Is keeping track of every aspect of your health a good or bad thing? For O Magazine, I try to find out.

It was a fortuitously timed assignment: a piece about decision-making that I researched just as my husband and I were moving to a new city. Choices abounded. Here are my conclusions, written for O, The Oprah Magazine.

I felt like punching Benjamin Moore in the face. My husband and I had just moved across the country, and after a flurry of big decisions, we were down to the nitty-gritty: what color to paint our new apartment. The previous tenant had gone with blood red, midnight blue, and tan—a look I referred to as “depressed Betsy Ross.” Hoping to achieve something more cheerful, we sat on the floor surrounded by dozens of paint samples—Classic Gray or October Sky? Silken Pine or Mystic Beige?—when all I really wanted was to be able to just flip a switch in my brain and let my rational self determine the perfect choice.

I just had a piece come out in O, The Oprah Magazine about how to stop beating yourself up for stupid things (or, as they titled it, “How to stop being so damn hard on yourself”).

While I pride myself on being kind to others, I do not show the same compassion to myself. Instead, I have a gift for letting trivial things suck me into a vortex of self-loathing. A missed workout, a bad piano practice: Anything can churn my mind into an emotional whirlpool that gathers strength by pulling in unrelated failings—say, my difficulty choosing clothes or my lack of a steady paycheck. “Why can’t I dress myself? Why did I pick this career?” Eventually, I’m dragged all the way under: “Why am I so pathetic?”

Judging from the feedback I’ve received so far,  I’m far from the only person who does this. It really makes you wonder: why are we so damn hard on ourselves?

Last summer my husband, Peter, and I spent two weeks on a family farm in France—a sort of “working vacation” in which we exchanged labor for room and board. The farm was home to a menagerie of pigs, cows, dogs, cats, chickens, and pigeons, but lucky for us, we didn’t have to worry about any of them. Our sole responsibility was the family’s herd of goats, which we were supposed to milk twice a day. It was the easiest job on the farm. And yet one morning, halfway into our stay, we managed to almost blow it.

In a piece for O Magazine, I learn the benefits of single-minded focus — courtesy of a herd of French dairy goats.

Here’s the ironic thing about stress: The human body has evolved to cope with it too effectively. When you suffer under a crappy boss—a stressful situation, sure, but hardly life-threatening—your body responds as if you’re being chased by a predator. Stress hormones like cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine spike, causing your attention to narrow and your body’s inflammatory reactions to kick into high gear. This would help you avoid infection if, say, your boss bit you, but when continuously activated, inflammatory reactions can wreak havoc on your health, leading to increased risk of heart disease, stroke, depression, and diabetes. Chronic stress can even shrink your hippocampus, a part of the brain that supports learning and memory. In short: You need to calm down.

It is probably a bad sign that I completely forgot to post this piece I did for Outside Magazine about ways to beat stress.

I’ve long thought that the body mass index, the oft-cited calculation of whether you’re obese, is flawed — after all, it doesn’t take into account whether your extra weight comes from muscle or fat. As an (equally meaningless) alternative, I propose a different measurement, one that reflects how you actually feel. I call it the Body Image Index, and I wrote about it for O Magazine.

What do feelings have to do with numbers? Most women know that it is possible to immediately gain 15 pounds by eating one pint of Ben & Jerry’s. And when it comes to your butt (which can enlarge six sizes in the wrong pair of jeans), the rules of physics no longer apply. 

We need a better way to quantify these fluctuations — a formula that goes beyond your BMI and calculates the feel of overweight. So I propose the personal body image index (PBII).

The general idea is as follows:

• Start with your weight. 
• Subtract seven pounds if you have just worked out. 
• Add five if you’ve single-handedly finished a plate of guacamole and chips; four for macaroni and cheese; six for death-by-chocolate cake. 
• Subtract 10 pounds if people nearby are fatter than you.
• If you’re wearing black pants, subtract two; if in a bathing suit, add eight. 
• If you are more than seven years older than the group average or are surrounded by bikini-clad undergraduates with toned stomachs and cellulite-free thighs, add 20.

Positive psychologists endorse several research-tested [gratitude] exercises. These include keeping a “gratitude journal,” where you record a running list of things for which you’re grateful; making a conscious effort to “savor” all the beauty and pleasures in your daily life; and writing a “gratitude letter” to some important person in your life whom you’ve never properly thanked.

These gratitude exercises all sounded pleasant enough, but would they work for me? While I’m not currently depressed, I’m very aware that depression runs in my family: I’m the only person-including the dog-who has not yet been on Prozac. So I decided to indulge in all three of these exercises over a six-week period, risking the possibility that I might become an insufferably happy and cheerful person. 

Originally written for Greater Good Magazine, this piece is about a 6-week gratitude experiment in which I overdosed on gratitude exercises to see if they’d have a positive effect on my mood.

After my tongue exam, Bianca and her classmates ask questions about my overall state. Do I have trouble sleeping? No. Am I generally hot or cold? I fluctuate. And how is my appetite? Healthy! Then their professor, Hua Ling Xu, chair of the AIMC Oriental Medicine Department, identifies treatment points on my wrists, shoulders, hands, ankles, and the backs of my knees. As I lie face down on the table, Xu swabs each point with alcohol, flicks it with her finger, and briskly taps sterile needles into my body.

I did a first-hand investigation of acupuncture for Health Magazine.