The Full Circle Health Challenge - a personal journey through my first Fyle health challenge
And the kick in the rear I needed to actually start doing all the things I made new year's resolutions for.
I joined Fyle as a senior backend engineer in March 2025 and I had done my fair share of research which included a very compelling read about the previous health challenge. I’m a self-proclaimed enthu-cutlet, I’ve been a yogi since childhood, and I started taking a more balanced view of fitness since 2020, so when a few weeks into my tenure at Fyle our indefatigable offsite committee announced the “Full Circle Health Challenge” for May 2025 — a team challenge this time — I was super excited. I somehow tripped and fell into the position of team leader for our team of five and we were off to the races.
I’ll put down the challenge format as simply as I can for some context. We could get 1 point per person per day by doing 45+ minutes of physical activity that day, and 2 bonus points per person per week for maintaining a 7 day streak for that week’s bonus challenge. The weekly challenges ranged from quite simple (10 minutes of meditation) to nearly impossible (<90 minutes screen time? In this economy?). To win, each team of five had to cumulatively collect 35+ points every week, leaving little room for off-weeks (**foreshadowing**). The bonus challenges were the most exciting for me —
(Week 1, 21st April) 💧 Hydration Nation - Drink 2.5L+ water daily
(Week 2, 28th April) 🧘🏻♀️ Zen it to Win it - Meditate for 10+ minutes daily
(Week 3, 5th May) 📵 Scroll-Free Society - Limit phone screen time to <90 mins daily
(Week 4, 12th May) 😴 Snooze to Cruise - Sleep 8+ hours daily
The committee’s goal was sustainability and consistency — we couldn’t make up for slow days by doubling up workouts. We couldn’t win without consistency. Being new to the company, not really knowing my team, and not really sure if I could achieve these challenges, I was mostly expecting to be there for a good time not a long time. As the days and weeks went by, I noticed improvements in my health that I couldn’t ignore, and decided to document this journey for posterity!
The week before: Prep!
In true enthu-cutlet fashion, I spent the week before the challenge downloading all the tracking apps — sleep tracking, water intake tracking, meditation, screen time tracking. I set up the Minimalist phone launcher and app timers, made plans for daily long walks even on rest days. I started keeping an eye on my normal water intake (shockingly low) and screen time (terrifyingly high). I also started trying out all these apps and skipping over paywalled ones, buggy ones, and ones with overly complicated UI. I was determined to give my best shot to every single week’s bonus challenge since every single one related in some way to one of my many new years’ resolutions for this year.
Week 1: 💧 Hydration Nation
I knew this would be a tough one for me, considering my history of failure in trying to increase my water intake. Getting to one litre would be a good day for me. So I set up my baking scale, my emotional support water bottle, my 7 day free trial to WaterMinder, and made sure to track every single sip. This strategy also made sure that the challenge was at the very forefront of my mind all day every day (turns out, water bottle on a weighing scale is just odd enough that I couldn’t visually tune it out and forget). Not a single sip of water went uncounted! Looks like all I needed to win was this highly specific combination of gamification, a team to hold me accountable, a constant visual cue, the promise of prizes, and the (frankly delusional) week 1 optimism of topping the leaderboard.
Week 1 ended with the TCS 10K run (and my personal worst time which I will not be getting into). I had been incredibly sore and in a lot of pain during all my 6K and 7K practice runs in the months prior, but I was pleasantly surprised to feel zero soreness after the full 10K — something I can only attribute to this unprecedented increase in my water intake in the week prior.
Week 2: 🧘🏻♀️ Zen it to Win it
From the day of the health challenge announcement, I chalked this up as an easy week. As a yogi I’m no stranger to meditation, and do genuinely enjoy it and have experienced its benefits for many years. Looking ahead though, I was anticipating week 3 as my white whale.
So I started using this week to prep for week 3’s challenge. While practicing staying away from my phone I discovered an incredibly upsetting habit of constantly unlocking it to check for notifications multiple times an hour.
Our collective fracturing of attention spans has been of concern to me since I saw this Anna Akana video —
I have noticed my own attention span dwindling over the years, with reading fewer books and spending more hours on Instagram. I started this year wanting to reclaim my attention and so week 2’s meditation challenge was the perfect set up for week 3’s screen time challenge for me. I found Calm’s 7 Days of Focus series and practiced it for 10 minutes every day, first thing in the morning.
Unfortunately thanks to the low-screen-time practice, this was also the week I lost my treasured 108-day Wordle streak. Alas.
On the plus side, I did find myself naturally drinking far more water than I used to before week 1, so consistency was already showing results!
Week 3: 📵 Scroll-Free Society
My white whale at last. I had looked at my average screen time on my phone during prep week — 4 hours.
So I spent the weekend gathering six novels to read during the week, aiming to read a few pages every time I felt tempted to go on my phone. I noticed in previous weeks, my longest screen time was either on WhatsApp (with long conversations), Instagram (mindless scrolling, mainly), Swiggy (apparently I was regularly scrolling for 30+ minutes wondering what to order!?), or the alarm app (when it would ring continuously for 20+ minutes if I didn’t hear it). There were also instances of Slack or other work apps taking up time. So my plan of action was clear.
Keep WhatsApp conversations to a minimum, make phone calls instead (with the screen locked - did you know a phone call also counts for screen time unless you lock your screen?)
Set up Instagram as a restricted app on Minimalist phone launcher (to kick me out when the app timer was done. This was a game-changer!)
Set up similar app timers for Swiggy, Slack, Clock and other apps to prevent unintended screen use
I experimented with all these strategies over the previous two weeks to find all the edge cases (that’s how I found out phone calls take up screen time), and it paid off!
This was a tough challenge for me with many takeaways. There was definitely a big sense of disconnect — those long async WhatsApp conversations were my only way of connecting with friends with different schedules and different timezones, who I ended up speaking to far less during this week. My reduced Instagram usage also led to far fewer conversations with the friends I keep in touch with there.
On the flip side, I saw the results of one of my new years resolutions. Not wasting so many hours on Instagram gave me that many more hours to read, and I ended up reading 7 books (2.5K pages!) this week alone — my most productive reading week of the year so far! I also saw the “battery low” notification on my Kindle for the first time in many many months :)
In the long term, <90 minutes screen time may be a stretch, but 4 hours was definitely overkill. I’m hoping to find a happy middle where I can stay connected to all the things I want to be connected to, and still be able to mindfully disconnect the rest of the time. The long-term goal is to cut the doomscrolling and consume mindfully, and I finally proved to myself over this week that I could do it!
(Alas, this was the week my team slipped below the victory threshold, but it was a tough time for a few folks and so, “Que será, será, whatever will be will be” — the benefits are still free and I wasn’t planning to stop!)
Week 4: 😴 Snooze to Cruise
At last the final week of the challenge — one where we had to literally sleep our way to the finish line. This did mean sleeping by 9:30pm every single day so that I could be up by 6am to make it to yoga class. This is close enough to my usual schedule that it was quite doable, I just made sure not to make any evening plans this week so as to not upset the routine!
I spent this week reflecting and trying to reach for sustainable versions of the previous 3 weeks’ worth of challenges — meaning more water, less doomscrolling, more yoga, and self-care.
As I reflected on the previous 3 weeks of challenges, I saw how this simple points-based motivation was enough for me to make the changes I had been talking about making for months. I was able to keep up 5-6 days a week of activity every single week of the challenge. I successfully made it through all four bonus challenges, and I saw significant benefits from making the effort. Benefits that I had theoretically always known about (enough to make it to my vision board), but for the first time felt the practical effects of.
Reflections
The previously described indefatigable offsite committee (Shoutout to Meeha!) also posted some incredibly wholesome bonus challenges through the weeks — going for a walk with a loved one, having a healthy snack, putting on a face mask, and just doing something that brings joy. All things that really brought into sharp focus the recipe for a happy, wholesome, healthy life. Meeha’s weekly highlights also helped me be inspired by my colleagues’ grit and determination — through their personal bests, perseverance, and pushing of limits, I stayed motivated every week to keep at it. The energy of the committee, my team, and all the other teams was a positive spiral for the ages.
All in all, my first Fyle health challenge was a positively transformative experience, and my team may not have won but I feel like a winner nonetheless!