Measuring Happiness

Here it is, 5:30 in the morning on the second day of my experiment. There are still a lot of thing I haven't sorted out or explained.

The first is, how am I going to tell if my happiness increases?
The second is, how long am I going to do this?

Of course, the only way to observe happiness is through self-reporting, especially when it comes to self-experimentation. The question is...how do I structure the reporting?

Do I try to locate my level of happiness on a ten point scale?

Do I "take my pulse" at random times throughout the day and jot down the average measurement at the end of the day?

Do I simply try to "sum up" my day's happiness level before I go to bed each night?

Do I recognize different types of happiness?

If I'm happy with my spouse but unhappy with my hair, which one do I count?

The nice thing is, there's no one to make these decisions but me. (The difficult thing is...there's no one to make these decisions but me.)

If I'd been doing this properly, I would have been taking happiness measurements for at least, preferably a month, before the experiment began. I don't really trust my hindsight assessments.


Here's one thing I can be sure of. I wasn't happy enough. I had a big enough whole in my life where happiness should have been, that felt kind of desperate to change something. I conceived of this project and set about trying to influence, and hopefully increase, the level of happiness I have each day.

So I know this: if, weeks into this experiment, I begin to feel that I have an acceptable level of happiness in my life, that is, if I am happy with my degree of happiness, then there is definitely something happening!

But I think I should take some measurements too.

It seems to me that there are two times of day that are the most important when it comes to how I'm feeling. If I feel happy when I first wake up, that's very good. That starts the day off right and gives me a good chance of being happy the whole day through. And, if I feel happy when I go to sleep at night, that's good too. That usually means I can fall asleep fast and easy, have good dreams, and wake up refreshed the next day. There's almost nothing as bad as laying in bed, struggling to sleep, and being kept awake by unhappiness in the form of anxiety, depression or dread.

In addition to those two measurements, I think I'll try to identify a low and high for the day. That shouldn't be too hard.

Yesterday's would be:

am: 6
high: 7.5
low: 3.5
pm: 4.5

Of course, there's a lot of information missing in that report. It doesn't say that I felt happiest when I was riding my bike back from the Shaman event...the one I found really boring and pointless and decided to duck out of at the first break...and enjoying the crisp and sunny fall weather.

And it doesn't explain that I felt lowest in the middle of the day, when I was starting to miss Sweetie, and feeling worried about money and frustrated at being unemployed, and resentful about doing housework and paying bills.

But that's the way it is with quantitative research, you can't explain everything. I guess that's okay.

So, I guess every day I'll need to make a "report" page. It will be a template, with room for the daily happiness numbers, and maybe room for some explanation if I feel like I want to do that.

It should also have room for reporting on the health figures. How will I know if I'm getting healthier or not? How does one go about measuring one's own health?

Well, first, I can just measure how well I'm keeping up with the "get healthy" program. When it comes down to it...I guess it doesn't really matter if it's being healthy that makes me happier, or adhering to the "get healthy" program that makes me happier. Adhering to the program is the only one I really have any control over. If my health level is not related to my efforts at getting healthy, but my efforts at getting healthy ARE related to my happiness level, then continuing with the health program is going to be the only thing that matters. So, for all intensive purposes (that's a joke) during this study I can treat "getting healthier" and "sticking to the program" as functionally synonymous.

But it would be nice to put in a few measurements that attempt to verify the connection between the program and my actual health level. So, I will measure both.

For the program I will list the 5 performance points: Eating right, exercising, drinking water, sleeping well, and hygiene, and account for my degree of compliance.

For my health: I will measure the following indicators:

Physical comfort (how I feel in my body)
Symptoms (any ailments or problems that have arisen)
Appearance (this is self-reported...do I LOOK healthy?)

Those are the three most direct ways I can think of measuring health. Here are a few more measurements that, if in a certain range, imply health. I'll take these measurements weekly.

Weight (I will measure this as pounds distant from my exact midpoint on the BMI chart. Midpoint between 134 and 174 =154. This matches with my personal experience.)
Push Ups (How many can I do in a row?)
Pull Ups (Maybe some day I'll be able to do one and count it!)
Mile Speed (How fast can I run one mile, on a track or smooth course?)

I just remembered, I'm due to get a full blood panel to find my baseline measurements of cholesterol and other things. That's perfect. I'll get it today, and get it again at the end of the study!

I'm not going to count day one in the report, because I didn't exercise, and I didn't eat according to the plan. Maybe I should use the happiness measurement from yesterday as a baseline. I think it's probably pretty standard for how I feel lately.

Of course, I'm hoping to see that my daily values go up. But, I'm also interested to see if they become more stable. Yesterday's swing from 7.5 down to 3.5 was difficult. I wonder, would I trade days like that for a stable 5.5 or 6 that lasted from waking to bed?

I don't know. Maybe I'll find out. I hope I don't. I hope that soon I'm reporting days that hover between 8 and 10. Wouldn't that be nice. It makes me happy just to think about it.