Alexandra Carmichael began tabulating her life on Aug. 25, 2008.
She decided she would track 40 things about her body, mind and activities - every day. (She's since whittled that down to 25.)
Ms. Carmichael, who was born in Toronto and lives in California, now tallies stats on her sleep, weight, supplements and sex (quantity and quality). She also records her moods: happiness, calmness, "feeling beautiful/self-love," and on the flipside, sadness, irritability and "feeling fat/ate too much."
"I also record unusual events, any pain or headaches, and if it's the first day of my cycle," says Ms. Carmichael, who uses Google spreadsheets and sometimes blogs about her findings on The Quantified Self, a website devoted to the relatively new community.
Ms. Carmichael believes the practice - dismissed by some as narcissistic - is a powerful self-therapy tool.
"It is, for me, a way of taking an honest look at myself, seeing what needs to be improved, and understanding my patterns," she wrote on the website.
The Internet had long ago turned navel-gazing into an international pastime, but self-tracking takes the self-absorption to a new level. Using elaborate graphs, pie charts, websites and newer technologies, self-trackers catalogue everything in their lives, sometimes with no clear result.
Happyfactor.com lets users track their happiness online, and promises more happiness in the meantime. Randomly throughout the day or week, the site sends users a text message that asks, "How happy are you right now?"
Users reply with a 1 to 10 rating and a quick note about what they are doing and who they are with. The system then tabulates which names and activities correlate with happiness, and which do the opposite.
Some self-tracking sites are more banal.
Bedposted.com is exclusively devoted to tabulating one's sex life. "Ever wonder how often you get busy?" the site asks.
Complete with a five-star rating system for lovers, the site features a calendar and fields that include how long the deed lasted.
Some critics say this type of self-tracking is obsessive. Others warn that self-trackers may be so tied to minutiae, they fail to see the big picture.
"It's an interesting comment on where our culture is, that people focus on the self as the site where one can find these patterns and then adjust them in order to adapt to everything, yourself, your environment, your family," says Megan Boler, associate chair of theory and policy studies at Ontario Institute for Studies
in Education, University of
Toronto.
But self-trackers say it is the opposite, insisting the process can unearth patterns and habits that would otherwise go undetected: Instead of passing through life unconsciously affected by their social interactions, moods, what they eat and how much they sleep, self-trackers are all over every detail.
"My sense from my own life, and from the many self-trackers I know, is that self-tracking is not, in general, unhealthily obsessive. Like exercise, or study, or televised sporting events, I imagine it could be the focus of obsession, but I haven't seen it yet," says Gary Wolf, contributing editor of Wired magazine.
Mr. Wolf, who started the Quantified Self blog with friend Kevin Kelly in 2007, keeps a spreadsheet with about 25 fields for topics such as blood pressure, sleep, caffeine and alcohol consumption, work hours and mood; it takes him about 15 minutes a day to fill these out. He says it helps people "gain self-knowledge."
Ms. Carmichael says the pursuit has made her marriage "more open," even though her husband Daniel Reda doesn't track himself.
"Having so much knowledge about myself brings up questions for both of us and helps us to solve problems more quickly.
"I'm able to tell him, 'I'm having a rough couple of days mood-wise because I haven't done any tai chi in a week.' So instead of getting into an argument and blaming it on PMS, we can arrange our schedules and he can put the girls to bed while I head out to a tai chi class."
Of course, self-tracking has its detractors. Ms. Carmichael has been called a guru and an upstart in one day, and has found the blogs about her experience to be a "powerful polarizer."
Friends have asked Ms. Carmichael if she doesn't "want to put down the pencil and just live."
She said she will continue tracking as long as it does not take away from her enjoyment of life.
"I don't know if I'll be tracking forever, but wouldn't that make for some interesting data if I did?"
