Introducing new Habits, Journaling & more!

Improvements to the Health Labs

• We’ve added over a dozen new experiments to help you optimize all parts of your body and mind, including new strength and stress reducing habits.
• Now the Labs can always be easily accessed from the top of your Coach tab!
• Your experiment history and ratings for each habit are shown at the top of Labs. Now you can easily retest an experiment to verify your results before installing it as a long term habit.

Daily Report

The Daily Report is the core of the Gyroscope experience, where you can see all the data that was logged in one place.

• Streamlined Timeline tab with places & map
• New Journal tab to post custom notes
• New Habits tab with daily todos & habits

Introducing Habits

The Health Labs solves a few common issues we see in human health.

One is not knowing whether things work. We are constantly exposed to all kinds of ideas and health advice. Some of it may work, some may not. It is hard to know who to trust.

Second, it is almost impossible to change our behavior and make new habits.

Understanding why something actually works is important, at a deeper molecular level rather than just because it is considered ”healthy.” Most of the Labs now have studies & hypotheses for how they work. Quantifying the effect is also important — will it improve your health by 1% or 10% or have no impact? Prior to Gyroscope, this was almost impossible to know. Health itself was not measured, so the effects of any interventions or habits were also very hypothetical and hard to take seriously.

We suspect this made it very hard for things to stick. Yes, perhaps broccoli is “good for you” but is it a 0.01% difference or a 100% improvement in lifespan? Or perhaps it has no actual effect at all? The effort needs to be worth the reward. This is actually quite a rational and logical response, since you have limited time and resources.

The Habits in the Labs have two steps to fix this problem — first to find the habits that measurably work that you fully trust, and then to make sure you actually do them daily.

Benefit 1: Seeing the actual effect of a habit

Our goal with the Labs is to get you those results within just a week. Does this new habit make your life measurably better? It is a very high bar, but one that can be achieved by many of the routines we have curated.

Just like on Amazon where seeing other people's 5 star reviews helps make a purchase, seeing the comments and reviews from the community will also help you find signal in noise.

If an experiment goes well, we recommend taking a break and then running it again to make sure it is repeatable. It is very easy for multiple variables in our lives to change and confuse the results, but verifying it twice helps establish that this new habit in fact works.

Benefit 2: Building lifelong habits

So you tested a new experiment twice and found that it measurably increases something you care about. Perhaps your sleep quality improves or your focus is better, or maybe it makes all your metrics go up. That’s fantastic!

Unfortunately, the most common human response is to quickly forget about it and go back to your normal life, losing the benefit of all those insights. This happens countless times, especially around the first week of January. We try on new habits and feel great for a little while, until the excitement wears off.

Very often, especially for smart people, the pursuit of health can become more of an intellectual pursuit than a physical one. We are interested in solving a puzzle or reading about the latest research, but get bored when it comes to the practical application of doing something daily for a year in a row. With such a big gap between theoretical and practical, health science remains an aspirational pursuit rather than something that benefits our daily lives.

The new Habits feature is designed to bridge this gap, by setting a daily reminder to do it every day and tracking your progress when you do. The actual benefits will only come from doing it regularly, so now you can install up to 3 successful experiments in your daily report to add them to your daily checklist. (These get manually logged with just one tap, to support many types of activities and not be limited to things detected by the app.)

Only experiments that were successfully verified can be installed, because if it is an arbitrary habit you may not actually believe that it works and start to change your mind after skipping it a few times. In other habit tracking systems, we will often see people ambitiously fill it up with a bunch of things that sound cool, but then drop off after a day because they don’t truly believe those things will work. It becomes very easy to rationalize these kinds of decisions, but seeing the experiment results that you verified twice yourself will help keep you on track.

Daily Journal

This has been one of the most requested features in Gyroscope. Most things in Gyroscope can be quantified and tracked for you automatically, showing up in your daily report with little to no effort. Your sleep, places, travels, steps, heart rate, music, and more. Other things take a few seconds to track but add a rich dataset, like your food and mood.

Now even more advanced details can be stored for your day, with custom notes, to cover anything not already tracked in the app.

In the new Journal section of your daily report, you can log both your quantified mood (measured on a consistent scale in less than 30 seconds), plus add text entries describing more about what you were doing, how you were feeling or anything else on your mind that you want to store.

It could include details of how you were feeling that day, notes on custom supplements or habits you’re working on, a daily journal, a productivity log of things you worked on, or literally anything else you want to store.

It is not designed to replace your diary or serious notetaking app, but is a way to add extra details about your day in realtime as they happen that may not get tracked otherwise.

New branding

The features are the same, but we have updated the plan names to be more intuitive!

OS and Pro → Track

Gyroscope AI → Score

Gyroscope X → Coach

You can browse the new lineup on the website to see the exact features available at each level.

Simplified Coach Tab

The coach tab has been improved, with a new area for the Labs and a simpler header.

The weekly goals and long term goals can be found at the top in the Goals section.

The support chat now has some additional resources and FAQs, and is easier to open.

Improved Web Experiences

The iPhone app is the primary platform where people use Gyroscope, but the website is a very powerful resource that we recommend checking at weekly or at least a few times a month.

The new Trends board on the site will show the best overview of all your data in a way that is harder to do with a small screen.

Members with a Gyroscope coach will be able to also talk to their coaching team on the site to more easily send messages and share updates.