Wed, Jan 26 2011
Jaw pain is still the same. Dentist tomorrow. Not much happened.
to a good 250-500 words) I also tried to keep a record of three "mood variables." Happiness, Unhappiness, and Satisfaction.
The scale I gave myself was 1-10 - With one being the lowest and ten being the highest. I figured that with such a scale, and only allowing myself to answer in whole numbers, I wouldn't be in the position where every day was, say, a three, if I were using a 1-5 scale. I don't really have perfectly neutral days. So, even though five and six are right in the middle of the scale, they're tipped just enough that I have useful information.
This was something I thought of doing while reading The Happiness Project (and I'm starting to feel like this is becoming a marketing point for that book - I swear, it isn't. The book just happens to be on my reading list right now, and is the reason that I even started this project). At one point, Gretchen Rubin talks about how she came to find her "happiness formula."
Suddenly ... everything slipped into place, and my happiness formula sprang into my mind with such a jolt that I felt as if the other subway riders must have been able to see a lightbulb appearing above my head.
To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right.
Well, I thought about this and tried to figure out how to best apply it to my own life. I simplified the terms - Happy for "feeling good," Unhappy for "feeling bad," and Satisfied for "feeling right." Then I decided to track, on a day-to-day basis, how I feel in all three categories.
This is what January looked like, for as much as I actually monitored (I ended up not posting most of January, I hope that February is a much larger graph).
I noticed a couple of things right away when I started doing this.
My happiness and unhappiness, feeling good and feeling bad, were independent scales. I could be happy and unhappy at the same time, and they didn't necessarily effect one another.
For example - early in the month I was very upset about losing Moe, one of my rats. I was distraught and unhappy about it (her sickness and decline came as a shock and a surprise). It wasn't until I rescued three rats that I felt some sort of closure about Moe. However, despite feeling a nagging unhappiness (a 1 or 2 on my scale), it didn't really change my happiness level. And being happy about something didn't necessarily make the unhappiness go away.
That isn't to say that the two had nothing to do with one another. When I was happier I was less unhappy, and when I was unhappy I tended to be less happy. But the two were different scales, not part of the same sliding scale. When I first set up the data sets I had separated them expecting something more like this:
Happiness 10 --- Unhappiness 1
Happiness 9 --- Unhappiness 2
Happiness 8 --- Unhappiness 3
etc.
But, as you can see on my graph, the numbers didn't correlate quite that well.
There was also the fact that my satisfaction had little to do with my level of happiness or unhappiness. On days that I happened to be happier, I also happened to feel more satisfied - but not because I was happy. From what I can tell, being happy tends to help me have more energy (or gives me more spoons), which makes it easier for me to motivate myself to get things done (and allows me to use up fewer spoons), which in turn helps me feel more satisfied about myself and my life.
Now I'm excited to see how the whole year will look once I'm done - and to see how much more frequent my happiness level is six or higher and my unhappiness level is five or lower.
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