#108: If happiness is our goal, why aren't we tracking our progress?
Harnessing the action and assessment feedback loop to live happier lives.
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“Sue, our podchat is ready!”
Even though I was reading the words, in my mind I could hear Gareth’s lilting accent wafting across the Atlantic. This feel-like-I’ve-known-you-forever chap is a new friend I met at Do Wales. Despite the thousands of miles, cultural differences, and varied upbringings that separate us, we are simpatico.
While architecting is his day job, Gareth Dauncey is also the founder of the Mood app and host of the podcast How Do You Feel Today.
Does that description make you think he’s a tree-hugging, airy-fairy, woo-woo-worshiping hippy? You know, talking about his feeeeeeeeeelings?
The truth is, Gareth built his app and started his podcast from a place many of us reach at a point (or many points) in our lives: the feeling that we just don’t want to get out of bed. Though we may have meaningful work and loving families, we’re exhausted and unmotivated. We feel like giving up, but we can’t figure out why…
We can call it ‘depression’, but then it’s easy to distance ourselves from it — “Oh, I’ve never seen a therapist or been diagnosed or medicated. That’s not me. I haven’t been depressed.”
So let’s just call it… low points.
Gareth was tired of low points running his life. So instead of gritting his teeth, pretending everything was fine, and carrying on, he turned his attention toward them.
Using a set of colored-pens and a traditional calendar as a prototype, Gareth started to track how he felt.
(This was before Apple watches, Oura rings, or the next-gen fitbits!)
Just once a day, he’d draw a line on the current day in a color that represented his mood. This daily, pen-to-paper ritual turned out to be powerful by:
creating awareness in the moment about how he felt and…
proliferating over a week, a month, a year in all it’s color-coded glory to reveal that his mood swings weren’t as random as he had originally thought.
For those of you who have struggled with unpredictable emotions (myself included!), you know how huge this is.
Gareth ended up being able to zoom out and see the trends — how his mood sunk… and rose. Then he could reflect on why. What was happening in his life, his family, his business, the world? What outside forces were affecting his internal landscape.
Today, Gareth’s highlighter/calendar method has evolved into the Mood app. It asks one simple question: How do you feel today? You answer by tapping a color gradient within a range of high to low. That’s it. Then, over time, you can see patterns in the stripes of hue…
What was I doing during that really dark-colored time? Oh right, that was when I was reintegrating back into real life after pilgriming, complete with a pile bills and a broken air conditioner.
What was I doing when the colors were consistently light? That was when the kids and I were lallygagging on the sectional, laughing our asses off while watching track, triathlon, and table tennis at the Olympics.
When you dip, you can assess why. When you rise, same.
How simple is that? Track how you feel in order to reflect, analyze the root causes, and course correct.
I can’t believe I’ve never thought of tracking my mood.
“What is measured can be managed,” and all that.
But it almost seemed… too simplistic? Our mood is affected by so many things — work, family, relationships, diet, exercise, sleep, the weather, the traffic, how frothy our cappuccino is that morning. So instead of ever thinking to track how I felt, I’ve tracked and optimized plenty of other things. I was briefly so obsessed with walking 10k steps a day that I wore a track around my living room rug.
But I’ve been making it more complicated than it has to be.
For many of us, the goal of having a slimmer waist line, sleeping more deeply, or getting the promotion at work is to eventually… be happier, right?
(Ok, maybe sometimes it’s to be healthier, but what’s so great about living to be 90 if we’re miserable?)
We can only know if our actions are doing any good if we track the outcomes. And I’d argue, feeling good — peaceful, content, joyful, spacious, pick your “light” emotion of choice — is the ultimate outcome of them all.
Without this data:
We might keep mindlessly repeating tactics that don’t work, hamstringing our way out of lows and into highs.
We might beat ourselves up every time things don’t go quite right. Then we might stop trying at all.
Gareth’s mission might seem only helpful to those of us who experience problematic mood swings.
But it’s more than that.
He’s helping us help ourselves.
In order to build a life that feels good, we have to get in touch with our core — what actually makes us feel better and what actually makes us feel worse. So we don’t end up chasing ideas (frequently other peoples’) of what will bring us joy, only to end up depleted and confused.
Self reflection isn’t an optional, superfluous step.
It’s the only thing that ensures our actions are based on what actually works for us. Otherwise, we’re wandering around in the dark, hoping to somehow stumble upon happiness.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s about the journey, not the destination. But we can at least know we’re moving in the right direction.
Tracking the hues,
I love the idea of tracking emotions, and there is so much research to back it up. In case you haven't heard of it, check out the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and Dr. Marc Brackett. So much to digest there, and also associated with another mood tracking app, called How We Feel. Thanks for reminding me about this powerful tool for mindfulness!
Happy Thanksgiving!