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Health Data Management: How to Use it To Get Healthier

Everything about your health can be tracked, turned into data, and analyzed, from sleep to exercise. Through the use of personal health tracking devices, you are now able to get an in-depth look into how your body performs on a day-to-day basis.

If you were to lay out every single piece of health data that your body has given since you were born, that list would stretch for hundreds of miles. It’s important, but narrowing down what to use and not to use can be difficult. 

People have been tracking their health with technology for years now. It’s not an uncommon practice, and there’s a good reason for that. Collecting and analyzing personal health data is crucial for everything, not just workout routines. 

Tracking your health statistics is an excellent way to improve your sleep, heart health, and just about everything that has to do with your health, both mentally and physically. 

Yes, there would be a lot of data to comb through if you went back through the years. Thankfully, personal health tracking devices live in the present and help you towards the future. 

Heart rate. Sleep. Exercise. Carbs and calories. Oncoming illnesses. You can track everything

Below, we’ll discuss why tracking your health data is beneficial towards making you healthier and what exactly you should be tracking. 

Let’s get into it. 

Why Should I Track My Health Data?

Whether it’s because you don’t like the idea of your body being analyzed or you just don’t know where to start, we understand if you have reservations about tracking your health. 

Let’s start with this: you can turn these devices off at any time, and getting started is a lot easier than you think. Your health should be your priority, which is why seeing how you can improve is so important. That’s what health tracking can offer you. 

The positives heavily outweigh the limited negatives. From the mental aspect to the physical aspect, tracking your health has never been more accessible and more important. 

The Mental Aspect

Realizing and eventually accepting that you need to get healthier takes a lot of strength and courage. As humans, it’s not easy for us to admit we need change, especially of this magnitude. 

If you’ve gotten to that point, congratulations are in order. If you haven’t, no worries. Nothing cures this mental slump more than getting started. 

Health tracking can be a wake-up call, like checking your weight or realizing something is off with your heart rate due to diet and inactivity. Whatever your reason is, tracking your health data can lead to more motivation and a better outlook on your health. Tracking your health data also allows you to set goals for yourself. Setting personal health goals can vastly improve motivation and encourage your journey. 

Tracking is especially important for people living with chronic conditions. Recording your health data is of the utmost importance when living with an illness. It makes life a lot easier, and the self-encouragement it will provide will be unlike anything else.  

The Physical Aspect 

Once you’ve got the mentality covered, it’s time to start thinking about the actual physical actions that you must take. Health tracking is essential to know what is and isn’t working and is the best way to check the progress you’ve made. 

It can be anything from tracking your daily steps to how well you slept. Everything goes hand-in-hand throughout your journey of becoming healthier. It’s difficult to record these categories on your own, so a personal health tracking device will go a long way in helping you advance your routines. 

The physical aspect can be grueling, but trust us; you’re a lot more capable than you might think. Plus, with a tracking assistant by your side, it will be easy to see which routines work and which ones need a change. 

What Data Can and Should Be Tracked?

You’ve made it to the most important part: learning how and what to track. The short answer? Everything. The long answer? Well, let’s discuss. 

Yes, everything about you is essential to know in order to advance and evolve your routines and goals. Admittedly, some data will help you a lot more than others. Below, we’ll break down what we track with Circular and why it can help you become healthier. 

Heart Rate

The king of all health tracking, your heart rate is like the library of your body. Loads of information can be pulled from how fast or slow your heart beats, from getting an idea of how in shape you are to when your body is starting to wind down for the day. 

Your heart will recover faster during exercise if you work out more often. If it’s been a while since you got moving, you’re likely going to be out of breath pretty quickly. However, the more you exercise, the faster you’ll recover and the steadier and slower your heart will beat during activity, which can lead to more time working out. 

Your resting heart rate is another one of these branches on the tree of heart rate data. Generally, the lower your resting heart rate is, the healthier you are and the longer your life expectancy is. Inactivity and a bad diet will lead to a higher resting heart rate, which is one of many reasons why you need to get your heart pumping more frequently. 

Let’s move away from the exercise and talk about sleep. 

Sleep Quality

Products like Circular can track your sleep quality to tell you how to improve and get better rest. Sleep is the most crucial time for our bodies as it allows us to recover and gain the required energy to start our day. 

Perhaps it’s stress and anxiety, too much caffeine, inactivity, or the seemingly infinite other ways life can negatively impact our sleep. Either way, understanding how and why we didn’t get a good night’s rest is crucial. Sleep helps with weight loss too, so if your journey is to shed unnecessary pounds, a good rest should shoot up on your list of priorities. 

We’ve looked at the mental and physical aspects and two of the biggest categories of personal health tracking. Now, it’s time for you to put it all together. 

How Can Circular Help?

Circular is one of the most advanced personal health tracking devices created to date. It is a small, fashionable ring that you can wear throughout your day to track just about everything. 

Through Bluetooth, the Circular Ring relays the information straight to your phone for quick and easy access. From sleep quality to all categories of your heart rate, Circular will help you be more. After a brief calibration period, Circular will deliver a personalized energy score. This score is a broad method of measuring and telling you how you’re doing in terms of health. 

The energy score will give you details about what you can do to improve your health to feel more energized throughout the day. The Circular app also  offers a personal health diary with the possibility of adding custom notes to correlate tracked data with daily activities and with your environment.

The Bottom Line

Tracking your health can provide you with crucial insights into your wellbeing each day. Understanding exactly what these insights mean allows you to pull more significance from your health statistics.

With Circular, you can start prioritizing your health and more. We’re here to help the entire way. 



Sources: 

About Health Statistics  | National Library of Medicine

Tracking for Health | PRC

Get to Know Your Heart Rate  | Sutter Health

Edouard Duquesne

Data Scientist at Circular, Edouard is passionate about healthcare and machine learning. His practice of CrossFit and running makes him the best beta tester of the Circular technology.

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