Emotional Health: Beware of noise

As we wrote in our weight loss series, weighing yourself regularly is an important part of your weight loss journey. However, you need to be careful because if you weigh yourself too often, your emotional health will suffer.

Here’s why: there are going to be normal fluctuations in your weight throughout the day. If you are weighing yourself all day long, you are going to be watching your weight go “up” a high percentage of the time even if you are dropping weight week by week.

Those fluctuations are “noise” because they are irrelevant to the big picture. Who cares if you are apparently gaining weight during some hours of the day if you are losing a few pounds each week?

That noise however will cause your emotions to jump around all during the day. Every time you see the weight rise, you will start to feel like a failure. This is not healthy and may even lead you to give up on losing weight.

Here is a big tip: When you are measuring something, be careful to measure it at proper intervals or you will just end up measuring meaningless noise.

You do not want random noise to affect your mood. For example, most experts recommend that you weigh on a weekly basis to protect your emotions from random ups and downs.

You can apply this principle to other parts of your life as well. Worried about the stock market and your retirement fund? Don’t watch the market every day. Watch it only as often as you need to in order to make the decisions you might need to make.

Or, do you own a business? Be careful about watching your sales constantly. Doing so will wreck your emotions during a slow morning even if you end up with a great sales day overall.

Did your child get a bad grade on a quiz? Before you get too worried, stop to look at their overall grades.

Here is the principle again: if you are experiencing stress in your life, take some time to evaluate what life metrics are giving you stress and whether you are measuring them too often.