Moments - Mood Analysis

When you ask someone about their life they can usually sum up a series of memories. Freezes in time that have defined us for who we are. The good, and the bad. These moments are usually very impactful. Getting a child with the person you love, or graduating college and partying with friends like there is no tomorrow. However there are also bad moments, lowlights so to speak.

In this series we discuss how you can start analyzing your Mood Tracker data to grow happiness and change your perspective on life. And in this addition we will discuss how to use moments, or memories, and what they can say about your happiness.

What to look out for

Mood Trackers are great tools for entering how we feel on any specific day. The scale you use can be anything from smileys to numbers. Great mood trackers go beyond this and allow you to enter a quick note about your day. Aswe analyse Mood Tracker data we kind of want to see what the best (and worst) moments of a specific time were. Because these moments can tell us a lot about about who we are and what to seek or avoid.

Express yourself

Whether you are mood tracking on paper, or are using an app, the premise of finding highlights and lowlights in our life remain the same. We need a freeform way of expressing ourselves. To show you here is a small exercise. Try to find the absolute highlight of these three days:

Day one: Happiness score: 4.5

Day two: Happiness score: 8

Day three: Happiness score: 10

Easy right, which of the three is the highlight of our weekend according to you?

If you picked the last option, you would be rightly so. If you picked the second option, well you would be absolutely right. Let’s add to the exercise by adding the text this fictional character has added to his weekend:

Day one: I had a pretty solid day, but bad news.. my best friend can’t attent my wedding. The thought of marriage kind of scares me.

Day two: We had the marriage! The ceremony was marvelous. I wanted the perfect marriage and it was amazing, but I would have never guessed the stress and anxiety I’d experience before the ceremony. And now I’m absolutely beat and ready for some rest.

Day three: Woke up next to my husband, and it was the best feeling in the world.

With the context added, some would say the marriage is a more profound moment than the day after. But just looking at the happiness scores you might say otherwise.

How Mood Trackers can help

So depending on the Mood Tracker you use, you can spot these highlights easily by finding high scores coupled with an expression such as journaling or images. Digital mood trackers can help you do this.

Luci recently added a new statistic that adds these highlights and moments for you automatically. Luci analyses your mood offline and looks for expressions coupled with high ratings to find the highlights of your month or year. Reversely, you can find expressions and low scores to do the same for lowlights, which can be a great indicator of energy drainers.

Use this to your advantage and be especially wary of lowlights that keeps repeating itself. If you can find a way to remove these experiences from your life, you will be better off. Examples: hate exams? Prepare for them better. Don’t like your job? Actively look for different work.

Concluding

So there you have it. Mood Trackers can help you to spot important moments in your life, whether these are highlights or lowlights. They may help you to spot (potentially re-occurring) themes that cost you happiness. Or, and we do hope you find these the most, events that bring you joy and happiness. Living your happiest life begins by consciously seeking more happiness in your life.

In the next addition of this series, we will go over ways to analyse and discover trends in your mood scores. Hope to see you there!