Energy Drift
Whether your overall energy baseline is shifting up or down over the past month.
What is Energy Drift?
Energy Drift tracks whether your energy baseline has shifted over the past two weeks compared to your prior data. It's a slow-moving signal, designed to catch the gradual changes that day-to-day signals can't see.
If your charged-phase highs and drained-phase lows are roughly the same, but your average has nudged up or down a couple of points sustained across two weeks, that's a drift. Worth knowing about.
Why it matters
A lot of ADHD research focuses on the immediate: what's happening this week, this charged phase, this crash. But sustained baseline shifts tell their own story.
Energy Drift catches things like:
- Seasonal changes: many people see their energy baseline shift with daylight and temperature
- Medication adjustments: a dose change shows up in the baseline before it shows up day-to-day
- Lifestyle shifts: new routines, new job, new sleep schedule. These all leave a baseline trace
- Sustained stress: a multi-week stretch of higher demands often drifts the baseline down even when each individual day still looks OK
For ADHD specifically, baseline drift can be one of the earliest signs that something is changing, long before crashes get deeper or cycles get shorter.
How it works
Energy Drift compares your last 14 days to all your prior data (your data older than the last two weeks). It needs at least 14 days of prior baseline to make a meaningful comparison, so the signal unlocks at 28 total days of logging.
The number you see is the difference in average energy: how much higher or lower your last two weeks are compared to your historical baseline.
But the signal does one more thing that's important: it scales by your own variability. If your data is normally very consistent (low SD), even a small absolute drift is notable for you and the signal will surface it. If your data is naturally wild (high SD), a similar absolute drift might just be noise and the signal will stay quiet.
This is more accurate than a universal threshold. A 0.5-point shift means different things for different people.
Reading your results
| Value | What it means |
|---|---|
| +1.5 or similar | Your recent baseline is higher than your prior baseline |
| -1.5 or similar | Your recent baseline is lower than your prior baseline |
| Small numbers (close to zero) | No meaningful drift detected for your variability level |
When the drift is large enough relative to your normal variability, it surfaces as an insight. Smaller drifts stay on the card without an insight, visible if you want to check, but not flagged as something to act on.
What you can do
-
When Energy Drift is positive (up): Whatever has been different in the last two weeks has been working. Hold those conditions in place if you can. If your Burnout Risk is also elevated, this might be a good time to coast rather than push. The lift is real, but pushing further can shorten the runway.
-
When Energy Drift is negative (down): A sustained dip below your baseline rarely points to one bad week. Worth thinking about what's changed: sleep, demands, stress, season, illness, hormonal cycles. Smaller demands and more recovery often help reverse the trend.
-
When stable: Your baseline is holding. That's its own kind of information. Predictability is valuable.
Sources
- Castellanos, F.X. et al. (2011). "Intraindividual variability in ADHD." Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences. PubMed 21769722
- Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences. The SD-scaling approach used here is grounded in Cohen's d for effect size.