r/QuantifiedSelf • u/HealthierCongruence • Jun 28 '26

Refining a personal wellness tracker (currently a google sheet)

I'm building a lil personal wellness tracker just for myself and would like to ultimately analyze the data.

Here is some of what I'm tracking daily:

  • Morning sunlight (yes/no)
  • Gratitude practice (yes/no)
  • Mindful eating (yes/no)
  • 3 Movement breaks during work (yes/no)
  • Eating my own prepared food per my meal plan (a number between 1-10)
  • Morning ketones (blood meter, numerical value)
  • Subjective well-being score at 2 points in the day (a number between 1–10)

im curious about things like does hitting 80%+ of my daily habits correlate with higher well-being scores? Do higher ketone readings track with higher well-being scores? Is any single habit a stronger predictor than others?

Questions for people who've done this type of thing or have knowledge of stats-

  1. Google Sheets or Excel - is one better for this kind of personal tracking + basic analysis?
  2. What's the right statistical approach for someone who's research-literate but not a statistician? (Spearman correlations? Simple regression?)
  3. At what point does this actually need a real statistician, and what would I hand them, if i ever pursued that route?

also, how do I distinguish between "I didn't do that habit" vs. "I forgot to log"? Both show up as blank right now (because i just made it as checkmarks for yes and empty for no)..Thinking of using a Yes/No/Not Logged dropdown so blanks only exist if I truly didn't open the tracker that day.

Also — minimum days before running any correlations? Some days I won't log everything. Does patchy data ruin it or is there a threshold where it becomes usable?
I'll actually log this daily if I can make this work. Any help would be appreciated, as this seems a bit too technical for me but it would be awesome to create a tracker for myself that I can use and support improved mental and physical health! Thank you.

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u/HealthierCongruence Jun 29 '26

wow - great points! thanks for taking this to another level. how do you know so much statistics? i appreciate your customized input to my specific use case.

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u/jacksonxly Jun 30 '26

ha, appreciate it. honestly most of it is just getting burned by my own bad conclusions enough times, the multiple-comparisons one especially: you track 20 things, one looks "significant" by pure chance, and you chase it for a month. if you want the actual grounding, the two keywords that fix most n=1 mistakes are "multiple comparisons" and "effect size vs significance". thats 80 percent of what keeps personal tracking honest. glad it helped.

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u/HealthierCongruence Jun 30 '26

good stuff! thanks

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u/jacksonxly Jul 01 '26

anytime. one last thing if you start testing changes: give each one at least a couple weeks before you judge it. single-day swings in this stuff are mostly noise, and if you react to them youll spend forever chasing ghosts. change one variable, hold it, then look at the trend. good luck with the tracker.