Yours to keep

Take your four measures.

The same four I take in the first session, yours to take on your own. About twenty minutes, and you come out of it with four numbers that belong to you and that you will know how to take again for the rest of your life. They stay on your screen and there is nothing to buy at the end.

Start with the first one Straight into it, no account needed

Measures you keep for good, three of them a number

Minutes, and you can stop anywhere

Thing you need, and it is the clock you already have

Weeks until you take them again and see what moved

Before you start

A baseline is only useful if you can take it again.

These four were chosen because you can repeat every one of them yourself, in your own kitchen, in twelve weeks, with nobody present. That is the whole design. A measure only I can take is a measure that keeps you tied to me, and these are the opposite of that: once you have taken them, the instrument is yours.

It is free, and it stays freeIf you take the four measures and never speak to me again, you have still had the useful part. That is the intended outcome rather than a loophole in it. Nothing to buy at the end and no sequence of emails.
Your numbers stay on your screenEvery one is worked out inside this page and goes when you close it, so write them down somewhere you will find them again. They are yours and there is nowhere else for them to go.
You own the instrumentThe point of a baseline is having something to compare with later. Take these again in twelve weeks, or on your birthday every year for the next thirty, and the comparison belongs to you whether or not I am anywhere near it.

The first measure

One sentence, in your own words.

Not a goal and not a target weight. A description of what you would want to be true, specific enough that in twelve weeks you could tell whether it had moved. Most people find this the hardest of the four, which is why it is first.

What would you want to be different in twelve weeks?

Nobody sees this. It is not sent anywhere and it disappears when you close the page. Write the honest version rather than the presentable one.

The second measure

How sure are you that you could keep it going?

One to ten. Not how much you want it, and not how important it is. How confident you are that you could actually keep it going for four weeks, given the week you really have rather than the one you wish you had.

5~~of 10~~

1 · Not at all 10 · Certain

What this number is used for

The third measure

A comfortable pause after breathing out.

This is the one people find most interesting, and the one most often done wrong. It is a comfortable pause, not a breath holding contest, and the number you get from pushing past the first urge to breathe is a number for something else entirely.

0~~sec~~

Breathe normally for a few breaths. Do not take a big one.
After a normal breath out, start the timer and pause.
Stop at the first definite urge to breathe.
Breathe normally again. Your next breath should be calm.

Where this sits

Take the measure and the reading appears here.

Skip this one if you are pregnant, or if you have high blood pressure, epilepsy, diabetes, a heart condition, or any condition affected by pausing the breath. Skip it if you are unsure. It changes nothing about the rest of the page and nothing about the hour.

The fourth measure

Seven wake times, and the spread between them.

Not how long you slept. What time you got up, across a week. The gap between your earliest morning and your latest is easier to change than total hours, and in my experience it is the first thing worth moving. Estimates from memory are fine.

Mon

Tue

Wed

Thu

Fri

Sat

Sun

The spread

Fill in at least four mornings and the reading appears here.

What you have now

Your baseline, as of today.

This is the whole of it. Copy it somewhere you will find it again, because a measure you cannot find in twelve weeks was never a baseline.

Write the four down somewhere you will find themA note on your phone is enough. A measure you cannot find in March was not a baseline.
Pick the smallest version of one thingNot all four. One, small enough that your confidence in keeping it is seven or better.
Put the date you will check itTwelve weeks is the usual gap. Short enough to remember, long enough for something to have moved.

The four measures

The tools on this page need JavaScript.

They are not running, so rather than show you four things that do nothing, here are the four measures themselves. You can take all of them on paper and the result is identical.

One sentence describing what you want to be different in twelve weeksIn your own words
How confident you are that you could keep it going, one to tenSeven or better
A comfortable pause after a normal breath out, timed in secondsStop at the first urge
The spread between your earliest and latest wake time across a weekIn minutes

Why these four and not four others

Each one has a different job.

They were not picked for being easy, though they are. One is the target. One tells me what size to make the plan. One is the best evidenced lever I know of. And one is the fastest to move, which matters more than it sounds like it should.

They are not equally well supported, and the honest version of that is below each one, including the place where the evidence is thin.

The sentence

The target everything else is checked against

It is not a goal and it is not a measure. It is the thing every later decision gets held up against. “Get healthier” cannot be checked in twelve weeks. A sentence you wrote can be, and that is the whole job it does.

Specific goals outperform vague ones, and a goal somebody arrived at themselves outlasts one they were handed. That principle is well supported. Writing it as a single sentence is craft rather than a measured intervention, and it is worth being straight about which is which.

Confidence, one to ten

An instrument for sizing the plan, not for measuring motivation

This is the one people misread. If you answer four, you have not told me you lack willpower. You have told me the plan is too big. The number is diagnostic, and the response to a low one is to shrink the thing until the number moves, rather than to try harder at the same thing.

Self efficacy, meaning your belief that you could actually do it, is one of the most consistently replicated predictors of whether a change holds. The measure stands on solid ground. The seven out of ten threshold is a working convention rather than a validated cutoff.

Sleep regularity

The best evidenced thing on this page

Not how long you sleep. The spread between your earliest and latest wake time across a week. It is easier to move than total hours, and it is the first thing I look at with almost anybody.

In 60,977 adults wearing accelerometers for a week, the most regular sleepers had around 30 percent lower risk of dying over the follow up than the least regular, after adjustment. Regularity also beat duration: once researchers knew how regular somebody’s sleep was, knowing how long they slept added almost nothing. (Windred et al. 2024, Sleep, n=60,977.) Two caveats. It is observational, so it watched people rather than assigning them. And that study used a validated regularity index, where the wake time spread you just calculated is a hand workable stand in for it. The principle carries across. The precision does not.

The comfortable pause

The weakest of the four, and kept on purpose

I would rather tell you this than have you find it out. The evidence under this one is thinner than the evidence under the other three, and it earns its place for a different reason: it moves faster than anything else here. Weeks, not months. It costs nothing to repeat. And it is usually the first physical evidence somebody gets that something is changing, long before strength or weight would show it.

Pooling twelve trials across 785 adults found a small to medium effect of breathing work on stress, with most studies at moderate risk of bias. (Fincham et al. 2023, Scientific Reports.) The hold time itself is not a well validated health marker. So this is a feedback loop rather than a diagnosis, and calling it what it is seems better than dressing it up as physiology.

What they have in common

Every one of them can be taken again without me.

That is the constraint they were chosen under rather than a happy accident. A measure that needs me to administer it is a measure that keeps you coming back, which is the opposite of what this is for. Three of them produce a number. The fourth is the one the other three are in service of.

A measure you cannot take again is not a baseline.

If you want it kept somewhere other than your own notes

I send something occasionally. It is not a funnel.

One piece of writing every few weeks, usually a study with its limits printed next to it. No sequence, no countdown, and unsubscribing takes one click. You do not need to be on it to have got value from this page, and most people who take the four measures never join it, which is fine.

The honest part

You may not need anything after this.

Some people take the four numbers and run it themselves, and that is a complete outcome rather than a failed sale. If you want the full hour, where the sentence gets worked on properly and you leave with a written page two days later, that is the wellness vision session.

See the full hour $99, and it credits in full against coaching

Elevate Wellbeing is a trading name of Elevate Health & Fitness LLC, Portland, Oregon · Insured through Hiscox, $1,000,000 per occurrence