As my colleague Anna Borges has reported, checking boxes when you do something healthy for yourself can be motivating, but the purpose of tracking your habits isn’t really to achieve your goals . . . it’s to be able to see patterns. When everything is in a single place, you can start to make connections between, say, drinking alcohol and feeling sad, or getting migraines and getting your period. A tracker also helps you notice frequency. It’s remarkably easy to tell yourself something isn’t a “serious” problem when you don’t have the data in front of you; documenting your habits gives you a
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