This is the 5th post of my continued brainstorm on the idea of building a set of standards to run your life with (inspired by Jake Lodwick’s similar pursuit).  By designing, executing, reviewing and revising these standards, the goal would be to eventually end up with a workable and, importantly, custom plan for long-term happiness. Forgive me if it’s long-winded while I continue to figure out what I’m trying to say.

I have been drawing little pictures to represent my various physical and mental states for a couple weeks now, trying to see if the process would lead me to better understanding what makes me feel productive, and what makes me feel happy.

I’ve learned a few things along the way. I think “stress” was the oddball metric, even though I think it’s a really important one. I decided over the weekend that I should flip it around and focus on being calm instead. By flipping it to be a positive metric instead of a negative one, it helps remind me what I’m striving for, rather than simply what I’m trying to avoid.

I built a quick reporting tool to capture my 4 emotional state dimensions, and also built a new kind of game that helps articulate the processes that my brain uses in order to manage my day. Here’s the output from last week’s data to give you an idea of what it looks like:

A few notes:

• Each item in the list of daily activities is given:
  • A level of importance
  • A flag designated whether it’s required or not
  • Optional days of the week that it should be done
  • A weekly frequency for tasks that don’t need to be done every month
  • Self-medicative benefits… for example, if something is good at increasing energy, it will be given an extra point for days when my energy is low.  This helps me connect my current state with the activities that are best done to help that state.
• For a given day, the points for a given activity are generated by seeing:
  • Add a point if it’s supposed to be done that day (or if its frequency requires that it be done soon)
  • Add points for its level of importance
  • Add in points if it has been neglected.
• Neglected activities, rather than being punished, increase in importance until they are done.  So it’s perfectly fine to neglect something for a while and then to come back to it.  In reality, I realized that we are required to neglect things until they become important enough to do… otherwise we’d be doing everything a little bit every day.  Instead, I wanted my system to mirror that natural feeling of things becoming more important over time, and encouraging you to do things that have been neglected for a while.  While it might appear that this would encourage me to neglect things in order to get more points for them, I think that getting some points today will always seem more rewarding than planning to get more points in the future, thanks to our cognitive biases for reward.
• I should mention that my chores are being sorely neglected at the moment because our house is under construction while a new window is installed.  I still need to test if it makes sense to put chores in this… but my sense is yes.

I think that by mimicking the way my brain actually works, I may have found a system that could work.  I plan on adding and removing things from the list as I find them to be useful or not.

Notes on the spirit animals

I love things like astrology, personality tests, etc that help create a very general profile of you and give you a reason to think about certain aspects of your personality or life.  I have created an algorithm that places me in one of 8 profiles based on my high vs low numbers in energy, focus, enjoyment, and calm.  Calmness hasn’t been added in yet (as I’m still trying to figure out how it plays in), so when it is added in there will be 16 profiles instead of 8.

I want to create a mood horoscope of sorts that tells you as much about yourself as it can, knowing as much as it can know about yourself.  As I tweak the system and add a layer or two of complexity to it (factoring in calmness, factoring in previous states, average states, etc) it may become smarter about nudging me in the right direction here and there when I need it.  Or, it might not.  In any case, it’s a fun little dimension to the project that I’m excited about.

What do you think?

Am I going further into the woods or finding my way out of it?  I can’t really tell at the moment by myself.

An interesting chart relating how we feel when confronted with difficult work in relation to how much skill and ability we have to meet it. Not sure exactly how it relates to what I’m thinking about, but it probably does somehow.

Now I’m back at the very top.  I started by thinking about emotions, then backed up to self-medications, then backed up to routines and habits and good behavior, then backed up to responsibilities and roles, and now I’m at the top thinking of Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues that he tracked and thought about from age 20 til at least 79 when he wrote about them.

1. Temperance: Eat not to dullness and drink not to elevation.
2. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order: Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time.
4. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself: i.e. Waste nothing.
6. Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice: Wrong none, by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation: Avoid extremes. Forebear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes or habitation.
11. Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring; Never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
12. Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
13. Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

While these virtues are “good”, they don’t really resonate with me very much.  They’re too bound in moderation and a mild temperament.

I’ve been working on my own list of “virtues” or general beliefs of self-conduct for a few years now.  I’ve tried expanding on them a few times, but always return to the simple sentences and limited number in the end.

Here’s what I have:

1. Make your own meaning.
2. Make your own advice, then take it.
3. Have good intentions.
4. Be your word.
5. Do not dilly-dally.
6. Do not feel sorry for yourself.
7. Take time to make a vision worth striving for.
8. Rally others with your vision.
9. Tie creativity and experimentation with survival.
10. Be the change you wish to see in the world.
11. Stake your reputation on your better self.
12. Take responsibility for the consequences of being who you are.
13. Manage your stress, health, and clarity of mind.
14. Enjoy things.
15. Share.
16. Study your mistakes.
17. Retry things you don’t like or are afraid of every once in a while.

Slightly different category of things than BF’s, and I don’t really see how I could create a journal that required me to make note of when I failed to follow these virtues.  So maybe I have some more work to do to simplify them, or rephrase them to be a bit more actionable.  I don’t know.

I’ve been compiling sources and articles about dealing with bad moods, self-medicating, etc for a while and today I started trying to organize them into a bit of a hierarchy.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

1. Mentally avoid or replace the mood
   1. Recall someone/something that you enjoy and daydream about it
   2. Listen to some music that you like
   3. List things you’re grateful for
   4. Affirm your goals
   5. Think of less fortunate people
2. Mentally address the mood
   1. Focus on what you’ve been ignoring
   2. Stay in the present
   3. Recognize you’re not alone
   4. Decode your mood (figure out what exactly is causing it)
   5. List why the bad cause of your mood is possibly good for your life
   6. Forgive others / abolish blame
3. Physically avoid or replace the mood
   1. Get some exercise
   2. Take a break and have a cup of tea
   3. Go somewhere that you enjoy
      1. Take a hike
      2. Shop
   4. Watch a young child play
   5. Sing your favorite song
   6. Talk to people you trust
   7. Make something creative
   8. Eat / Consume
      1. Chocolate
      2. Alcohol
      3. Caffeine
      4. Junk food
   9. Do something nice
   10. Take a bath
   11. Play with a pet
   12. Avoid people who put you in a bad mood
   13. Get a massage
   14. Change your body posture
       1. Practice smiling
   15. Sit in the sun
   16. Get a hug
4. Physically address the mood
   1. Meditate
   2. Experience the mood fully
   3. Catch your breath
   4. Get some sleep
   5. Wait
   6. Calm down
   7. Take a daily vitamin
   8. Let it all out
      1. Cry
      2. Scream

Thoughts? Additions, edits, improvements? Do these things actually work in practice?  Are some more effective than others?  Though some might be effective, might they also seem repulsive at the time of a bad mood?

Wouldn’t it be cool to have some kind of personally-tailored self-medication tree that you could use in times of duress, and then afterwards see which methods are actually most effective at improving your mood?

A few different kinds of emotions, originally uploaded by Buster Benson.

Trying to suss out the different classes of emotions. Here I’ve got those that are linked to some kind of biological function or physical sensation, the general emotions with some sense of opposites, and the very vague emotional scale of great to terrible.

Here’s me trying to figure out how I feel right at this very moment, and to uncover as much metadata about it as possible. Consider it the 1-person very early adopter beta tester of an unmade product.

Mood: studious

Pleasant or unpleasant: pleasant

Energy level: medium-high

Occupation with mood: medium

Intensity of mood: medium

Duration of mood so far: several hours

Cognitive level: fairly high

Tension: low

Category of mood: fairly joyful, fairly anticipatory, optimistic, appreciative

Meta-emotion (how do I feel about this mood?): happy, though a little worried that I’ll have to stop thinking about this stuff soon to attend to real-life things and that I won’t be able to re-conjure it in a couple days.

Which of these categorizations are useful in highlighting the uniqueness of this mood?  I think it could be a combination of the pleasant, medium-high energy level, long duration, and high cognitive level.  The level of occupation (which I take to mean the amount of my total mental resources that the mood requires of me) seems potentially interesting, but not really in this case. I wonder if occupation and intensity are usually linked.  If they are, then I probably don’t need to track both.

Which of these categorizations could potentially apply to all or most of my future episodes of feeling studious? Again, occupation level and intensity seem like they could vary pretty widely from episode to episode, and are more a characteristic of the moment than of the mood.  I’m leaning away from those two dimensions as being truly useful.

I think I might try this a couple more times over the next few days to see if anything else emerges from over-analytical mood dissection.

After reading up on Wikipedia articles for emotions, meta-emotions, moods, and lists of emotions, as well as a few excerpts from Robert E. Thayer’s books, I’m a little overwhelmed with the number of different, yet slightly overlapping, theories of emotions that there are out there.

For a given emotion, here are a few of the dimensions that they have been found to exist upon:

• unpleasant to pleasant
• high energy to low energy
• occupied to unoccupied
• weak to intense
• fleeting to enduring
• non-cognitive to cognitive
• calm to tense

And then, there also seem to be a few ways to rate emotions as being between two other emotions.  For example, some simple emotions:

• joy to sadness
• acceptance to disgust
• fear to anger
• surprise to anticipation

And some more complex emotions, that are actually combinations of the simpler emotions:

• optimism to disappointment (anticipation + joy)
• love to remorse (joy + acceptance)
• submission to contempt (acceptance + fear)
• awe to aggressiveness (fear + surprise)

I’m compiling a list of emotions that’s already several thousand words long, and trying to test out some of these categorizations to see how they fit.  So far there seems to be a lot of square pegs in circle holes.

Hungry

Hunger could be considered an unpleasant, non-cognitive, tense emotion that almost doesn’t exist along any other emotion scales (maybe anticipation if I had to pick one), and can vary in intensity, duration, and level of mental occupation required.  It’s basically an emotion with a physical connection to your body’s survival, but the feeling can be extremely intense and cause all kinds of emotional turmoil in certain situation.  It can lead to anger, impatience, and sometimes even fear.  Is it a true emotion?  For the purposes of this experiment, I will have to say yes, because people will answer “I am feeling hungry” when asked how they are feeling.

Bored

Is boredom a feeling?  One could say it’s unpleasant, fairly low energy, and fairly tense.  If it weren’t tense or unpleasant, you could call it relaxed.  But it’s not.  It’s a state of anticipation again, but a very cognitive anticipation rather than the non-cognitive anticipation of hunger.

Busy

Is feeling busy a feeling?  I would say that it’s an unpleasant feeling of high energy, a high state of occupation, fairly intense, and also fairly tense.  If it exist along the emotional spectrums at all, it probably exists somewhere around aggressiveness, with little time to sit back and exhibit awe or appreciation for what’s around.

Lonely

What is loneliness?  An unpleasant feeling of low energy and mild to high intensity.  It occupies the mind fairly strongly, is highly cognitive, and tense.  Is it a variation of sadness or acceptance?  Is it disappointment or remorse?  Lonliness is a pretty complex emotion and for that reason is pretty difficult to break down into static components.

So, it seems like these emotions can be analyzed and taken apart to a certain extent.  And then, at a certain level of resolution, they become un-pin-pointable, with options to branch off in several different directions.

I have a feeling that I’ll understand this a lot better the more emotions I attempt to dissect.  Will it lead to a clearer understanding of their components or a more confused understanding?  That’s yet to be seen!

Some people make a distinction between feelings, moods, and mindsets, basically drawing the line between them based on their duration. A feeling is what you get when someone gives you the bird. A mood is what happens when everything around you starts to look drab, dull, slightly offensive. And a mindset is something that persists as we weave in and out of feelings and moods, a foundation that either continually brings us up, or takes us down, and often determines how we heal and grow over time.

I’m interested in all three, as I don’t necessarily think that they can be separated. Talking about a feeling separate from its larger context of mood is like trying to figure out how a tomato in a grocery store got so ripe, and the rest of the plant is completely ignored.

As I’ve been thinking about moods for years, I’ve tried many different ways of tracking my moods, and have eventually ended up at the conclusion that there’s no point in recording this stuff unless I’m learning something about myself in the process. There is still a lot of debate about moods. Can you have more than one mood at a time? Can moods be reduced to more basic components? Does saying you are a 5 of 10 on the happy scale actually mean anything? What is there to be learned from tracking moods over time? Are we even objective enough about our own moods to know what we’re feeling with any accuracy at all?

What field do moods lie in? What dimensions can we drape over moods and mark on a grid where they are? Can you ever compare one mood to another, and say that one is more energetic than the other, or that one is more fleeting than the other? Who has a copy of the dictionary that dissects and compares every mood to the others and knows how you feel and can tell you its Mood Identification Number?

Independently of the way or reason that you enjoy things (of which I think there are 9 kinds), another dimension to consider is the capacity to enjoy those things. The threshold at which something becomes enjoyable. How good does it have to be before it is enjoyable?

I’ve noticed that there seem to be a couple easily distinguishable steps on the staircase of enjoyment capacity or threshold. In our brains, each neuron also has a certain threshold of chemicals needed for it to trigger on the long chain of neural connections, and in the atomic realm there are different energy levels that electrons can orbit a nucleus. I think this digital nature of nature is highly convenient for us to make broad generalizations about things we don’t know much about. The digital nature of enjoyment is the newest category of such generalizations.

1. Bystander enjoyment

The lowest orbit of enjoyment. You see a beautiful car go by, you see someone else enjoying a delicious meal in the window of a restaurant as you walk by. You enjoy their enjoyment. You don’t experience it directly, but you can see that something out there has enjoyable qualities and you partake in them indirectly.

2. Passenger enjoyment

The second orbit of enjoyment. You are in the passenger seat of a friend’s car, and you enjoy the beauty of the car. You are at your sharing a bit of your friend’s meal, and you realize that his dish is better than yours, but you don’t necessarily covet the meal. Their meal is good, and that is enjoyable in itself.

3. Ownership enjoyment

The third orbit of enjoyment. You own the beautiful car, you bought the delicious meal. It’s 1-degree of separation from your own soul, and this is enjoyable. You deserve to enjoy it because you paid for it.

4. Inventorship enjoyment

This is the highest energy orbit of enjoyment. It radiates with energy and life. You brought into life the thing you’re enjoying, and it speaks for you and you speak through it. You invented the car, you made the meal, it’s yours, it’s almost you. Other peoples’ enjoyment of the thing increases your own enjoyment of the thing. Exponential power to the exponential degree, etc.

The controversial conclusion

We can all enjoy things on the 4th threshold of enjoyment, but how many of us are true connoisseurs of the 1st and 2nd levels? The first 2 levels are all about empathy, compassion, connection, relating to others. The second 2 are all about the self. They do happen to result in the same feeling of enjoyment, in increasing levels, but I think that those who focus too much on the 3rd and 4th and neglect the first 2 will eventually become weaker, less attuned, less appreciative of the full scope of experience, and possibly more miserly and grumpy. That’s my thought right now at least.

Enjoy things that you don’t own and didn’t invent. It’s good for you!

A person at last night’s talk brought up Matthieu Ricard, a recent TED speaker, in relation to how meditation is related to decision-making and emotions.

I listened to the TED speech and wasn’t very impressed.  Certain Buddhist philosophies simply rub me the wrong way, even though I agree that they’re effective methods for learning to train the mind to be less reactive.

Before I go into what I disagree with (as that will take more preparation), here’s something I agree with from a recent article on Sustainable Happiness:

Human qualities often come in clusters. Altruism, inner peace, strength, freedom, and genuine happiness thrive together like the parts of a nourishing fruit. Likewise, selfishness, animosity, and fear grow together. So, while helping others may not always be “pleasant,” it leads the mind to a sense of inner peace, courage, and harmony with the interdependence of all things and beings.

Afflictive mental states, on the other hand, begin with self-centeredness, with an increase in the gap between self and others. These states are related to excessive self-importance and self-cherishing associated with fear or resentment towards others, and grasping for outer things as part of a hopeless pursuit of selfish happiness. A selfish pursuit of happiness is a lose-lose situation: you make yourself miserable and make others miserable as well.

This passage basically says to me that happiness is a quality of community rather than individuality.  That the non-zero sum game is the key strategy for happiness.  And I generally agree with that.  Those who take the selfish strategy in the Prisoner’s Dilemma may make short term gains, but will not outlast other more cooperative players.

Consider this as a starting point for my longer goal of exploring the differences between enjoyment, pleasure, happiness, hedonism, lack of suffering, Buddhism, cooperation, and shared experience.  They’re all tied together, and I want to meditate on their differences and subtleties in a loosey goosey manner that goes to the very inspiration for me to start this blog in the first place.