What I’ve been wondering for some time now is whether the causation can go in reverse—i.e. whether intense thinking about your life’s overall strategy can be recognized by your brain as “that mood” and actually trigger the emotional ensemble associated with depression.
You know, this is something that we can test. Keep some measure of mood for a while—randomly sample “how are you feeling” on a 1-5 scale, say, (or better, on one of these). After a couple of weeks for calibration. spend a couple of weeks where you write out hopes, fears, and ramifications about your overall life strategy for 20 minutes or so, every morning or night. Try other, similar tests. See what results.
I’ve been using MercuryApp to track my mood on a daily basis for a few months now.
One problem: it’s very noisy data. I consciously recalibrated my happiness set point sometime in january following Alicorn’s strategy, and it’s really hard looking at the curve with its ups and downs to tell when that happened.
ETA: I’m not sure the experiment you propose is wise. As far as I’m concerned this is definitely “don’t do this at home” science. Depression sucks.
Actually, given some of the information linked from Alicorn’s post, I’ll just take increased worry as a solid trigger for depression, and act on that where possible. The added value of information is pretty high, but probably not that high. :P
how do you feel right now on a scale of 1 to 10? (I don’t think 1-5 has enough gradation but I think those circle things make the whole process too involved).
You know, this is something that we can test. Keep some measure of mood for a while—randomly sample “how are you feeling” on a 1-5 scale, say, (or better, on one of these). After a couple of weeks for calibration. spend a couple of weeks where you write out hopes, fears, and ramifications about your overall life strategy for 20 minutes or so, every morning or night. Try other, similar tests. See what results.
Hm. I should start doing this.
I’ve been using MercuryApp to track my mood on a daily basis for a few months now.
One problem: it’s very noisy data. I consciously recalibrated my happiness set point sometime in january following Alicorn’s strategy, and it’s really hard looking at the curve with its ups and downs to tell when that happened.
ETA: I’m not sure the experiment you propose is wise. As far as I’m concerned this is definitely “don’t do this at home” science. Depression sucks.
Actually, given some of the information linked from Alicorn’s post, I’ll just take increased worry as a solid trigger for depression, and act on that where possible. The added value of information is pretty high, but probably not that high. :P
how do you feel right now on a scale of 1 to 10? (I don’t think 1-5 has enough gradation but I think those circle things make the whole process too involved).