I often wonder why I feel the way I do. Most times, the reason I wonder is not for positive reasons.
I’ve been told that Major Depressive Disorder is the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain. Most commonly prescribed to solve the issue is psychiatric medication, along with changes in behavior. Activities often recommended include exercise, social time, and breaking large tasks into smaller ones.1
I decided to take a look at my mood over a two week period to see if there were any patterns I could find in my mood for two main reasons.
- To understand what makes me happy.
- To understand what makes me unhappy.
In order to collect this data, I created a spreadsheet of the hours from 8:00AM to Midnight every single day, and tracked my overall mood on the hour. I took notes as to what could possibly be affecting my mood, and then scraped that textual data to categorize each hour’s activity to then further analyze the data.
The first chart on the Mood&Time dashboard looks at my mood over time. Quite simply, it aggregates my day to day mood to most easily look at my best days vs. the worst ones. Unsurprisingly, my mood is much higher on weekends as compared to weekdays, with nearly every one of my highest rated days taking place on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.
The second chart looks at average mood by time of day. The worst part of my day is waking up, while the best parts of my day are usually right after lunch & in the evening when I tend to have some free time.
The second dashboard focuses on the activities associated with the moods. I categorized each hour in order to try and see some trends associated with each type of activity. I found that music, coffee, food, and spending time with my girlfriend were the 4 things that have the most positive impact on my mood. Waking up, sitting in meetings, and being fraudulently charged hundreds of dollars are the three worst parts of my day regularly.
Class was an interesting one to look at. Overall, I enjoy my studies, but after a long day of work, I often feel as though I have less to give to class. Unfortunately, my mood usually drops at some point in class as I am exhausted and would like to go home/sleep.
The stacked bar graph that counts the number of hours spent on certain activities was very helpful in figuring out actionable insights for my own life. It was interesting to see how the things that I spend most of my time doing (chilling, work) are not my favorite activities. I should try to spend more time on music-forward activities as I tend to have far more fun when I focus on those. Perhaps I should spend more time at the club!
If I were to run this project again, I would make a couple distinct changes. First – I would more actively track sleep & try and get more continuous data. I think it would be helpful to associate the amount of sleep I got with the next morning as opposed to arbitrarily cutting off my data collection at midnight. I also think it would be more effective to track activities every fifteen minutes to get more accurate.
Data Source here: XM Mood Tracker Spreadsheet
- “Major Depression.” Johns Hopkins Medicine, Johns Hopkins Medicine, 3 Nov. 2023, www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/major-depression#:~:text=With%20treatment%2C%20you%20should%20feel,worthless%2C%20helpless%2C%20and%20hopeless.
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