[OC] I’ve been tracking my daily sneezes for 10+ years. Here the main results

Source: Me. Since 2016, I’ve been logging my individual sneezes daily. Tools: Microsoft Excel

Here are the key findings:

• Total yearly sneezes dropped from 1000-1500 to around 300-500 after 2019
• Despite the overall decline, occasional “spike days” still occur, typically when I have a cold
• The number of sneezes generally drops during summer
• Overall, weekends have been slightly more sneezy
• The distribution of daily sneezes resembles a power law: most days have 0, few days have many
• The daily lag-1 autocorrelation during the years is slightly positive, meaning that a sneezy day is more likely followed by another, and the same is true for a day without sneezes

Records:

• The daily max is 42, recorded during 2017
• The record month is October 2016 with 252 total sneezes, while the record low is March 2025 with only 5
• The yearly max is 1656 in 2016, while the record low is 303 in 2025
• The running total since 2016 is 8083 (including 2026)
• Longest streak without sneezes: 15 days in March 2025
• Longest streak with sneezes: 31 days in October 2016, only recorded month with at least 1 sneeze per day

Some notes:

• The last table shows how I log raw data daily (2025 presented here), along with the related statistics
• I actually started in 2015, but back then I only kept track of the running total, achieving 2153 by the end of the year, with a daily max of 54
• Apparently, in 2020 my lifestyle changed dramatically with the pandemic, which in turn made the total yearly sneeze settle on lower values stably
• One could think the histograms should reflect a Poisson distribution, counting events in a fixed interval of time (a day), but this is not the case. Instead, the power law can be appreciated in Figure 6, clearly depicting a linearly decreasing trend with the logarithmic scale
• The median number of daily sneezes has steadily dropped to 0 after 2019, meaning that most days I don’t sneeze anymore