I tracked my mood every day for one year.

One year ago, I started tracking my mood every day. Each night I'd look back on my day and give myself a score. Was I proud of what I accomplished? Did I struggle with anxiety? How many times did I get so frustrated that I plowed my head through drywall? I've heard a lot of people talk about the benefits of tracking your mood and happiness over the years. Every single day I track how I feel zero to ten about my life, my work, and my health. But I've never tried it up until now. Could it help me find happiness, contentment, and a greater sense of awareness over my feelings? Here's what I learned from tracking my mood every day for one year. This video is sponsored by Squarespace. More on them later. All right, so my very first step was to figure out a system for tracking. Now, to create some consistency around this habit, I decided to set an alarm each night at 7 p.m. This way I could look back on my day, reflect, and give it a score. Inspired by author Jim Collins, I settled on a five-point scale from minus two to plus two. Minus two being awful, minus one being bad, zero being fine, plus one being good, and plus two being amazing. I found out pretty early on that it's really freaking hard to give your day a score. It felt like I was oversimplifying a really difficult question. Did I have a good day today? I mean, my mood varies so wildly from the time I wake up to the time my head hits the pillow at the end of the night that it's really hard to tell. But as I got into it, one thing that really helped me was to write down a summary of what happened that day. Sometimes it was just a few words, other times a full paragraph. January 6th. Spent six hours trying to screw eight holes into a wall. Score. Minus one. March 20th, ate two donuts, played Last of Us. Score, plus one. October 13th, got Nat pregnant. Score, plus two. Instead of being swayed by my current mood, by writing down this reflection summary, I was able to give myself a better picture of the day that I had. I didn't realize until later that these summaries would really become an invaluable tool as I looked back on my year and tried to spot patterns and trends. The system that I'm using isn't new. Top performers from different fields all over the world have been doing this kind of record keeping for years. On the extreme end, skateboarder and entrepreneur Rob Dyrdek systematically tracks every minute of his day. I track every bit of my time and tag it and it pumps into a dashboard so I could tell you exactly where I spend every single hour of my life over the last three years. He then ranks each day on a scale of 0 to 10. This now gives me insight to what things would pull and take energy from the quality of my life through the lens of what's happening in my work, how I'm taking care of myself, and what's going on in my life. But that kind of obsessive tracking isn't for everyone. I take it to a fanatical level. On the more reasonable end, Jim Collins, best-selling author of Good to Great, tracks his day in a simple spreadsheet. He talked about his approach on Tim Ferriss' podcast. So at the end of every single day, I open a spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet has three cells on a line. The first thing is just a simple accounting of what happened that day. And then the second cell is the number of creative hours I got that day. Now there's a third cell. And what this is is a totally subjective how quality was the date. The biggest benefit that people like Dyrdek and Collins get from tracking their mood, they get accurate data on how they're spending their time and if that time is being spent wisely. It makes it so much easier to say yes and no to things because you're looking at it through the lens of first, second, third order consequences. Most importantly after they step back and analyze this data they can adjust their life accordingly After all data doesn't really help unless you do something with it As impressed as I was with some of these crazy tracking systems, I was really just doing this for one reason. I wanted to find out if I was as happy as I hoped I was. Now, this seems like an obvious thing to answer, except for the fact that we actually do a really bad job at accurately judging our own happiness. And that's because if we're in a funk, we have a tendency to think, I'm unhappy. My life is miserable. But the truth is that we're probably just having a bad week. As someone who has struggled with a lot of anxiety and burnout, I frequently fall into these patterns. And I was hoping that by the end of this experiment, I could look back and say, hey, you know what? I had a pretty good year. And so I continued to track each day, the good ones and the bad. I don't know if I like it. The totally boring and the once in a lifetime. One thing I noticed early on was how much more self-aware I was over my feelings. Okay, so my computer froze and I lost three hours of work. Am I really going to let this ruin my day? The answer is yes. Yes, I will definitely let this ruin my day. I spotted my first real trend in September when Nat and I took a month off to get married and travel around Europe. I had 24 days that were a plus one and above and zero bad days at all. This was the first month that I'd ever taken off from work. And as someone that has struggled in the past with taking weekends off, it was a really strong signal that maybe I shouldn't center my entire life around work. The year wasn't without its challenges. November was one of the worst months that I had all year. I logged 19 days with a score of zero or lower. I felt like I had no consistency in my routine. Nat was sick from her first trimester of pregnancy, and I was struggling to get motivated with work. So I wouldn't really worry too much about the fact that you can't. Hold on one second. After a few months of tracking, I realized the handwritten journaling system I was using was a little more tedious than I expected. So out of sheer necessity, I gave up the pen and paper and started using an app called Dalio. This definitely made things easier from a tracking perspective. This process was starting to make a difference, and I felt a little bit more accountable each day. And I was eager to see if there was anything I could learn new from taking a step back after 365 days to spot bigger trends in my life and happiness. This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Do you know what's a real mood killer? No, not a smooth transition into a YouTube advertisement. Building, designing, and launching a website from scratch. That's why I use Squarespace. No, but seriously. I actually do use Squarespace. I think they're amazing and I think that you might like them as well. Let's say you want to track your mood for the rest of your life and document it all on your new blog. First, you go to squarespace.com and buy your domain name. Something like mattsmood.co because .com was taken and you decided that that was totally okay and you're not going to let it ruin your day because that would be absolutely crazy. From there, you pick a template, which is really easy because all of them are so beautiful. Then you can add your logo. pick out some brand colors, and tweak your fonts so they're just right. And finally, you track your mood every day for the rest of your life and share your slow demise into losing your sanity because you've overcommitted and now see no way out but to keep doing it until you die. Pretty simple. From there, you can set up your online store, customize your email addresses, and so much more. Visit squarespace.com today for a free trial, and then when you're ready to launch, make sure you go to squarespace.com slash mattdiavella to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Click the link in the description below to get started today. Thanks so much to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. I don't know why I just winked. That's weird. So I did it. I tracked every single day for 365 days, and here's what my year at a glance looks like. 69 amazing days, 169 good days, 98 fine days, 25 bad days, and four awful days. Using the five point scale, I could add up all of my days to come up with an average score for the year, which was .75. And if you're rounding up, that means that I had a good year. Yeah, I had a good year. But now I wanted to see if there was anything I could learn by zooming in and taking a closer look at the data. So I pulled everything into this spreadsheet here. There are four main columns. Day, mood, reflection summary, and keywords. One of the really cool things about organizing it like this is that I can now sort my daily scores to find trends among my best and worst days. And here are the biggest lessons that I learned. Work and productivity came up a lot, 119 times in total. But I think the most interesting thing was that it showed up both on my very best days as well as my very worst days. Two of my lowest rated days were because I burnt out from working over 12 hours in a day. But on the opposite end, many of my best days were rated plus two because of work. I didn't have to travel around Europe to have a peak experience. Simply sitting down at my desk, getting lost in my work, and making progress towards my goals was enough. I already knew that I had a complicated relationship with work, but one clear trend that I noticed was that I never ranked a day positively because I worked over 10 hours. but there were many negative days because I just simply worked too much. So this could really be one thing that I work on going forward slash continue to work on going forward because I've been trying for a while. Can I cut myself off before I reach that 10-hour mark? So I've been working on this video for 12 and a half hours now. That's your answer. I'm not doing a good job! The one trend that surprised me the most, and this is going to sound a little bit corny, is the keyword fun. 27% of my best days happened because I did something fun. I think like a lot of people, I grew up really quickly after college, and I tried to become an adult as fast as I could. And that meant focusing all of my energy on my ambitions and leaving video games, travel, and sports behind. But now that I've started to make more room for fun by traveling with Nat, by learning how to golf, by joining a softball team for the first time in five years, my happiness has really gone up a lot. My golf game has not. People who regularly track their mood say it helps them increase their self-awareness and identify underlying issues, and I think that's true. There's something about tracking your mood every day that forces you to confront the things that you're not happy about. The goal isn't to get rid of bad days entirely. They're inevitable. The goal is growth. To continually find ways to challenge yourself, to improve your circumstances, to move yourself a little bit closer to the life you want to live. Thanks so much for watching, and yes, if you were wondering, I do my own stunts.

Go to http://squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you’re ready to launch, go to http://squarespace.com/mattdavella to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video.

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Hi there 👋 If you're new to my videos my name is Matt D'Avella. I'm a documentary filmmaker, entrepreneur and YouTuber. I've made a couple documentaries for Netflix. I also teach courses on everything from filmmaking to habit change. If you like to nerd out about self-development as much as I do, you can subscribe for weekly videos.

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