What I learned from one year of tracking my mood
I first started to use Daylio in January 2019, just after my Winter break. At the time, I wanted to continue to develop an app I had initially built in my first year of university that helped users track their mood by inputting whether they were happy or sad for that day. In addition, it showed them how they were feeling in certain periods and displayed some global data of all recorded inputs.
As I was doing some research to gain ideas and inspiration, I coincidentally came across Daylio among several other mood tracking apps. It was disheartening, because I had realized that what I had in mind already existed, but I took the opportunity to give it a try and see how I would feel after a few weeks into it.
While I started to compile more and more entries, they became part of my routine. Here’s the workflow: the user gets a reminder (optional) to input how their mood has been throughout the day. There are five customizable moods which represent values from 1 (negative) to 5 (positive). The following screen allows the user to select which activities they did during the day that contributed to feeling in that specific way. There is also an additional field to enter a message relevant to the user. The app has other cool additional features such as achievements, weekly and monthly reports, and simple data analysis showing how often an activity is present with a specific mood. The concept seemed cool enough, so I stuck to it.
Next thing I know a year had passed and I could see my progress, moods and emotions over time. The app also includes a very simple, yet insightful feature called Year in Pixels. It consists of a table with all of the days of the year represented as dots, where each day has a different color based on the mood that day.
In addition, as the month progresses, a monthly chart on the main tab shows the highs and lows. After a year, it was interesting to see how my months played out. Spoiler alert: I didn’t really find any pattern, unfortunately. (But if you can, I’d be interested to hear what you find).
In fact, it would have been too easy if the summer months all had a noticeable increase in my perceived mood, or if weekends also were better than weekdays. This led me to think about how I actually felt about the data I collected, and in addition, to how we track data overall.
I find that nowadays there is so much information that can be tracked and stored that it becomes a real challenge to figure out what to select and what to disregard. In the end, it’s a cost-benefit analysis. For every action or event that is tracked, the user needs to invest time, energy and perhaps even mental effort to follow the process. The implications of this are nearly limitless. People can track what they listen to (songs, podcasts, the sounds of birds on their walk to work), what they watch (movies, TV shows, how many BMWs they see in a week), what they eat (different cuisines, macronutrients, the colors of their food), how many lines of code they write in a month, how many books they read in a year and the corresponding lessons learned, their daily mood and feelings…
This can create a huge dataset with hundreds of metrics for each person. On top of that, data analysis can be applied to each one of the individual values to find patterns, similarities, connections… And with any kind of data there needs to be a way to visualize it, so here comes the challenge of figuring out how this information needs to be displayed. There is so much to think about. All to satisfy the burning question: why am I doing this?
Why should it be worth it for someone to track their life, in whichever aspect that may be? If you came here expecting an answer, I’m sorry to miss your expectations. I want to ask a question that I think may not have been asked enough. Tracking and measuring come at a cost. An interesting, similar scenario occurs with sharing. As per tracking data, sharing data also comes at a cost. People can share any of their data with friends or strangers. Don’t want to share data? Sure. Share thoughts, opinions, your passions, desires, stories and deepest fears. But why?
I cannot hope to find an objective answer to my questions, so I will have to settle for my own conclusions, unsatisfying precisely for their lack of objectivity. In my case, I try to minimize the cost and maximize the benefit. I’ve grown up to aim at maximizing my efficiency, to the point where it has even gotten out of hand, so I have had to make some readjustments to become more realistic.
Going back to Daylio, I wanted to make the most of it. After one year I decided I was going to stop. At around the same time as my one year anniversary since I started using the app, I had also concluded a month of using my Fitbit. Even though it initially felt so cool to look at my heart rate, caloric consumption, active minutes and sleep quality, I cared so much about my statistics that I grew tired of them. And this is the point that made me change my mindset: if the activity concurs such a low cost to me, it’s worth it for the benefit, even if seemingly small. I then remembered to spend less time on the tracking apps, so that they would stop becoming chores — it changed everything.
And thus here I am, still using Daylio, after one year. I have changed the app colors as well as the structuring of tasks, and thanks to it submitting entries has considerably improved.
So what did I learn from one year of mood tracking? Not that much about my own habits; in fact I learned how there isn’t really any distinct pattern. Yet despite the apparent lack of usefulness, I regardless ended up finding the results really cool. Why? Because they represent a part of me, which is now forever captured. It gives a sense of immortality.
The tracking made me think of data in general and how it’s used and shared among people. There is so much that we can store digitally in our modern world, so much that we can share, that it’s important we consider the cost of us doing so. I believe we still cannot hope to find an objective set of metrics to help guide us on the path that optimizes what we track and what we share. Yet, perhaps we shouldn’t. And maybe that precisely is one of the parts that makes life so unique: it’s inherently unpredictable, and drastically beautiful.
