This post unveils a little bit more of my weirdness :-p Every Sunday for the last two and a half years I have set aside five minutes to grade myself on a scale from 1 to 10 on eight different aspects of my overall happiness. I then take this feedback and use it to prioritize the tasks for my week to come. For example, if I am feeling unhappy about the physical shape I am in, I add more gym appointments to my calendar. I call this exercise my emotional self portrait.
As you can see from the radar graph above, I grade my happiness in the following areas:
- Romance
- Sexual
- Social
- Spiritual
- Mental
- Physical
- Professional
- Financial
When I first started this project, I built a spreadsheet to automatically draw up some cool graphs (can graphs really ever be cool?) for me. Spreadsheet available here.
I included some of my favorites below:
Above is the average of all eight areas of happiness graphed over time. This roughly shows how happy I was overall for the last two and a half years. One note of interest is that I was quantifiably more happy when I was living in Argentina than when I was living in Los Angeles. :-) It also shows the happiest week I have ever had. (This is illustrated in the spike 3/4ths of the way through the graph.) At the time I was living in Argentina and living with both my girlfriend and one of my best friends. Good times :-D
This shows the relationship of my sexual happiness vs my romantic happiness. As you might have guessed, they correlate. ;-p My guess is that the latter led to the former as me not being romantic tended to have me sleeping on the couch more often. lol... tear.
This illustrates the relationship between my physical and mental happiness. As you can see when I was physically feeling unhappy, my mental happiness also declined.
This graph shows the relationship between my professional (job) happiness and my financial (money) happiness. I find this interesting because it is clear from the data that being more financially happy did not necessarily make me more happy with my job.
Note: I changed the dates in the graphs above so that the people who know me well won’t be able to figure out how my involvement with people and companies impacted how I was feeling at the time. It would be really weird if the Internet knew exactly how my sex life differed in relation to the girls I dated at the time ;-p That is too much sharing.
I have been working on a hobby project for about five years trying to figure out the best way to quantify happiness :-) In a roundabout way, this was one interest of mine that eventually led to the creation of my life list. I imagine this whole area will be the topic of my next book.
If you find this process or topic interesting, let me know in the comments below and I will write more about it. If people are interested, I’d be happy to open source the spreadsheet and go into more details about how this has impacted my daily mindset.
