Mapping your behaviour: unlocking a goldmine of advice

Health complaints often feel random, seemingly lacking explicit connections with your behaviour. Consulting Dr Google is unlikely to reassure you. By systematically checking your habits however, you can get a clear view of what’s really going on.

If you manage to track your recurrent behaviour, chances are you’ll be able to pinpoint the causes for your health problems, and start working on them. Is there any tool better suited for a regular, systematic check than a diary?
The term obviously refers to an ‘old school’ paper diary - which still has its value - but can serve for any tool which allows you to extensively and regularly map your behaviour
(or ‘demine’ it -  which also has to be done systematically if you don’t want to risk walking into a landmine anyway).
Contemporary technology provides numerous interactive tools, which feed back information to the user in real time, based on the choices he makes. These can be ideally suited for self-management, if they adhere to a number of quality requirements.
Some universal criteria can help you assess the quality of such a tool:

• Is the key information on your situation nicely grouped together? If the available room is too small, is there a clear hierarchy? A good example is a smartphone screen which allows you to click through to the next level for more information.
• Do graphs make use of a fixed set of colours ( red  amber  green ) to represent a status? In the renewed ichange3 dashboardwe also use these consistently.
• Is key information - or a visual overview - displayed in the upper (left-hand) corner? This is advisable, as this is where we intuitively look first when reading.