Throughout my adult life, I’ve tried tracking various metrics in the hope that I’ll develop insights that are not just interesting, but useful.

Sometimes this works out really well. I have been tracking my net worth and various other financial metrics for most of my adult life, and have a very satisfying chart that shows how my situation has improved over time (despite a lot of volatility).

A lot of the time these exercises end up not being useful at all. In particular, there are countless times when I’ve tried systems for getting insights into my moods and emotions, often with an eye to identifying actions/environments that are conducive to thriving. With these experiments, it feels like very little has stuck.

I’ve worked out various things, but these have been more through organic observation and “anecdata” rather than actual data. For instance, I’ve come to realise that my moods and emotions are often driven by “hardware” rather than “software” issues.

For example:

  • Bad sleep often translates to bad mood.
  • Drinking a lot of alcohol might have a day-after effect, but the impact for me extends to the following week or two – I just don’t adapt to stress as well.
  • When I’m in a bad mood, it’s often because I’m thirsty or hungry or need to get some movement.

Usually the “software” stuff (ie, what I’m thinking) is correlated, but often a lagging indicator rather than causal. If I’m in a bad mood, I can come up with all sorts of complex reasons: things that are wrong with myself and my life and the world in general that justify feeling shitty.

But most of the time, the software is just creating a complex narrative that, when I’m my better self, I would easily counter. (It’s rationalisations all the way down!)

Having said this, there are two phone apps that I’ve used in the past year or so that have been very useful. They’ve helped me collect data and develop some very useful insight and self-knowledge. They are Daylio and How We Feel.

The funny thing is, both of them allow you to track your emotional state, and other factors that might influence your state. However, the primary value I’ve gained is that they have been easy ways to consistently track my state, and come to some insights that I hadn’t come to before.

Daylio

With Daylio, you basically track your mood each day. Ideally, you complete a check-in at the end of the day, and make a global assessment of how the day felt. (Along with ticking off various other things that you may have done over the day.)

Daylio is the first tracker I’ve used that I’ve enjoyed using enough to actually track my moods on a consistent basis, over the course of several months.

The big insight that Daylio gave to me was that I’m quite happy most of the time!!!

This was contrary to my own self-perception. Part of my self-identity was that I was quite curmudgeonly most of the time. I can present as opposite, but I often think of myself as having a much lower baseline of happiness than most people.

It turns out, that wasn’t quite right. Most of the time I’m a good 4 out of 5.

There were (and are) times when this changes, almost always for the worst. This can happen over extended periods of time. However, tracking my emotional climate with Daylio made me realise that this was not the norm, and that no matter how dark I was at any given point in time, I always seem to spring back to my baseline of feeling pretty good.

This has been very cheering!

How We Feel

How We Feel is a different type of tracker. It is different from Daylio in two big respects:

  • it encourages you to check-in regularly over the course of the day; and
  • instead of tracking your general mood on a 1-5 scale, it allows for a lot more specificity about how you’re feeling. After noting how you feel across a quadrant from low-to-high energy versus low-to-high level of pleasantness, you then scroll through a grid of many different, specific emotional states.

The main thing I get from using How We Feel is an appreciation of just how fleeting and passing my emotions are.

Suffering some sense of existential crisis? That’s no good. But I’ll almost certainly feel completely different in an hour or so.

That day that you look back on and rate as being terrible, horrible, no good, and very bad? Somehow there were moments when you felt alive!!!

Using the app regularly (which is delightful), I’ve probably improved my emotional vocabulary significantly. I’ve also come to appreciate how rich my emotional climate is, and how it could be extended further by looking at the emotions I rarely seem to experience but that are available to me.

However, the profound, transformative insight I got from using this app over an extended period of time is that emotions really can be fleeting.

I’ve always understood this, at an intellectual level. But seeing the evidence mount, and seeing the data showing how it happens day after day, has made me “know” this at a deeper level.

The data from Daylio and How We Feel has shown me something profound: not only do I bounce back from difficult moments, but I’m actually thriving most of the time. It turns out I’ve been a happy person all along - I just needed some apps to prove it to myself.