Excel stops at 16,384 columns, and for a stretch I was determined to fill every last one. Caffeine, humidity, even the brand of green tea in my mug all went in. That is how cognitive tracking dies — buried under its own noise. What follows is the cleaned-up version of my brain health log, laid out as the questions people keep asking me about supplement testing and memory improvement.
Quick disclosure before the answers: this site uses affiliate links, so if you buy through one, I earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only point to supplements and programs I've personally tested and logged in my own sheet, the one my wife says has more tabs than our tax returns ever did. I have zero medical training, so please run any of this past your own healthcare professional before you change what goes into your body.
Why track brain health with a spreadsheet at all?
Because a feeling is an unreconciled account. I retired early partly because the sharpness my whole career leaned on had started to feel unreliable, and the last straw was forgetting a long-term client's name mid-meeting for the third time. A memory like that can't audit itself. A log can.
One afternoon on a bench at Klyde Warren Park, I finished a crossword in under fifteen minutes without once reaching for my phone — and the first thing I did afterward was open the sheet to see whether the numbers agreed.
A good day is an anecdote. A good day the log backs up is a line item.
What actually goes into the log?
Three numbers, no more: focus, recall, and mental fatigue, each scored one to ten, once in the morning and once in the evening. Same scale, same two moments, every single day.
Consistency beats precision here. A 6 that means the same thing every time is worth more than a fancy score that drifts — the same reason a bookkeeper never changes the chart of accounts halfway through the year.
If you want the column-by-column layout, the spreadsheet structure has its own write-up on this site. Here I'm sticking to the rules.
Cognitive tracking rules: fewer columns, steadier habits
My first build was a monster. It tracked caffeine, sleep hours, humidity, and the specific brand of green tea I was drinking, which gave me plenty of noise and almost no signal.
Three hours went into a macro for my focus scores, and then I found I'd misspelled "fatigue" as "fatgue" in every single header. Somewhere, an auditor is smiling.
The rule I took from that mess: add a column only when you can name the decision it would change. Sleep and caffeine both qualify in most logs, and each has its own write-up on this site.
Guardrails matter as much as columns. I now build in checks that catch a bad run early, so a test gets voided while it's still cheap to void instead of being written up as a result at the end.
Did the capsules pay off in my log?
Only modestly. Ginkgo biloba tablets from the CVS on Spring Creek Parkway came first, and my log showed a flat line — in bookkeeping terms, a line item with no return. That is one man's numbers, not a verdict on ginkgo.
After that came capsule brands like Neuro-Thrive and NeuroPrime. Bottles suit an accountant — one bottle, one line item in the budget. My focus scores moved from a 4 to a 6, a moderate return, but the heavy, wool-blanket feeling stayed put. I was looking for a genuine surplus and the sheet kept showing a plateau.
Early notes on that stretch live in My Tracking Spreadsheet vs. Brain Fog: A Retired Accountant's Four-Week Look at Neuro-Thrive.
Supplement testing for shift workers needs a different clock
A neighbor of mine works nights as a nurse and told me the same products did nothing for her. So yes, I built her a spreadsheet too. The products weren't the problem. A "morning" dose taken at 6 PM before a shift lands when her body is primed for sleep, and her scores were describing the hour, not the capsule.
The fix was what I call a relative morning: dose and log against your own waking window, not the clock on the wall. Even the best input won't balance if the entry timing is wrong. Dose timing for day-shift folks is a separate subject, and it gets its own post here.
Can an audio program share a ledger with pills?
By then my sheet showed a plateau, and I carried a capsule-only bias: if it didn't come in a sealed bottle, it wasn't real science. Then I ran into The Brain Song, an audio-based approach instead of a pill. The accountant in me balked — how do you track the ROI of a sound?
Easily, as it turns out. The log doesn't care about format: same three scores, same two moments each day. I ran my usual routine against the audio program, which is as close to a controlled comparison as one man and one spreadsheet can get.
About ten minutes into the first session, I noticed a light, cool sensation around my temples. It wasn't the jittery spike coffee gives — more like a desk being cleared. I logged it as an observation, not a result.
My wife counted fourteen supplement bottles on the counter, a tiny plastic skyline, and laughed. She stopped laughing when she noticed I'd quit asking her the same question three times. My recall score hit an 8, the highest number in the sheet.
Treat that as one person's numbers with no control group behind them. The pills-versus-audio comparison is laid out side by side in NeuroPrime vs Brain Song for Better Name Recall and Memory.
Start your own log before you buy anything
The most useful answer I give is a dull one: log first, buy second. Track focus, sleep, and dose timing across a stretch of ordinary days before the first bottle or program arrives, so you have something honest to compare against.
A buddy from the pickleball crowd at the Allen Community Center asked me which product to start with. Nothing, I told him — not yet. How to tell a real change from a hopeful one has its own post on this site, and it's worth reading before you spend anything.
Sometimes the best move isn't another product like NeuroPrime or The Genius Song — it's a tighter test.
If your mental accounts feel perpetually in the red, start the log. And if you're tired of the plastic skyline on your counter, the audio approach is the one whose numbers kept trending up in my sheet without adding another line item to the budget. The program I've been logging is here: The Brain Song. Keep your own records — the numbers never lie, even if our memories occasionally do.