Biorhythm Journal

The SecretsJournal.

A notebook that became a program, and then a journal. Harvey Makishima began charting the three cycles against the games he watched in 1976, and the Biorhythm Secrets Journal is what he wrote down. This is the journal as a record, with its counts kept and its promises left out.

Written down, for 50 years.

Begun 1976 · Copyright 1996

What the journal is

Biorhythm Secrets was the name of the software and the journal that went with it, copyrighted together in 1996. The software counted the cycles; the journal recorded what its author noticed when he held the counts up against the days: a tired afternoon on a physical critical day, a sharp one on an intellectual high, a run of good games from a player whose emotional cycle was rising.

That is what a journal is: one person noticing, for a long time. It is not a controlled study, and it should not be read as one. The research that looked for the cycles in large groups did not find them, and our evidence page says so. The journal remains worth reading for the same reason any long record is: it shows a habit of attention, and it is the origin of the symbols and the written readings that BioCalendar still uses.

The three cycles, as the journal kept them

The journal divided each cycle into the same eight states the app shows: rising and falling above the midline, falling and rising below it, the two critical days where the wave crosses the line, and the high and the low at the turns. It gave each a symbol and, for the three cycles together, a single figure it called the BioRating.

The eight symbols a cycle passes through, and what each means
SymbolStateWhere in the cycle
cCritical, turning upDay 1 of the cycle. It crosses the line on its way up and the battery starts to charge. A critical day, traditionally read as unsettled rather than bad.
CCritical, turning downThe cycle crosses the line on its way down, which takes two days. Critical again: a change of direction.
HFull chargeThe peak of the cycle. The battery is at its fullest; from tomorrow it eases.
LLowest chargeThe bottom of the cycle. From here the battery begins to recharge.
+ChargingAbove the line and climbing towards full. Energy building each day.
#Charged, easingPast the peak but still above the line. Plenty of charge, slowly running down.
-DepletingBelow the line and still falling. The battery is running down towards its lowest point.
*RechargingBelow the line but climbing back, recharging towards the start of the next cycle.

The chart page sets out the days each symbol falls on for all three cycles, counted by the same engine the app uses.

23days

Physical

The author read the days above the line as the ones on which endurance and timing came easily, and the days below the line as the ones on which they did not. He paid most attention to the two critical days and the low: on those dates he recorded more tiredness than usual, and in sport a sense that timing was off. He also noted the old folk claim that colds arrive more often on those days; the journal records it as a thing people said, and the studies did not bear it out.

28days

Emotional

This is the cycle the journal returns to most. Around the critical days and the low the author recorded a tendency to take things too seriously and to over-react, and he advised himself to let decisions wait a day. He also kept a list of the unusual days people told him about, good and bad, and noticed that many fell at the two extremes of the emotional cycle: the high on day 8 and the low on day 22. He kept counting them for decades.

The legacy journal went further and called those two days lucky. We keep the record of what he noticed and make no promise about it: a day is not made fortunate by its place in a cycle, and nothing on this site or in the app says otherwise.

33days

Intellectual

The journal gives this cycle judgement, decision-making and memory. On an intellectual low the author recorded forgetting telephone numbers he dialled every week and the names of people he knew well; on an intellectual high he described his mind as sharp, "as though the switches were working well". He weighted this cycle most heavily for the positions in sport that think for the team: the quarterback, the point guard, the pitcher.

Sport by sport

From 1976 the journal was mostly about sport, because sport offered what a record-keeper needs: a published birth date, a published calendar of performances, and a score. Over the years its author wrote down which cycles he weighted for each sport he followed. The notes below are his, condensed, and they are observations, not findings.

    • E Emotional
    • P Physical
    • I Intellectual

    Basketball

    The sport the journal followed longest. Exceptional games came, in its author’s notes, with the emotional cycle positive together with either the physical or the intellectual.

    • I Intellectual
    • E Emotional

    Baseball

    For pitchers and hitters the journal watched the intellectual cycle first, then the emotional.

    • I Intellectual
    • E Emotional

    Bowling

    Precision and decision over strength: the intellectual cycle, with confidence from the emotional. The journal called its own notes here unfinished.

    • E Emotional
    • P Physical
    • I Intellectual

    Boxing

    One against one, so all three mattered to the author, the emotional for confidence and the physical for endurance.

    • E Emotional
    • I Intellectual

    Fishing

    Patience and judgement: the journal weighted the emotional and intellectual cycles for competition anglers.

    • P Physical
    • E Emotional
    • I Intellectual

    Football

    By position. Linemen: physical and emotional. The positions that read the game, the quarterback above all: emotional and intellectual.

    • E Emotional
    • I Intellectual

    Golf

    Emotional and intellectual, with the physical cycle mattering least. The journal’s one full tally, of 121 tournament winners, is a golf tally.

    • E Emotional

    Soccer

    The emotional cycle above the others: focus, coordination and the willingness to pass.

    • P Physical
    • E Emotional
    • I Intellectual

    Tennis

    All three: endurance for long matches, steadiness between points, and the intellectual cycle for shot selection.

A tally of 121 golf tournament winners

The one count in the journal that is given in full is a tally of the emotional cycle of 121 PGA Tour tournament winners from 1990 to 1992, on the final day of each tournament. The author grouped the winners by the state their emotional cycle was in.

Sixty-five in a hundred of the winners were in the positive half of the cycle. That sounds like a great deal until you remember that the positive half covers 14 of the 28 days, so about half of any group of golfers will be in it on any given day. The count is real; what it shows is that a positive emotional phase was somewhat more common among these winners than chance alone would suggest, in one tally, by one observer, with no comparison group of players who did not win. The author drew a stronger conclusion than that. We do not.

Emotional cycle on the final day, 121 winners, 1990 to 1992
  1. +Rising, above the line49
  2. #Falling, above the line30
  3. *Rising, below the line25
  4. -Falling, below the line11
  5. LThe low6

The positive half (+ and #) is 14 of 28 days, so chance alone puts about half of any group there. The tally has 79 of 121.

From players to teams

In June 2001 the author compared the cycles of 275 NBA players on the night each scored a career high; that tally has its own page. In the 1994–95 season, the first the software ran on a PC, he compared two teams at a time through a whole season, which is the subject of the track record page. Out of that came Teambios, a spreadsheet method that rated every player on a roster for the day of a game and summed them into one figure for the team. Teambios and the spreadsheet are described on their own pages.

One idea from that work is worth keeping. The journal calls it the law of initial value: when the difference in ability between two players or two teams is large, the cycles do not come into it. A heavyweight does not lose to a lightweight because of the calendar. The author applied it to teams as a rule against reading too much into any one comparison, and it is a good rule for reading the whole journal.

What a coach took from it

The journal was written partly for coaches, and the kindest use it describes is the smallest. A coach of children who knew where each child’s cycles sat had a gentle way to talk about an off day: not a failure, a day in a pattern that comes round again. The journal suggested using the chart after a poor game to say so, and to show that the better days were already on the calendar.

The journal also proposed using the cycles to choose who plays and who takes the last shot. We leave that where it is, in the record. BioCalendar does not rate teams or choose between people; the family plan lets up to five people see their own days side by side, and that is as far as it goes.

Reading the journal now

Read it as the record of a habit: fifty years of writing down where three cycles sat and what the day was like. The app you can download is that habit made easy. It tells you where your cycles sit this morning, in plain words, and leaves the noticing to you. How it is written, and what it will never say, is set out in our editorial policy.

The records