Thanks for writing this article. If the feedback helps, I found your self-disclosure much more illustrative than “gooey.”
I made a point of noting non-sadness deficiencies in my status
Did you formally track your mental state at any point? The luminosity series, among other things, has gotten me thinking about the fact that my overall historical impression of my mood status has been a pretty poor indicator of my day-to-moment mood status. I can get fuzzy snapshots by reading through my scattered past writing, but am missing a lot of data. So I’ve been working on a system to do some more regular, granular tracking, and I wondered if others here have a) found tracking effective at all, b) particular levels of granularity met your needs, c) found any particular system or tool helpful. (I’m considering building a tool for this process if I can’t find one, and would happily share here if there’s interest.)
Edit: This seems unclear on a re-read. I meant to say my general impression of my past moods approximates the sum of my moment-to-moment moods poorly; I’m planning to take data to get a more accurate estimate.
I have tried the data-hog approach in the past (about a year ago I stopped, after 5 months keeping daily logs of a few basic things), and
a) it did nothing to help me (back then my error was to not know what to actually do with the data; well, I had one idea, but it came out negative)
b) I collected data once per day; for me this was already quite a burden
c) I thought to write a tool for this, but for what I was interested in, any spreadsheet app was sufficient
Now my experience is, if you know what you want to change, the “attentiveness” approach (I hope I got the correct word from the dict, without some stupid connotation) is much more successful. Also, for longer-term mood-cycles, referring to my own notes of the corresponding time seems as good as I can make use of it now. I never got back looking at any numbers or graphs from the detailed-log.
At your edit: AFAIK this re-calculation of past experiences is well studied, though I do not know for which experience-domains this has been researched. If I do remember correctly, there was a Kahneman TED presentation linked here a few weeks ago, giving a side-note on this, and funny and short enough to fill a coffee break. Maybe from there you can find further references.
Thanks for writing this article. If the feedback helps, I found your self-disclosure much more illustrative than “gooey.”
Did you formally track your mental state at any point? The luminosity series, among other things, has gotten me thinking about the fact that my overall historical impression of my mood status has been a pretty poor indicator of my day-to-moment mood status. I can get fuzzy snapshots by reading through my scattered past writing, but am missing a lot of data. So I’ve been working on a system to do some more regular, granular tracking, and I wondered if others here have a) found tracking effective at all, b) particular levels of granularity met your needs, c) found any particular system or tool helpful. (I’m considering building a tool for this process if I can’t find one, and would happily share here if there’s interest.)
Edit: This seems unclear on a re-read. I meant to say my general impression of my past moods approximates the sum of my moment-to-moment moods poorly; I’m planning to take data to get a more accurate estimate.
I have tried the data-hog approach in the past (about a year ago I stopped, after 5 months keeping daily logs of a few basic things), and
a) it did nothing to help me (back then my error was to not know what to actually do with the data; well, I had one idea, but it came out negative)
b) I collected data once per day; for me this was already quite a burden
c) I thought to write a tool for this, but for what I was interested in, any spreadsheet app was sufficient
Now my experience is, if you know what you want to change, the “attentiveness” approach (I hope I got the correct word from the dict, without some stupid connotation) is much more successful. Also, for longer-term mood-cycles, referring to my own notes of the corresponding time seems as good as I can make use of it now. I never got back looking at any numbers or graphs from the detailed-log.
At your edit: AFAIK this re-calculation of past experiences is well studied, though I do not know for which experience-domains this has been researched. If I do remember correctly, there was a Kahneman TED presentation linked here a few weeks ago, giving a side-note on this, and funny and short enough to fill a coffee break. Maybe from there you can find further references.