My Habit Tracker Has Made Me an Accidentally Positive Person

Sure, I had some Pollyanna* tendencies to begin with. But this simple practice pushed me into a strange, permanently joyful mindset.

Yi Shun Lai
Forge
Published in
6 min readOct 28, 2021

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Goofy smizing yellow lab
Photo by Jonathan Daniels on Unsplash

Habit trackers are just that: a method by which you notate each day you do a thing. Say you want to track your exercise: you might mark that in your calendar. Say you want to track drinking 8 glasses of water a day. You might mark that down, too. If you’re using a traditional agenda, you might put a checkmark or a little crab*** or dot or something on each day you do this thing.

I resisted tracking my habits formally for a really long time. Some of that resistance was sheer cussedness: If you can’t even make a habit, what the hell kind of grown-ass human being are you? went the thinking. Yes, it was needlessly cruel. There’s no shame in needing or wanting help, for anything.

The other part of it was envy. If you Google “habit trackers,” you come up with all manner of intimidating layouts. They are all gorgeous. I mean, criminey, look at this:

nautilus-shaped habit tracker, filled out in rainbow colors, with a legend and a list on the side.

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Yi Shun Lai
Yi Shun Lai

Written by Yi Shun Lai

Author: A SUFFRAGISTS’S GUIDE TO THE ANTARCTIC (2024), Pin Ups (2020). Former columnist, The Writer. theGooddirt.org Psst: Say “yeeshun.” You can do it!

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