The Melodrama of Measuring Mood
Ever Wondered WHY You Feel The Way You Do?
This is part of my Inspiring Insights series. This is #1, and the idea is to discuss a topic in more detail, and then offer some tasks for your own daily practice. At the end there is always an exercise for you to practice!
How do you feel today?
Rather than just reading this next sentence, I would like you to go back to the question above, and try to truly think about it.
Still reading? Go back up and think. Or feel. Or perceive. Oh no, what is it supposed to be now?!
Look, I already kind of tricked you into doing several more steps than we do when, in the daily grind of our lives, we perceive our own feelings. You had to read my sentence, understand it (realise that it is about today), and than think about it, rather than just allowing the feeling to take over your whole being – and maybe even actions.
Normally you would more likely go straight to an expression of your anger, frustration, disappointment, fear, happiness, disgust, embarrassment or whatever else you are feeling. We all do that at least every then and now. We rely too much on sheer willpower to overcome our feelings that stop us from doing the things we want to do, and cave in most cases too quickly and too often to feelings that push us towards specific actions that are not in our best interests.
Frustrated at work about some odd work tasks that got thrown into your day? Go get another coffee and maybe a muffin and cookie with that.
Too excited about the weekend trip to a local hike that you have planned? Better check the local outdoor shop if they got any last minute deals on offer.
Disappointed with your significant other because of some house hold chores that have been exclusive done by you? Complain to a friend instead of talking to the person that matters.
But here is the simple question I would like you to ponder much more than the one at the start of this article:
Are you sure you feel the way you do just because of that one proximate event?
So you see – even the simplest cue to observe your own feelings “right now” is already complicated enough. Now, the most up to date trend in the health, fitness and wellbeing industries is to monitor your mood.
This is likely old news to you, but Apple (and likely everyone else who is even remotely trying to compete) recently announced and implemented their mental health questionnaire (and its results) into their phone and smartwatch dashboards (1). After exploring what they are exactly doing, how they are assessing it (actually, for a change, utilising validated questionnaires (2,3), yey!), and checking out how it works in practice, I have been discerning for a long time what people are supposed to do with this.
How can people benefit from this (apparently) daily assessment?
What does this mean for an individual user?
Why would people care enough to use it?
And if they use it, most importantly:
So why measure mood?
This is specifically for me a question of application. If people are going to use this daily questionnaire to “track” their mood, then
what are they going to do with it?
First, I would like to address some aspects of the reality of tracking our mood daily. Mood is already tricky to get right. Quite often it will be impossible to clearly interpret and conclude that you felt up, down or in between because your co-worker has pissed you off somehow with their attitude towards your presentation, you have not exercised or meditated for over a week, or because your morning coffee was slightly under-brewed and was lacking the usual sweetener. Or maybe it were the weeks of lack of support with the kids, chores, as well as way less quality time with your spouse. There is a lot going on in your every day life – even if you read this and do not believe it, or your routine has become so ingrained that you do not realise that there is a lot going on.
Despite popular belief, not everything will directly impact your short- and long-term wellbeing.
Still, a lot of the average to extraordinary happenings of your daily casual life will build up or consume one of your physical, mental, emotional, social or spiritual health capacities. Each of these is complex in its own right, and individual to you and your direct environment. Yet, you are supposed to be able to summarise your mood across all aspects of your life for today with one simple question and a sliding scale? And then what? “Analyse yourself”? Pinpoint your own (miss-)happenings that have caused the given state at this moment?
So, what do you think about this tech driven wellbeing/mental health approach? I truly would like to know if you are using any of it, how it is going, or also, if not at all! Please let me know in the comments - I am looking forward to writing back:
The question remains: So why measure mood?
I feel like this idea of mood tracking (+self-analysis via cute dashboards) is too much of a simplification. You cannot truly find causal relations that always go like
“Oh yes, A led to B.”
This reads, sounds and smells to me like another drive to “fool” us into believing that everything needs instant gratification. No, not just your social media feed, your favourite video game, or your WHOOP or exercise score for the day, no that is not enough. Now, you are also led to believe that you current mood is immediately open to not just analysis, but instant interpretation because you got it in your fancy smart device dashboard.
And we are not talking about a measurement that is a rational and objective assessment based on a validated process, step or method – in itself the parameter you are looking at is a subjective perception of your own mood (without all the bells and whistles of standardisation of the science that is based on).
What if:
you get all the sleep you can,
you drink all the water you need,
you meditate,
exercise,
crush problems at work all day long,
- and for an utterly unknown reason, you feel bad. What about the opposite?
It is rather easy to assume scenarios like these, where you objectively (and measurably) would appear to be (mentally & emotionally) fine, or not so well. Even if you added a perfect daily journal of the happenings of your life, there is very low probability that you will be able to interpret the reason for your current and daily mood correctly.
It is not getting better: So why measure mood?
(Plus, I hope it is clear to everyone that now the technology providers easily hold another data point about you that they can leverage to sell you “adequate” products for your current mood. Oh, you feeling a bit down and alone? How about this great deal on some alcohol and shoes?).
I have been a technology and internet nerd since about 1999. The progress, application and implementation of technology across all aspects of health, fitness and wellbeing is tremendous – I cannot deny this. It is exciting to see all these cool gadgets being pushed year on year towards new limits, functions and features. And trust me, I fully appreciate that they will and have been useful for some individuals out there. Thus, it would be very easy and convenient for me to straight jump to praising and explaining all the features and benefits of smart health and fitness tracking devices. Be it the smartwatches, the Whoop band, or anything else that most people have never heard of (e.g. heart rate monitors in a headband).
But, I am also an exercise, health and sports scientist.
Due to studying, working and researching at the German Sports University, I also had the pleasure and privilege to have used or even officially trialled a lot of devices when they were either completely unknown (e.g. FitBit wrist sensors), or not yet officially available for sale to the public (e.g. Miha Bodytec electrical musclestimulation suits). Despite this high interest and affinity for all this amazing technology and the data that they enable us to collect, analyse, and utilise:
I am not a fan of its continued adoption and popularity.
Why?
Although I am usually against simplifications, I will utilise some of it here (mainly for dramatic effect):
Our world-wide health and wellbeing is screwed.
Yes, it is like deadly bad.
You think COVID was a problem or scary? It has nothing on the epidemic that we have been in the middle of for 20+ years.
Our children are physically weaker than 30+ years ago (4–6).
We live longer than ever, but with lower functional capacities (7–9).
Our youth and young adults will be unhealthier than any previous generation (10–13). Their children likely even worse.
All in all, the big picture of our world-wide populational health is still continuously declining in quality – while our most “popular” and trendy line of prevention and rehabilitation (aka. preventive health methods) appears to be:
Smart tracking devices?!
All these massive problems we are facing today, not in some distant far away future, no, no, no. Right now, you are likely paying for heaps of people to fix their health and wellbeing because we simply did not give them enough support, help and guidance. Unfortunately, with all the amazing health professionals and preventive health experts in the world, the best that the “leading” technology companies can do is sell us another piece of electronics?
Bollocks. (See, this makes me feel angry).
If you are connecting with that anger of mine to a certain degree, or if you at least find my writing interesting or useful, please consider suscribing:
Even if we were to isolate the emotional and mental underlying of our wellbeing into its own existence outside of the other aspects, we would see that none of the measures, tools and methods on offer from technology companies or even other movements over the course of the last 20 years has really helped.
No, the over hyped trend of mental health, even with various attempts at diluting professional knowledge and skills into adorable little courses for the masses (14,15) (because, this mixed method of mass-education/awareness raising has yet not worked once in this field), is not helping.
No, the overwhelming amount of apps in the “mental health” sections (16), another trend from ACSM’s list (17), has also not improved our overall state of mental wellbeing.
At a greater scale, none of it has worked. Still, we get continuously thrown into the pit of technology and professional skill dilution being the apparent saviour for our emotional or mental health – despite all indicators showing it is not working.
All the while no one is truly educating, coaching, or guiding us about our useful techniques, methods and processes that could help us with mood regulation. I have mentioned one aspect of this in my previous article No One Is Watching (18) – the upstream chain from emotions, feelings, thoughts, all the way to our actions. It would great to provide more high quality mentoring around something practical like that instead of being continuously bombarded with superfluous and superficial “quick”-fix strategies.
Plus, even the ACSM’s yearly trend questionnaire contributes even more to this problem. They are a fancy organisation of scientists in the health, fitness and wellbeing space, one that I used to be myself. They found that number 1 trend as reported by apparent experts in the fields of health, fitness and wellbeing is once again, wearable technology.
Sigh. They could do so much better.
This yearly trend ranking is quite popular. It gets massively dispersed via all online platforms, people see it, consume it, analyse it, and quickly can get a bias confirmation of “Oh yeah, I need to get into those wearables.”. And the trend accelerates itself even more.
Why can they not instead “support” trends that could be more useful?
Why have they not asked instead “what should be the next trend/focus in health, wellbeing and fitness”?
Instead we get another list full of things of which almost none have contributed to the betterment of our terrible populational level health status.
Surely, I am not the only one that is continuously perplexed by this?
Once more: So why measure mood?
On one side there is also the problem of professional skill dilution. Continuously pushing mass-consumption, awareness and education at the lowest possible quality has not worked. We need more integration of professionals with the highest possible education, experience and expertise instead. We simply need more preventive health experts to be involved with more people.
In 2008 when I started at the German Sports University, some of the leading researchers, coaches and whole sports associations where already using subjective assessments of various mental and emotional states (mainly of course for various studies, but also in direct practice). Specifically for mood assessments we figured out rather quickly that subjective parameters are more predictive than objective parameters for any future changes in sickness, over training or other negative events in the long-term training periodisation – something that has only been, over a decade later, “confirmed” or more widely accepted (19–21). So there are well documented usage cases of subjective mood ratings where, with adequate support from high-level qualified professionals, you can gain massive advantages, and even prevent major issues from happening.
This would somewhat answer the question: So why measure mood?
Unfortunately, me going further into why and how this can work, would explode this article even further. Thus, I will leave that part of the problem that I like to theme under “Decision making 100% user driven” (or just simply hopes and prayers), which to me is the much larger evil, for another article in this series. Yes, I think that one might be able to then give us an answer when and why measure mood.
In the meantime, I want to give you something to think about (and do!):
Life is just life.
Your feelings are your feelings right now.
Maybe later today they will be different.
How about earlier today?
You likely do not know, and will not know.
This is not your fault. Systematically, maybe it is due to the way we have designed our education, or even, whole social systems. No one really provides us useful, actionable and practical knowledge, tools or help for emotional self-regulation, emotional intelligence or as I pointed to before, upstream identification and regulation. You might have heard some of these in relation to how you behave with and treat other people, but have you ever considered that this also applies to yourself?
If you can follow what I wrote about the upstream identification and regulation of emotions, feelings, thoughts and actions, you might be able to appreciate that most of our mood is often our own choice.
There is not really good, bad, evil, negative, positive, happiness, sadness – these are constructs and interpretations of our minds. When we are in the rush of our daily life we might just allow all our feelings to take over our being. While breaks are obviously needed, a reflection onto our own feelings (emotions and thoughts as well) is probably generally a good thing. Per se, there is no need to measure it – especially with the limitations discussed here. One particular Zen koan might be helpful here for some people:
Do not burden yourself or drag yourself down.
Although the way I have learned it and reflected upon it so far, it has been related to having a spiritual abode, and maybe a small ritual to consider gratitude for our lives today, it is still a koan. This, as far as my beginner’s understanding goes, means that it is an open ended riddle to make you think. For our moods it can be helpful to consider it as well. If you constantly are measuring and assessing your mood, trying to find connections, correlations or even causation with any of your other fancy smart health device data, you might very quickly burden or drag yourself down.
Instead, I would love if you could try this following practice. At least give it a go 1x this or next week. You know, whenever, in the ecstasy of the moment, you can remember any of this. Even if you can only remember and try it ONCE, you might have the first building block for a new self-regulation habit!
1. Voice your feelings (to yourself) – e.g. “I feel angry.”
Yes, it is important you truly voice them by saying it out loud. Then, try to lead with the “I feel […].”. Why? To avoid becoming the feeling. If you just say “I am angry.” you are internalising it more, and just like that speeding up the chain of reactions straight to your actions.
2. Search for causes – e.g. “I feel angry because my car broke down, and I was late to work, which messed up my schedule, and now I am stuck with no time for myself in the afternoon, so I feel even worse… “ (I am sure you see what I am doing here.)
I feel the example is self-explanatory, but I would like you to dig deep into why you think you are feeling this way. It is highly unlikely that it is one isolated reason, especially not the first one that comes to your mind.
3. Communicate it – e.g. “Hey Bob, look. I feel still angry, and was more before, because I had so much happen unexpectedly today because of my broken down car.”
The hardest one: communicate with someone to who this problem of yours is relevant exactly what you found in step 2. This is standard operating procedure that I implement with all groups, teams and organisations. Good sports teams, and especially emergency and military groups, use this all the time. This is usually done regularly at a specific time, in a specific space; I coin it usually something like “emotional feedback zone” (the name might matter a lot depending on the group of people). It is nowadays often also mixed up a bit with the popular practices of psychological safety for organisational development.
Thank you, and aku mihi (best regards),
Dr Marcin
For those who made it all the way down here, thank you. I would also like to share:
Yes, this clearly pisses me off. The amount of money spent on these approaches that are purely tech-greed driven and have very little to none evidence based to support it (or falsely interpreted) is just getting stupid. We could pay so many experienced and qualified people to help other people instead. Pay people, not stuff. Or maybe if I make it “Pay staff, not stuff.” it is better? Anyways, if you ever have a chance to invest into your own health and wellbeing, walk past the gadgets and toys, and get a high-level qualified expert to work with you.
References
Feel free to checkout references for all my articles in this document.
Good points, thank you for this article. I'd like to add one more reason to question whether we should measure mood: resilience.
As you pointed out, there is relevance to noticing our internal emotional landscape. However, sometimes when people observe a particular emotion or mental state, they become fragile because of it. They let that emotion or mental state become stronger than they are. Instead of realizing "I'm uncomfortable now but I can cope and it will pass", people get overwhelmed by that emotion.
There are so many people suffering from mental health issues now and I feel like we're stuck in a chicken-and-egg cycle: modern life creates mental health issues and mental health issues create modern life. But at some point, each person has to find their way to interrupt that cycle. I think that confidence in one's resilience is one part of that interruption. I'm not convinced that measuring one's mood helps build resilience but instead, solidifies one's sense of fragility.