1: What if the fastest way to make progress isn’t focusing on your bad days—but keeping score of your good ones?
Six months after suffering a concussion, Jane McGonigal was still living with postconcussion syndrome. “It didn’t heal properly,” Jane writes in her book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully.
The headaches “were bad enough that I was taking the maximum safe dosage of pain relievers almost every day,” she recalls, “sometime three different medications a day.”
While there were some encouraging signs—Jane could finally think clearly and work for several hours a day—”but I was still spending way too many daylight hours resting in bed, nauseated and half-blind from the headaches. I felt far from back to normal.”
Jane decided she needed a measurable goal.
“I needed to have hope that not every day would feel like a bad day. What would be good enough for me?” Jane asked herself.
“I decided that if I could have just two good days a week—two days where my headaches were mild enough that I could skip pain relievers completely—I could be happy.
“I could live with five bad days a week. . .
“. . . as long as I knew I could have two good ones,” she notes.
One challenge was not knowing how many good days she actually had. “The days all blurred together into one long lousy week, one terrible month,” she writes.
2: “So on January 1, 2010, I started keeping track,” Jane notes. “I taped a plain piece of white 8.5″-by-11” paper by my bedside and started a tally. Every night before I went to sleep, if I’d gone medication-free, I gave myself a check mark.
“My hope was that I would have a hundred check marks by the end of the year,” she recalls.
The first week was tough, with just one good day. “But the next I had two. The third week I didn’t have any good days. But the fourth week I had three!”
Keeping score changed everything.
“Whenever I had a miserable migraine day,” she writes, “instead of slipping into depression and despair, I could look at the growing tally next to my bed and say, ‘Look at all those good days you’ve had. Statistically speaking, you are going to feel better tomorrow or at the very least the day after. This pain is not forever. Hang in there.’”
Those check marks became objective evidence that better days were possible.
3: There was another benefit of keeping score. “I also started craving a check mark at the end of the day,” she writes. “I wanted the feeling of pride and accomplishment I got when I added a new notch to the tally.
“When a migraine hit, instead of reaching for a pill right away, I would lie in the dark for an hour, in hopes that I could still earn a check mark for the day, waiting to see if the headache would pass on its own.
“And sometimes, to my great surprise, it did!
“It was a revelation to me,” Jane notes. “Sometimes the headaches got better on their own. If not for my extra motivation to bump up my score, I’m not sure I ever would have realized that sometimes my migraines actually went away without any pills.”
Simply keeping track of her good days encouraged her to try healthier habits.
“I practiced the ‘power breath’ (exhale twice as long as you inhale) as a first response to headaches, instead of medication.
“Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t,” she shares. “When it did, I felt powerful. But even when I decided I needed pain relievers after all, the result was positive: I’d waited so long before taking any medicine that I often wound up taking a much lower dosage for the day.
What happened? “This triggered an upward spiral,” Jane writes. “Not only did I start earning more check marks, and counting more good days, but the medication actually started working better when I took it. (I had been decreasing my tolerance to it by taking it less often.)”
Jane had created a self-reinforcing cycle of positive change.
“This gave me more confidence that I was really getting better, and the newfound confidence led me to spend more time out in the world and less in bed. . . The more I was out in the world, the less attention I paid to the migraines. It turns out that being active and busy reduces pain perception!
“Less pain perception meant I racked up more good days and a higher score,” she notes. “A higher score meant more confidence and therefore more daily activity.
“It was a virtuous cycle, all kicked off by the simple act of keeping a tally.”
By the end of the year, Jane had 154 check marks—far more than her goal of 100. She averaged three good days a week instead of two.
“And that’s when I stopped keeping score,” she writes. “I didn’t need an objective tally anymore to tell me I was getting better. I was confident that my health was strong enough that I could enjoy my life, do important work, and be there for my family.”
That’s the power of keeping score. It doesn’t just measure progress—it helps create it.
And once the habits become part of who you are, you may no longer need the scorecard.
Just like Jane.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: If you started keeping score of one meaningful behavior, what would you choose to track?
Action: Create a simple tally today. Put it somewhere you’ll see it every evening, and give yourself one check mark each day you follow through.
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