Happiness Scale
Oct. 27th, 2009 12:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynI wrote up a "Happiness Scale" a few months back, and showed it to a few people, some of whom said 'hey, I think this might be useful to people other than you, too'. And I thought, 'oh hey, I should clean it up a little and post it publicly.' And then I promptly failed to do so. This happens to me a lot.
In the better-late-than-never vein, however, here it is. It's intended as a tool to help me quantify my mood so I can measure it. So feelings that usually accompany one another are grouped together. One thing I noticed while creating this is that how I feel about myself often correlates to a degree with my mood. When I'm unhappy with my life, I'm often unhappy with myself; the converse is also true. It's not a 1:1 correlation -- nothing on this chart is -- but there's a definite connection. I suspect it's in part because I have a strong sense of being in control of my life and my decisions. So if I'm unhappy, I usually blame myself, and if I'm happy, I usually credit myself.
On another note, the states described are more to serve as a baseline than reflections of my day-to-day experiences. I've never actually attempted suicide, for example.
0: Hate myself and everything about my life. Attempt suicide.
1: Sense of utter uselessness, overwhelming despair, self-hatred, uncontrolled rage. Inablity to cope with trivial problems. Inflict deliberate (very minor) injuries on myself.
2: Self-hatred, despair, anger at self, hatred of life, belief that I deserve to suffer, inability to see how I could ever be happy again. Intense guilt over real and imagined failings. Frequent fantasies of suicide and self-mutiliation. Usually external factors are involved in moods of 2 or below.
3: Misery with a dull resignation. Unwillingness even to attempt to feel better. At 3 and below, there's a sense of worthlessness that means I don't try to improve my mood: "I deserve to suffer, and therefore there's no point in cheering up because it's right for me to be miserable." This doesn't yield to normal strategies for improving because I lack the motivation to employ them. Mostly I soldier through on the basis of "this too will pass".
4: Muted misery. Lack of interest in leisure activities as well as work. Acute longings for things I do not have. Lack of appreciation for things I do have. Guilt over lack of appreciation of same. Guilt over being in a bad mood is less of a problem now than it was when I was younger. I still feel guilty about being unhappy sometimes, but mostly I succeed at stopping that cycle with a mantra of "making myself unhappy because I am unhappy is SO counterproductive".
5: Mild dejection, general indifference. Nothing matters very much. Difficulty in enjoying the company of others. Leisure activities are somewhat pleasant, expected required activities are met with distaste and/or avoidance. Unexpected/atypical but required activities are met with irrational anger and downward mood spikes.
6: Mild engagement. Leisure activities are pleasant, expected required activities are tolerable and may engage my interest.
7: Content. Leisure activities are a source of joy. Expected required activities may engage my interest, though boredom and avoidance are still common. Unexpected/atypical but required activities make me grumble but are manageable. Belief that life is good and all my difficulties are manageable. Like myself and consider myself a decent person.
8: Happy. Required activities engage my interest and I feel little desire to avoid or escape them. Keen appreciation for my life and the good things that are in it. Sense of capability. Unexpected obligations are not a problem. Belief that the problems in my life are minor and unimportant. 7-8 is pretty much the range I am hoping for. Higher would be great; I would like for my default to be 9. But when I put down "Be happy" as a New Year's Resolution, I meant "be generally content and satisfied with life."
9: Joyful. Life is great. Love everything that I do. Engaged with all activities of every kind. I seldom have this kind of mood for more than a few hours at a time, and usually it's the result of unusual and/or unexpectedly good circumstances. But occasionally I will be at this level for several days for no particular reason; the beginning of this year was like that.
10: Esctatic. <3 <3 <3 Everything is wonderful. Bursting with sense of tremendous joy, pleasure, wonder, love. I really don't think this is a sustainable mood; it's the sort of mood that only happens at the beginning of a requited love affair or an unexpected and wonderful event. I get occasional random flashes of it that last for a few minutes now and again, though.
Another thing I noticed was that other people have very different mood-correlations. Lut's moods don't match mine at all, for example, and it was interesting to have a way of framing that difference. So I don't know how useful this particular scale would be to people in general, but it might be the kind of thing that's useful to build for yourself and then track for a while. The main thing I liked about it was that it gave me a sense of perspective. After I'd been using it for a couple of months, I could go back and add everything up and get a sense of the big picture, an idea of what the forest looked like that wasn't blocked by the trees closest to me.
Of course, then I stopped using it back in September. >:) But I've still kept a little of that perspective anyway. It was an interesting experiment.
In the better-late-than-never vein, however, here it is. It's intended as a tool to help me quantify my mood so I can measure it. So feelings that usually accompany one another are grouped together. One thing I noticed while creating this is that how I feel about myself often correlates to a degree with my mood. When I'm unhappy with my life, I'm often unhappy with myself; the converse is also true. It's not a 1:1 correlation -- nothing on this chart is -- but there's a definite connection. I suspect it's in part because I have a strong sense of being in control of my life and my decisions. So if I'm unhappy, I usually blame myself, and if I'm happy, I usually credit myself.
On another note, the states described are more to serve as a baseline than reflections of my day-to-day experiences. I've never actually attempted suicide, for example.
0: Hate myself and everything about my life. Attempt suicide.
1: Sense of utter uselessness, overwhelming despair, self-hatred, uncontrolled rage. Inablity to cope with trivial problems. Inflict deliberate (very minor) injuries on myself.
2: Self-hatred, despair, anger at self, hatred of life, belief that I deserve to suffer, inability to see how I could ever be happy again. Intense guilt over real and imagined failings. Frequent fantasies of suicide and self-mutiliation. Usually external factors are involved in moods of 2 or below.
3: Misery with a dull resignation. Unwillingness even to attempt to feel better. At 3 and below, there's a sense of worthlessness that means I don't try to improve my mood: "I deserve to suffer, and therefore there's no point in cheering up because it's right for me to be miserable." This doesn't yield to normal strategies for improving because I lack the motivation to employ them. Mostly I soldier through on the basis of "this too will pass".
4: Muted misery. Lack of interest in leisure activities as well as work. Acute longings for things I do not have. Lack of appreciation for things I do have. Guilt over lack of appreciation of same. Guilt over being in a bad mood is less of a problem now than it was when I was younger. I still feel guilty about being unhappy sometimes, but mostly I succeed at stopping that cycle with a mantra of "making myself unhappy because I am unhappy is SO counterproductive".
5: Mild dejection, general indifference. Nothing matters very much. Difficulty in enjoying the company of others. Leisure activities are somewhat pleasant, expected required activities are met with distaste and/or avoidance. Unexpected/atypical but required activities are met with irrational anger and downward mood spikes.
6: Mild engagement. Leisure activities are pleasant, expected required activities are tolerable and may engage my interest.
7: Content. Leisure activities are a source of joy. Expected required activities may engage my interest, though boredom and avoidance are still common. Unexpected/atypical but required activities make me grumble but are manageable. Belief that life is good and all my difficulties are manageable. Like myself and consider myself a decent person.
8: Happy. Required activities engage my interest and I feel little desire to avoid or escape them. Keen appreciation for my life and the good things that are in it. Sense of capability. Unexpected obligations are not a problem. Belief that the problems in my life are minor and unimportant. 7-8 is pretty much the range I am hoping for. Higher would be great; I would like for my default to be 9. But when I put down "Be happy" as a New Year's Resolution, I meant "be generally content and satisfied with life."
9: Joyful. Life is great. Love everything that I do. Engaged with all activities of every kind. I seldom have this kind of mood for more than a few hours at a time, and usually it's the result of unusual and/or unexpectedly good circumstances. But occasionally I will be at this level for several days for no particular reason; the beginning of this year was like that.
10: Esctatic. <3 <3 <3 Everything is wonderful. Bursting with sense of tremendous joy, pleasure, wonder, love. I really don't think this is a sustainable mood; it's the sort of mood that only happens at the beginning of a requited love affair or an unexpected and wonderful event. I get occasional random flashes of it that last for a few minutes now and again, though.
Another thing I noticed was that other people have very different mood-correlations. Lut's moods don't match mine at all, for example, and it was interesting to have a way of framing that difference. So I don't know how useful this particular scale would be to people in general, but it might be the kind of thing that's useful to build for yourself and then track for a while. The main thing I liked about it was that it gave me a sense of perspective. After I'd been using it for a couple of months, I could go back and add everything up and get a sense of the big picture, an idea of what the forest looked like that wasn't blocked by the trees closest to me.
Of course, then I stopped using it back in September. >:) But I've still kept a little of that perspective anyway. It was an interesting experiment.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 07:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 08:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 06:32 pm (UTC)It looks good, and useful. My own default mode runs between 7 and 8; I rarely move out of that range, even under current circumstances.
===|==============/ Level Head
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 07:40 pm (UTC)===|==============/ Level Head
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 07:07 pm (UTC)EVERYTHING MUST GO!
no subject
Date: 2009-10-27 07:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-28 01:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-28 04:25 pm (UTC)It's been so long since I was truly single that I can't really judge how that affects my own moods, though. In 1997, I had a pretty miserable few months between breaking up with
no subject
Date: 2009-10-28 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-28 09:25 pm (UTC)Which is not so much to say that forming relationships is easy, as to say that you're being silly when you describe yourself as fat and unattractive, and that "34" and "geeky" are not *detractors*. *snug*
no subject
Date: 2009-10-28 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-28 04:29 pm (UTC)How closely does feeling lonely / awful correlate with feeling bored?
What are your views on mandatory fun, that is, when one of those required tasks is go engage in an activity that's nominally supposed to be fun?
no subject
Date: 2009-10-28 05:06 pm (UTC)Mandatory fun is usually, but not always, problematic. For example, I generally enjoy being at conventions but I don't like going to them; I'll often postpone leaving for hours, or get ready at the last minute. Sometimes I have the same problem with scheduled roleplay. But it's not a problem with scheduled boardgaming (or other non-RP gaming).