Mood Analysis
I’ve been tracking my daily mood and activities for a year now, and I have come across some interesting patterns by analyzing it. Here are some things I found out:
Over the last one year, most of the days, my mood was good (85.5%), which is to say, I was not feeling terrible, but neither was I jumping with joy. It’s the average-kinda mood you expect to have when things are going fine. Also, my really good, awesome days (6%) were fewer than my kinda-sucks, bad days (8.5%).
Next is the same mood data, charted weekly.
Jan ‘21 to May ‘21 had relatively more bad days and no awesome days. Perhaps because India was going through the massive second wave of CoVid, and all of us were locked in our houses. I was also dealing with a back injury, and was unable to do any physical activities. But things have been looking better now, with one awesome day almost every week since May ‘21.
Locked in my house over the last one year, I spent most of my free time reading, writing or programming. Intriguingly, there was not much overlap between these hobbies. Most days I pursued only one of them, and that too happened in streaks of days. Of course, many days I didn’t do any of them at all, and instead just sulked on my sofa.
I use Daylio to track my mood, events and activities. With some fancy statistics, it tells how events and activities affect my mood. Some of them have a positive influence, that is, doing them makes me happier than average. And similarly, some have negative influence. The next chart shows some events/activities, and their positive/negative influence on my mood.
Last year, traveling sucked. And since I tried staying in most of the time, almost all of my traveling was of emergency nature. So it’s no wonder that traveling had the most negative influence on my mood. I also learned that bad sleep makes me miserable.
On the positive side, visiting friends IRL, though it was not often, always made my day, as evident from its big positive influence on my mood. And of course, I love sleeping.
Finally, some data on mood swings. I define a mood swing when the mood of a day is different from the mood of the day before it. Here’s a histogram of mood swings per week:
Most of the weeks, I had two mood swings (18 weeks). Many weeks, I had no swings at all (16 weeks). On the other hand, there was one particular week in which my mood swinged five times!
So that’s it for now. I’ll keep tracking the various aspects of my life, and looking into them to understand myself better.