Greetings! This isn't really a post so much as a link to another thing I made. Specifically, a Google Form designed to
(a) take just a few minutes, and
(b) make whoever takes it happier.*
Everything else you need to know is on the form, available at https://tinyurl.com/happyminutes.
What Inspired You To Make This?
I'm glad you asked. A few months ago, I began a system called DIMS, or Daily Internal Mood Survey. Under DIMS, each night when I added my diary entry, I would also score my happiness on a scale where 0 represented my unhappiest days and 10 represented by happiest days.**
A Google Form designed to (a) take just a few minutes, and (b) make whoever takes it happier.
And then because I like statistics I did a bunch of Google Sheets stuff with it. For instance, my average score is 6.26 out of 10. More complicated charts in the footnote.***
But anyway, I've been listening to the Happiness Lab podcast for a while, and I've tried to integrate its tips into my life. They're backed up by science. And I think I've done at least an ok job of it. I've also gotten happier when ever I've listened to it. (PS: Season 2 just started getting released and it's also so good.)
But I wanted a way to remind myself of the tips that the podcast and other resources provide, a way to ensure I would do them every day. So I built a Google Form, and the idea is that you do it every day.
If you're a subscriber to this blog, you got an email this morning advertising this blog post. That email–snooze it for a full day. Then tomorrow, you'll get it fresh in your inbox and the cycle begins anew. Or don't. Whatever floats your boat.
–beautifulthorns
Next: Addenda
*Well, it was originally designed to make me happier, but then I realized some of y'all might want to use it too, and that realization was combined with the fact that it was 5PM on bleeping Monday and I hadn't so much as started the blog post that would air the next day. Point being, let's do this.
**Notably, these aren't platonic ideals of happy and unhappy days. Theoretically, -1 and 11 are legal scores. However, I wanted the score to virtually always fall between 0 and 10, thus the choice of 0 representing my personal least happy days in my memory and 10 representing my most happy. This is also how the Richter scale works, by the way–earthquakes can have magnitudes that are negative and that are above 10, it's just that they wouldn't be considered earthquakes in the first case and don't happen naturally in the second case.
***Here's the average happiness chart by day of the week:
So my happiest day is...Monday? And my unhappiest is Saturday? Maybe there's some sort of weird effect where I secretly like school. Maybe it's just random fluctuation tho.
(Sidenote on tho: I watched a very engaging video about spelling reforms and how they never work. Except: the ones that do work are the ones where it's very clear what they mean, they've already gained some traction, and they're more logical spellings. So from now on, I'm making a conscious effort to write though as tho and through as thru, except in formal contexts.)
Here's one that I find fascinating. Here's my average happiness ranking overall, before March 13, and after it:
Can't talk much about that. Here's the bar chart of rankings overall:
Huh. That's, um, not a bell curve. There are no 2 rankings! And sooo many 7s. I wonder if this is related to what numbers feel more or less random. Finally, here's a graph of the average score one day given the previous day's score:
And that's a complete mess. I don't think we can take any lessons from that.