1000 Rows and 6000 Minutes

An all-too-measured journey of self-improvement

I know the moment I lost control. Winter 2010, at my first Christmas party a year after moving back from India. I saw a box of peppermint bark, and my sweet tooth couldn’t resist. Maybe I had too many, or my developing metabolism tipped a certain balance, but I began a process of weight gain that would take me a decade to reverse.

This began what my brother calls the “dark days,” where I would eat string cheese and watch TV aimlessly for hours on end. My caloric intake was supplemented by two glasses of milk a day, which my mom said would accelerate my vertical growth, but only added to my horizontal. I was used to being an agile and thin kid, bouncing across stairs and beds impersonating Spider-Man. But slowly, I noticed a change in how my peers viewed me. As I kept falling further behind in the lineup to pick gym class teams, I realized something was off, but didn’t have a solution. 

In 2013 I joined my high school Model UN team, and was introduced to a world driven by solutions through resolutions. In sentences that began with “Whereas” – and always said “included but not limited to” – I found clarity and control. I started writing resolutions for and about myself, designing clever exercise and eating goals (e.g., only one cheese stick allowed per day, but two if I exercised), and asking friends to be signatories to keep me accountable. But ultimately, I couldn’t get away from love-and-oil-filled dinners made at home.

By the time I moved to college, I relished complete control of my diet, and found a guide into the world of cardio and weightlifting in my roommate Neehar. I began religiously going to Yates, our college gym, and got even stricter on my consumption (aided by our dining hall’s sparse vegetarian options). When the weighing scale finally started going downwards, I excitedly created a spreadsheet to track my weight, running, and lifting amounts. Over months, I could bask in my progress, or push harder when the statistics were stagnant.

By junior year, my physical health had significantly improved, but my mind was swirling with classes, clubs, and interviews. I had tried meditation before, but started to use Headspace, which timed my sessions. Following the soothing voice of Andy Puddicombe, I found myself more calm. To increase my total minutes meditated, I started going daily to our college’s Civil War-era infirmary-turned-meditation center. When COVID hit, I began using our basement in New Jersey. And then the backyard of my senior year house, and then the porch in my DC apartment. 

The past six years have seen improvements in nearly every aspect of my health. I’m stronger, faster, and hopefully more at peace. I’ve turned these exercises into routines, with numbers as both my carrot and stick. Believing that more effort is always better, I’ve focused on my input: the time I invest. In order to feel “productive,” I’ve held onto these routines no matter where in the world I was: running on beaches, meditating in office closets, or working out in cramped hotel gyms.

But lately, I felt lost within these numbers. My desire to feel “productive” has led to countless runs where I barely pushed myself, meditations where I never stopped thinking, or workouts when what I really needed was rest. I got to add another row to my spreadsheet, or minutes to my Headspace, but likely did little to benefit my body or mind. I end up cycling through the same-old exercises – after all, I can only see progress when I know how to track it.

I tend to become beholden to my routine, and the assurance they give me that I’m being “productive,” far from the abyssal fear of falling back into my TV-and-string-cheese days. But sometimes, all I’ve done is check a box. Recently, my mentality on productivity was challenged by “How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” where “writer and Stanford professor Jenny Odell questions ‘what we currently perceive to be productive.’”¹ It forced me to rethink the relationship between what I’m tracking and what I really want to achieve.

Numbers, after all, are an easy metric of progress. The weight on the scale, the size of the dumbbell, the minutes to reach a mile. Even outside of health, numbers (e.g., likes on social media) once played a big role in my self-worth. But numbers miss something in the story: how much I actually focused during meditation, how good my form was when working out. Numbers aren’t forgiving: they don’t tell me the value of taking a break, or trying a lighter exercise – things that may make the graph go down that week, but actually may be better for my long-term health.

Earlier this summer, I entered the 1000th row on my spreadsheet, reached 6000 minutes of meditation on Headspace, and stopped tracking both. It felt scary at first, having no idea if I benched more or less than last week. (If I didn’t track it, did it even happen?) But over time, it’s been freeing: packing up an apartment may not have fit on my tracker, but it sure worked some muscles I wasn’t used to. 

As I’m settling into this new journey out west (more on this later), my instinct is find comfort in the perceived productivity of my routines. Join the same type of gym, do the same exercises, and set a daily Headspace timer. But in this new environment, I’m challenging myself to change it up. On a mentor’s advice, I’ve shifted to self-paced pranayama meditation, and I’m even joining a rock climbing gym (channeling the inner Spider-Man that never really left).

I may try new ways of tracking – or not tracking at all – but I hope to channel those rows on the spreadsheet where I really pushed myself, the minutes where I truly experienced calm and connection. And some days I’ll just sit back, watch TV, and unabashedly enjoy my string cheese.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/apr/02/jenny-odell-how-to-do-nothing-attention