My personal panopticon
Is habit-tracking just self-surveillance, or does it have a deeper benefit?
New habits are hard. You gotta schedule them. You gotta stack them. You gotta make them such a core part of your identity that not doing them feels like losing a little bit of your soul. Yeah. HARD.
Maybe I’m exaggerating with that last one but not by much. Habits are hard to break, and, paradoxically, almost impossible to start. According to self-help, you should make your habits atomic or badass. Or maybe tiny? Who can say.
Whether you go big or go small, you’ll probably come across the advice to track your habits in order to solidify them.
Indeed, habit expert Gretchen Rubin sells a “Don’t Break the Chain Habit Tracker” journal, complete with gold star stickers, for $34 bucks Canadian.1 According to the description,
The pages provide structure and flexibility, with space to visualize progress in different ways, use “pass” stickers if you need to take a day off, award yourself gold-star stickers to celebrate your milestones, get reminders from Gretchen Rubin’s Habits Manifesto, and suggestions for ways to use this tracker effectively.
No shade to Rubin for monetizing this schtick. The bespoke habit tracker’s existence points to the belief that consistently tracking progress (e.g., marking the days when you complete the desired habit) is one of the best strategies for building a habit that sticks.
But what are we to make of all this self-monitoring? Does it just play into the neoliberal idea that we’re all responsible for our own well-being and that we need to be watching over ourselves contantly? Or (maybe it’s and/or) is habit tracking a way to deepen our relationship with ourselves?
Watch me watch myself
The concept of the panopticon comes to mind: a prison setting with a guard tower that can see every inmate, but the inmates can’t see into the tower. They have to assume they’re being watched at all times even if they can’t see the watcher. Thus, they control their own behaviour, having internalized the surveillance.
French philosopher Michel Foucault had a lot to say about the impact of the panopticon effect on society. He wrote about the spread of surveillance culture and the tentacles of self-surveillance that creep into ever more mundane and intimate aspects of daily life. These have a disciplining effect that keeps people in line with the norms and expectations of the dominant culture.
As someone who has very much been a tracker of habits, and who lets various apps track my “streaks” everyday,2 I wonder about the shadowy societal function of all this self-monitoring. Sure, tracking helps me keep my habits alive, but have I simply turned the dominant eye of normativity and “good behaviour” onto myself?
By this I mean, am I disciplining myself into being a “good” subject under late-stage capitalism? Proving (to whom?) that I’m taking care of myself and taking on ever more ways of being productive?
I may be overthinking this, but when we factor in all of the digital tracking of our habits by corporations it’s worth considering who is benefiting from all this information gathering. What’s being marketed to us, for example, based on the kinds of habits we keep (or break)?
Even if we just use pen and paper to keep up with habits, it can feel like we’re buying into the idea that “success” in life is quantifiable and can be measured by easily track-able traits like consistency. This seems like a rigid way to engage with certain kinds of self-help processes, especially those that are aimed at healing and personal growth.
Tara Schuster, however, is an advocate of tracking and measuring progress toward healing-related goals. In Glow in the F*cking Dark: Simple Practices to Heal Your Soul, she recommends practices like journaling and meditation, and says that it’s important to be able to set specific and track-able goals (e.g., 3 pages of journaling, 20 minutes of meditation) to know you’re moving toward healing.
Schuster admits that she’s an over-achieving, goal-oriented person who likes to be in control. I can relate, Tara, I can relate. She pokes fun at her tendency to “project-ify” everything, even the deeply emotional work of addressing a painful childhood. But for her, it’s an effective way of holding herself accountable when, let’s face it, journaling about her parents’ horrific fights might not be the most fun way to spend a Sunday morning.
Being accountable to ourselves
Accountability is a key function of habit tracking. Even if we’re only “checking in” with a tick box on a calendar or gaining a fresh “fire” emoji on an app, it’s often enough to make us feel like we’re being held to account by something out there beyond ourselves.
Yet it also has an important feedback effect. In How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self, Nicole LePera writes about the significance of keeping promises to yourself. This sounds like a BIG TASK, but LePera notes, much like Schuster, that by keeping up with even one habit, you’re showing yourself that you can, well, show up for yourself.
Showing up for yourself, keeping promises to yourself: these sound way better than self-surveillance! Seriously, though, these concepts remind me that there’s a deeper layer to habit tracking that isn’t about being a good girl who takes my magnesium supplement. Tracking is a way of reminding and encouraging myself to take my well-being seriously, to prioritize myself, and to value whatever bigger processes (self-development, healing) I’m engaging with.
At the same time, I do have to watch out for my own tendency to be rigid and controlling when it comes to habits. Gretchen Rubin has a typology of four tendencies that capture the different ways people respond to expectations: Upholder, Obliger, Rebel, and Questioner (take the quiz!). According to the quiz, I’m an upholder:
Upholders respond readily to outer and inner expectations. They want to know what’s expected of them, and to meet those expectations. They thrive with routines but may struggle with last-minute changes or when the rules are unclear.
Now, I don’t entirely appreciate Rubin’s Orwellian catch phrase for upholders—”Discipline is my freedom”—but the part of being an upholder that means I tend to meet and keep my own expectations, e.g., habits that I impose on myself, certainly rings true. Rubin warns that upholders can sometimes be unwilling to waver from their routines, even when it would make sense to do so. I don’t think I’m too unyielding with my habits, but if I’m being honest, I sometimes feel resentful of commitments (even fun things) that interfere with my routine.
All of this is to say that I’m predisposed to be pretty good at keeping promises to myself, and to like the consistency and formality of habit tracking. Who needs the panopticon when you’re an upholder??
Hold on to yourself
On a recent episode of the Dear Therapists podcast, hosts Lori Gottlieb and Guy Winch counsel a woman wondering if her marriage is over after her husband’s repeated cheating. During the session, they notice that not only is her husband not keeping promises to her, she’s not keeping promises to herself. For example, the promise to not to put up with this behaviour anymore. The therapists suggest that she’s abandoning herself to take care of others, and that it’s time to stop.
Building up the ability, slowly and with small, simple habits at first, is a way to “train” ourselves to keep bigger promises. If you show yourself that you can prioritize something for yourself—like journaling, or going on a daily walk—you prove that you can start to trust yourself. And trust in yourself is the most important thing to have if you need to make a big decision or take a leap of faith.
Ultimately, habit tracking might be usefully thought of as a way to prevent us from abandoning ourselves. For anyone who was taught that their needs don’t really matter and that they’re responsible for looking after everyone else’s feelings, this basic practice might be an accessible place to start. In this case, worrying about the neoliberal side of self-surveillance isn’t a top priority. Habit tracking can be less about proving to the outside world that you’re “good,” and more about proving that you can be good to yourself.
Introducing Willow
Let me introduce sweet and fluffy Willow, adopted a few weeks ago to help fill a lonely place left by the passing of our dear old gentleman cat, Mischa. Like Mischa, Willow has a heart murmur. We’re grateful to be in a position to take in a cat that some might worry will have health problems. Willow is getting along quite well with Gala, and importantly, the black-and-white cat trend continues in this household! Also, LOOK AT THOSE WHISKERS.
What I’m reading: The latest Fiona Barton mystery: Local Gone Missing.
What I’m watching: Hijack on Apple TV. Idris Elba? Archie Panjabi? Crisis at 30000 feet? Yes please.
Something I’m excited about: New epidoses of the podcast Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel. I’m obsessed. I’ll be writing about therapy podcasts as a form of self help in an upcoming newsletter.
Just linking for informational purposes; not promoting, nor associated with the product in any way. :)
Current count of apps tracking streaks on my phone: Duolingo, Snapchat, Peloton, Less, Wordle.