g., when you touch a hot stove and feel pain.
Do something, feel better in your body now, your brain remembers to repeat it e.g., when you eat a warm chocolate chip cookie and find it satisfying.
What your body tells your brain in real time is the information you need to change your bad habits.
Why does tracking work for healthy habits?
Tracking is recording what you did, such as exercise, meditation, or eating.
Studies show tracking habits in a daily routine is a powerful way to change a habit. It lets you see clearly what you are doing, or not doing, and the results of that action or inaction.
In Thrive Tracking, you add how your body felt, so you are aware of what your body told your brain as you did something.
For example, if you take a moment to stretch mindfully after sitting for a while you might notice less tightness as you start to move and a little energy boost. Writing it down helps your brain remember that is well worth your time the next time.
How to use Thrive Tracking for Whole-person Health and Lasting Habits
Write your Core Why at the top of the page to remind you what is important to you about being healthy.
Write down anything you did for your health and well-being, especially the actions you want to become healthy habits.
Write down how you felt.
Note how your body actually feels (not just how you feel about doing this action)
If it helps, you could use emojis or a number system like the one below:
Flee: Doing the opposite action, away from well-being, ignoring the signals here now
Freeze: Avoiding action to deal with what is happening here and now, distracting to avoid it
Flow: Trusting what is here now as your guide, not pushing away, not chasing something better, simply using what is here now to know what to do to Be Well Now
Flee: Fear is the motive to take action (ie: fear of getting a disease, fear of weight gain)
Fight: Anger is the motive to take action. Fighting against what is here now. (weight, pain, guilt)
Important note:
Notice when you are thinking of each of these as ‘good or bad’. The purpose is not to always be at a three out of five.
The purpose is to be aware of what is fueling your motivation and what you are getting from that fuel source. Add self-compassion to presence to allow you to notice what is here now without going into a downward spiral of self or other criticism.
Kindness gives presence a soft place to land, so its easier to keep your awareness in this moment. Your whole person wants you to thrive now. Your kind awareness allows your parts to work together so you thrive.
Four things to remember about Thrive Tracking
Tracking reminds you that you are in charge of your well-being, not your friends, the trainer at the gym, or the media.
Set up tracking so it’s easy to do, but captures the information.
Shift out of the “bad” or “good” mindset to collecting data. Labeling days ‘bad’ or ‘good’ is using judgment and self-criticism to keep you ‘on track’.
When you don’t do what you know you should, remind yourself you are human. Stay curious so you can learn from what is taking you away from being well.