Collect Your Own Life's Data

Unless you recognise that what "you know" might be faulty in some way - you can't begin to do the things that might reveal new understandings.

As film-maker Waldo Salt wrote in his journal, "To search for truth you must first have lost it."

Collect your own data from the experience of your own life. Nobody else can do that for you. It will one day reveal something you didn't expect to find. Good news, like a problem you once had, has now gone. Bad news, quite likely unnoticed, that your weight or your blood pressure or your sleep pattern is getting worse.

How to Reinvent Your Personal Health

You should know the health basics, but let me repeat them using George Vaillant's thinking. Good self-care is the answer, stop smoking, use alcohol sparingly, be careful about your weight, control your blood pressure, and get a better education. (Including a good health education.)

Update your own knowledge

Today, online there is every opportunity to improve your own health education. Combine your reading with keeping a health journal, and do some experiments for yourself. Keep notes. Learn from the various things you try out. You are the only source of your own understanding.

You don't need to be obsessive about keeping the health journal. If you take notes for a few days each month, over time that will build into quite a reliable record. Not having your own data makes you entirely dependent on Google or on your doctor. Learn to count, and to measure, and to record personal facts that might over time get either better or worse. These are the pieces of your own "life puzzle." Without those pieces solving that puzzle is unlikely.

What are the Facts?

When we read the newspaper, a book or online websites, we actively make choices about what is or is not important. We make those choices on the basis of what we currently know and believe. Our "values" in particular, throw up barriers to what we will of will not accept.

Even new science may be difficult to accept. Here is a link to some of that work.

Facts often contain information we choose not to know. This leads to denial or to making exceptions for yourself. No amount of evidence is convincing if your pre-conviction, (or perhaps your income) requires you not to know.

Your existing beliefs limit what interests you, limit what a sensible question might be, limits what a valid source of information might be. You choose what you know.

Make space for not knowing

Nothing I or anyone else might tell you is convincing. No amount of evidence is ever convincing. You have to do something yourself to discover your own "truth." That's where your health journal can be so useful.

There can be no learning if you begin by already knowing the answers. Make space in your life for what you are not sure about. Make that a little research project. Prepare yourself for the possibility of being wrong. Record what interests you in your health journal. Write down the unanswerable question? Leave it there unattended for a while, and come back to it, maybe months later. Is it now easier to see where a better answer or direction lies?

Goal setting is not enough.

There's lots of evidence that good intentions; goal setting; rule making; as a way of reinventing ourselves does not work very well. We are human, and we keep excusing ourselves when we fail. Change fully informed by your OWN experience, and understanding embedded in your own life, can be very powerful, when combined with new knowledge.

Join with other people, online or locally.

Active participation in groups is an excellent way to alert you to things you should be learning about. First, you need to join the group, and it won't help much if you just moonlight, find a way to participate. Participation confirms you as a member. Members thrive, learn together, and do things that are useful.

The task of reinventing yourself is much easier if you travel with like-minded people. Put support around yourself. Join a programme. Join a support group. Get your family involved as a support group. It's a long lonely road on your own, more expensive in both time and money. Much more prone to failure. That's why I'm recommending the Banting Course from the "Real Meal Revolution."