In the last few years, I’ve seen a lot of people habit tracking. Sometimes they use a paper chart to keep track, as a printout on the fridge or drawn out in a bullet journal. Sometimes, it’s in an app…there are tons of tracking apps out there. Some focus on one thing, like exercise or food, and others are sort of a choose your own adventure space, where you can create your own actions to track and even keep up with multiple habits in the same space.
Recently, I’ve been learning about optimal macro and mineral ratios and I spent a month or so learning how to track what I eat. This process got me thinking about how math shows up in habit tracking. Even if what you are keeping track of isn’t as involved as nutrition, you are still using mathematical thinking in the process.
What I’m saying is, tracking habits makes you a math person.
Let’s dive into this a bit.
When you track a particular action over the course of a few weeks or months, you organize that information in some way so it is useful to you. This could involve marking something on a calendar, so you can go back and see how many times you completed the activity in a week or a month, or it could mean you’ve created a way to chart the information. I have a printout on my fridge right now that allows me to keep track of how many items I declutter from my home this year. The goal is 2025 things in 2025 and I color in a little box every time something leaves my home. We are more than halfway through the year now and I haven’t quite made it to the halfway point on my printout, so I know I have a bit of work to do. Not only is the tracking of quantities itself mathematical, whether you are making tally marks or coloring in boxes, but this comparison of how many you have to where you should be to reach the goal is mathematical as well.
If you don’t have a specific goal like in my example and you are keeping track of an action to help you develop a habit or to see where you currently stand in relation to it, what you’re actually doing is looking for patterns in your behaviors. If you are tracking sleep, maybe you notice you don’t sleep as much or as well on the weekends. If you are tracking exercise, maybe you notice a trend of skipping Mondays. You get the idea here. Recognizing patterns is most certainly a math skill…I even did an entire podcast episode and blog post on it. Check out Math in One Word.
So, when we track habits either to develop a new one or see what our current actions are, or when we keep track of progress toward a goal, we are using several math skills…organization, counting, and pattern recognition to name a few. If you are nutrition tracking, like I have been lately, you also have weight and ratios and percentages involved, especially if you are working toward specific nutrient ratios.
What are you going to do with the information you collect through tracking? Thinking logically about the patterns you notice and the goals you have for yourself might very well lead to changes in routines (routines are behavior patterns) and problem solving as you work to find ways to increase your consistency or get the results you want. All of these have connections to math, too.
So, I’ll say it again. If you are tracking your habits and actions in any form, whether on paper, in a journal, on a calendar or in an app, you are most definitely a math person.
And that brings us to the mindset portion of the discussion. Meaning, some real talk about what it takes to shift a mindset that’s probably holding you back to one that’s actually serving you. If you are reading this, you probably have an iffy relationship with math. You may have a belief that you aren’t good at math or you may think you missed out on the math gene. I bet you’ve even told yourself, and possibly said to others, that you are not a “math person.” Because you are still reading, I know you’d like to believe you are a math person and that math is for you. This is where the mindset piece comes in.
Shifting your belief is going to take some work. It’s going to take some open mindedness. A willingness to see math differently and to see yourself differently. And, it’s going to take some action. A new thought habit, if you will. I’m not asking you to track it, although if that speaks to you, please do so! What I am asking is for you to start taking notice of all the ways you use math in your daily life. When you catch yourself using mathematical thinking in some way or another, stop and remind yourself that using math or thinking this way makes you a math person. Make this a daily habit and pretty soon you’ll start seeing yourself as the math person you really are.
Let’s continue this conversation! What thoughts and questions popped up for you while reading this post? Did you have an aha moment? Are you wondering how something I said relates to math? Tell me all the things by shooting me an ******@************pi.com“>email or a message over on Instagram. It’s only me on the other side of both of those and discussing your thoughts and ideas around math truly brings me joy! If you’d like to listen to this information, check out my podcast called I See Math People.
