Habits are easy to make and hard to break, could the Way of Life app be the solution?

Habits are such a fickle thing

We pick up habits we don’t want and we try to put in place healthy habits that we ultimately can’t make stick. Technology has created app after app and device after device to help us stick with “good habits” and get rid of the bad. For instance, all those fitness trackers are meant to be a visual reminder both, from seeing it on your wrist, to the stats it shows you are the end of the day on your phone, that you need to get up and moving.

A wearable has been created to help promote good posture. But do any of these apps or gadget really work. Does wearing a band on your wrist make you any more likely to get up and walk than anything else?

Way of life

Recently I downloaded, by recommendation, the Way of Life app. It’s supposed to track all your good and bad habits from things like exercising or smoking to mood or taking vitamins. The free version allows up to 3 things to be tracked. It gives you a list to start off with but you can input your own if there is something specific you’d like to track. For $4.99, you can track unlimited things.

The way that Way of Life tracks any of these habits is by using the old stand by of red and green.

Red being bad and green being good. So for instance, you exercised on one day but you also consumed alcohol (or too much alcohol). You’d mark exercise down as green for good and excessive alcohol as red for bad. Obviously you need to determine for yourself what is a good amount of anything, but hopefully you get the point.

Habit tracking

Each habit you are tracking is its own line and as you start having more and more days continuously tracked it will start to create a graph, showing you the highs and lows of trying to maintain habits, as well as the longest streak you’ve done something.

Now for everyone that exercises (unless you’re an elite athlete) you take days off.

The same could be said for cheat days on diets, so there is an option to skip tracking for that day so it doesn’t show up positively or negatively. You can also put in notes for each item and day tracked.

As a whole

Overall Way of Life is easy to use and well designed. But is it going to make me more likely to stick with good habits just because I am a total Type A and hate having numbers show up next to my icons on my phone? Hell no! The idea of tracking healthy and good things as a fairly basic manner is great. You don’t have to read a lot into the app to understand how it works but for me at the very least, it’s not going to change how I go about my life.

I’ve been using the app for a while now and while I have maintained good habits, I can’t emphatically say it’s because of the app. I personally think it’s just because I realize that I’m not getting any younger and drinking a beer or five a night should really be a thing of the past.

#WayOfLife