I suspect that if I track how I feel on a day-to-day basis, along with the variables I think will be associated with happiness, I'll be able to figure out how to maximize my happy days and minimize my unhappy days.
Journal
2013 - (I'm writing this up in 2016) - I remember being particularly happy in the summer of 2013 when I was unemployed and getting ~9 hours of sleep a night. I was spending all day watching girls at GW, eating ~5 eggs for breakfast, drinking protein powder. I think the sleep was a huge factor.
2015.05.06 - I got ~10 hrs of sleep today, got a haircut, and actually felt pretty crummy most of the day. I was in a bit of a rush when I woke up and didn't have time to relieve myself before I left the house, so that may have had me off to a bit of a stressful start. I actually also went for maybe 2 hours after waking up without eating much, because I didn't have any easy-to-eat food at home and I was at the barber for longer than I anticipated I would be. I ended up gorging myself later that day on Clif bars and Milanos that were in the office. So that was probably also a factor.
2015.05.07 - I woke up at ~6:30am today, couldn't really sleep. I took 200mg of caffeine at 8:50, relieved myself, and went to the gym and did a 4k in a PR time (15:24.5). I felt great ~5 mins after finishing (after I caught my breath), and still feel great at 10:44am. The past few times I've worked out in the morning I've felt great all day. I'm actually not sure how much of my good mood is due to the exercise and how much is due to the caffeine. My mood reminds me a lot of when I would eat Haagen-Dazs. I can't find the caffeine content of a pint of Haagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream on Google but apparently their coffee icecream has ~100mg of caffeine per pint. According to the FDA, "If caffeine is added to a food, it must be included in the listing of ingredients required on food product labels." 8:30pm - I still feel really good; I felt good pretty much all day. It may be worth experimenting to see if this effect could be stretched out to 7 days a week, as at the moment I feel better on days that I work out than on days that I don't work out.
2015.05.08 - 11:14am - I feel alright. I don't feel the high I felt yesterday after working out. I got ~8.5-9 hrs of sleep. I can't say I feel bad, more like slightly groggy / foggy-brained.
2015.06.30 - I'd been feeling pretty depressed for the past week and wasn't sure why. Last weekend I ate a chowder bowl at Fisherman's Wharf and had two slices of pizza, and I've had it happen to me in the past where bread would make me feel depressed for the following days, so that might have been part of it. IIRC the bad feeling largely went away when I started forcing myself to eat half a box of salad and a bunch of tomatoes. I may have just not had enough of some nutrient (?).
2015.07.07-13 - I had been feeling really bad, with a tight feeling in my chest, which may have been a combination of anxiety about needing to pack up and move my things to CA and also wanting to reconnect with YO (mainly the latter). After I reached out and got a positive response, I immediately felt the bad feeling leave me completely, and for the rest of the day I felt totally at peace with the world. I noticed that I was spending a lot of time thinking about this good event, and not spending time thinking about bad / stressful things or problems. Over the coming week I gradually was presented with problems that I needed to take care of, and I gradually noticed a slight bad feeling returning, although nowhere near what it was before. I'm also noticing that the amount of time I'm spending thinking about these problems is increasing, while the amount of time I'm spending thinking about things I feel grateful for is decreasing. So maybe one way to increase happiness is to spend more time thinking about pleasant things, things you're grateful for(?). A complication here is that I was taking a break from work as my mood improved and I returned to work as I started to feel more stressed, so another lesson here may be that working can cause stress and reduce short-term happiness (which seems obvious).
2015.09.13 - I had been controlling my diet very carefully over the last few weeks and started to feel depressed as my bodyfat percentage got to 9% or lower, and recently I had kind of given into my cravings and eaten some ice cream, and I felt much better; I didn't really "crash" the next day the way I had noticed in the past. Today I had two ice cream cones from Gelataio and felt good all day. Yesterday I went to the gym.
2015.10.09 - I've continued to eat fairly laxly (ice cream, etc.) and have generally felt much better than when I was eating very strictly. I have also been feeling good since I made a suggestion at work that I think may have raised others' esteem of me. So social status / feeling important / feeling needed is a big part of happiness.
2016.02.10(?) - I woke up after having a pleasant dream and I remembered it when I woke up, and I felt really good.
2016.02.14 - I drank two beers while programming and was feeling pretty energetic, and then I felt tired like I wanted to take a nap. This made me consider whether a person might be happier in their life if they have a more intense experience while they're awake and then rest / sleep more often to recover from that heightened-level of activity. That seems to be the way ~3-6yos function. It's something to think about.
2016.02.15 - I woke up because I needed to use the bathroom, and then I wasn't able to go back to bed for external reasons (ie I could have fallen back asleep but external things kept me from going back to bed). I ate breakfast and then tried to do work, but ~3 hours later I felt depressed / tired. I also drank two beers the previous day to stay motivated while programming, so withdrawal from that might also be a factor.
2016.06.23 - I only got maybe 4 or 5 hours of sleep, so I should feel like crap, but I just ate ~ 1lb of marinated mussels that came as part of Infer's catered lunch (the mussels were from "Bertucelli's La Villa") and I feel better than I've felt in a long time. My head feels totally clear, like when you take a wet paper towel and wipe the dust off off your TV screen. I'm reminded of when I would eat a tomato and feel way better. I think there were some small pieces of tomato in there but I don't think there would have been enough on their own to have the size of the effect I'm experiencing. I called the place and the guy listed: oil, garlic, vinegar, oregano, I suspect there was added salt, I think I may have also seen onions but they may have been bits of garlic instead.
2016.08.18 - 11:25am - I feel really, really good. Last night I worked out for the first time in a few months (I did an 8k on the erg, ~2:05 pace), I also shaved off all my hair / beard after growing it out for a few weeks, I went into the sauna twice and I remember it being particularly refreshing because I hadn't done it in a few weeks. I had a meeting go well yesterday, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing W. Also I was praised by a bunch of people yesterday at work for one of my experiments. Today I woke up around 7:30am, kept my eyes closed for a while, then relaxed for a bit. I think I ate a peach, but that was it. I headed to work ~10:30am. I don't remember feeling particularly good up to that point. But now I'm in the office, I had some very easy work that I had to do (I had already written out the instructions for doing it step-by-step), I'm listening to a Magic Tape (and I haven't listened to music much in the past few weeks), reading a chapter from "Scalability Rules". The temperature is a pleasant cool, I'm wearing shoes for the first time in a while, which are keeping my feet pleasantly cozy-warm (I had been wearing sandals before today, and my feet would get cold). I'm scheduled to have lunch with a friend at 12pm, so I'm feeling pleasure anticipating that. I suspect that what's happening here is that there are just a few different (uncommon?) pleasure-causing things that are converging all at the same time. I vaguely remember the same thing happening for "bad days": I'll have a few different random bad things happen to me all at once, and the unhappiness they cause me will stack up.
Later that same day I felt quite bad; I had eaten ravioli for lunch that was very heavy and left me feeling gross, and then in the evening I think my blood-sugar got low (I was craving the cookies at work), and my stomach felt bloated, and I had hit a bug while trying to learn Reactive Coffee. I then got help for the bug and figured out what was causing it and fixed it, and I went to the bathroom, and then I ate broccoli, and then I left work and I'm now on my laptop in the nearby park with my belt loosened, and I feel much better. So I really think that "happiness" may very well be a simple sum of the pleasure you're feeling and the displeasure you're feeling.
2016.08.20 (Saturday) - I feel really very good; not euphoric, but I don't feel any displeasure at all. It's 1:30PM now, I was working in bed on my computer at 8pm, I think I turned off the computer around 10pm, then was just relaxing on my phone until ~11pm. I woke up around 8:30am(?), relaxed for a bit in bed, ate a tub of Fage yogurt for breakfast, and later had 2 scoops of protein mixed with water. I just ate three bags of reduced-fat chips, which I suspect may make me feel like crap later. I would have prefered to eat some broccoli or brussel sprouts but I didn't have any handy. I've been working on writing up detailed instructions for how to set up a fake-button test with Typeform, which I feel happy about because I think it's a useful way to spend my time; I think one thing that can make me feel bad (stressed) is when I'm not sure what I should be working on.
I wasted an hour or two looking at random stuff on the Internet, which made me feel a little bad; I think I had gotten exhausted from creating these step-by-step instructions. As of ~5pm I was feeling pretty exhausted, but then I ate 4 small pieces of chicken (grass-fed, in case it matters) and drank some water and after ~30 minutes I feel much better.
2016.08.22 - 12:15pm - For some reason I woke up earlier this morning (~7:30am?) and had trouble falling back asleep. I think maybe it was because my head was cold, but I'm not sure. Now I feel sad. I can't really say I feel tired, or gross, I just feel depressed. I'm not sure how much of it is sleep-related.
2016.09.10 - It's my first day in Texas. I was feeling bad earlier in the day, but I remember feeling better once I ate some food and then later when I had some good chocolate milk, so I think I was partially just low on calories / low-blood-sugar. I also was out walking around in the heat because I don't have a car yet, so that may have been a partial contributor. And lastly I felt alone since everything here is unfamiliar and I didn't have anyone to talk to, and then Dev called me and we talked for ~30 minutes, and I remember feeling better after that. And I also bought a bunch of healthy groceries, including tomatoes, and I just had a tomato and I think I already feel better because of it. [Later: Another thing I noticed is that I was thinking about / worrying about the future earlier today, and as I started directing my attention to pleasant things in the present and stopped thinking about the future I felt better.]
2016.09.11 - I woke up at 10:30am after going to sleep ~1am (the flight to Texas messed up my sleep schedule, I'd been going to bed earlier). It's now 10:37 and I'm noticing that I don't feel amazing. I do feel well rested. I think I'm starting to feel better and better as the minutes pass, though. So it may be some kind of gradual-waking-up that I need to do. The weird thing about this hotel room is that if you draw the curtains it'll be almost pitch black even during the day, and so I didn't get gradually-woken-up by light. So it may be that my head just needs a few minutes to fully wake up. I also may just be hungry / thirsty. (...) I just had a small cup of water and noticed I was a little cold, so I changed into pants and socks, and I think I feel a little better. I may step outside to get some sun. (...) I turned on the TV and caught the final third of 'Rat Race', a very funny (silly) movie, and I better.
2016.09.26
8:43am - It's my first fully-remote day as a software engineer, I just had some almonds, tomatoes, and water for breakfast, and I'm feeling pretty good / excited!
8:33PM - I don't feel so great...I ate a bag of Spanish olive-oil cracker things which were probably 1000 calories. But I think it's probably just that I haven't talked to anyone today, and I don't feel like I have a good idea of what I should be working on for WhatDo. I probably would also have felt better if I'd worked out this evening.
9:30pm - ...and now I feel better, not 'great' but also not bad, just 'good'. I tried to think of what changed in the past hour and I think the major thing is that I drank a bunch of water. So I may have just needed water.
2016.11.01 - I was feeling really down / tired, and then I ate a big spinach salad I had bought at the store, and I soon felt much better. So I was probably suffering from low blood-sugar(?), and just needed some carbs.
2017.01.11 - I feel surprisingly happy right now. I'll try to list the factors that I think led to this:
the past few days I've been trying to make an effort to go to sleep (lights off) at 11pm, and I've been waking up at 7am to start working. So I feel very well rested right now; I don't feel any of the pain in my head that I'd often feel when I was tired.
I was also slightly sick over the weekend (it's Tuesday now) and my head didn't feel great (kind of like when I'm tired), and I was still a little sick yesterday, but I now feel almost totally recovered, so it may be that part of the happiness is a kind of response to that (in the same way that, after I eat bread / ice cream, I have a period where I feel better-than-normal and then another period where I feel worse-than-normal).
I've been eating at my healthiest for the past week or two.
Protein:
Two tubs of Fage 0% yogurt
4 skinless boneless chicken thighs from Molly Stone's meat department, it usually works out to ~1-1.6lbs
Carbs
Two bags of Birdseye steam-in-bag broccoli
1 bag of baby carrots
Fat
I switched back to eating almonds after a while where I was eating Mozzarella string cheese. I think I was driven to the cheese when I wasn't getting enough salt in my diet, and once I started microwaving chicken again (and putting salt on it) I didn't crave the cheese as much.
The chicken thighs have a fair amount of fat on them, even though they're skinless.
If I'm not feeling like almonds, I buy a bag of string cheese (I don't have the brand on-hand) which has 6 sticks.
I've also been going to the gym twice a week for the first time in months in the past week or two.
I mention this in my exercise journal, but I've switched back to a kind of Crossfit mindset where my goal is to try to not take any breaks, even if that means I need to go down in weight. So now I don't worry about the amount of weight that I'm doing, I just try to make sure that 1) I'm doing the number of reps / sets / exercises I decided on, 2) I'm doing as much weight as I can at that number of reps, 3) if I can't finish a set at a certain weight, I just immediately switch to a lower weight and finish the set.
I think this approach is really working well, I'm feeling a good soreness the day or two after the workouts even though the workouts are taking much less time than before (eg, I'm doing some workouts in 30 mins, which is roughly the amount of time they would take when I was doing CrossFit).
I'm doing my normal rotation of: all ab stuff on one day, then all leg stuff on another day, then all arm stuff on another day.
My work has been educational/challenging (which is what I want) but not too stressful.
Update: And now, maybe ~30-60 minutes after writing the stuff above, I still don't feel bad, but I've lost the slight euphoric feeling I was feeling before. I think maybe the euphoric feeling was also related to me being 'in the zone' while doing my work; I felt like I was getting stuff done; I wasn't getting stuck and feeling like I wasn't sure what to do next.
...hmm, and I was also listening to Magic Tapes, and because I wasn't tired they weren't at all tiring / grating, so I think they were helping me stay in the zone and feel good.
2017.01.13 - It's Friday at 1:49pm and I just feel fantastic; I've got a slight euphoria going on. I think it's the same things I discussed above that are causing it: enough sleep, healthy food, the right level of difficulty of work, good music, etc. I ate my big batch of chicken (described above) around an hour ago, so I may be feeling slightly high from all the calories in that, like when I eat Haagen-Dazs. I didn't feel great this morning when I woke up; I felt tired.
2017.01.14 - It's Saturday and I started to feel bad in the early afternoon. I think it was a combination of two things: 1) I had blueberries and orange juice in the morning for carbs instead of my usual broccoli, and I think I may have been coming down from a mild sugar high, and 2) I think the bigger reason was that I was procrastinating about programming, and watching YouTube videos about Notch and Peter Thiel instead, and I've noticed I feel bad every weekend when I do this.
2017.01.15 - One thing I'm noticing today and I also noticed last night is that I'm needing water more than I did in the past few weeks; I'm guessing it's a result of my recent renewed combination of 1) eating a lot of protein, and 2) putting a bunch of salt on the chicken that I eat every day. When I'm craving the water, though, I don't feel a craving for water in particular; I usually just feel either a craving for ice cream (that's what I felt last night) or I just feel generally down / bad (that's what happened today).
2017.01.18 - I slept very well last night, and woke up feeling great (very well-rested), but then when I got to the GSB library I realized I had forgotten my Lacoste shirt, and I only had my ragged sweaters or my white undershirt. I had work I needed to get done, but I decided to head back to get my shirt. And when I started to bicycle back, I noticed that at some point my front bike tire had gone flat. I felt bad because of all of this, but I'd say the main thing I felt bad about was 1) feeling embarrassed at not being dressed appropriately (so, social causes of unhappiness), and 2) being worried about not having enough time to get my work done.
2017.01.21 - I was feeling bad because I hadn't been getting any work on (it's Saturday), and then I 1) started to work on a scraping project for David, 2) put on MT 13, 3) ate a bag of peas, and I was high as a kite. I really think the peas / MT combo would work great for a dance club.
2017.01.30 - I've spent most of today with the tight feeling in my stomach that I used to get in high school when I had a big paper due the next day. The feeling seems to go away somewhat when I'm totally absorbed in doing productive things, but it doesn't go away if I'm 'wasting' time, like reading stuff that won't help me get out of my situation.
2017.02.14 - I feel pretty great right now. I'm tempted to say that I feel pretty much 'perfect'. The only thing that isn't perfect is that I'm spending my time on work-related stuff instead of being free to spend my time however I like, in which case I would prefer to go for a walk / hike / bicycle ride, or play ping-pong / Risk / GoldenEye with friends.
It's a beautiful day out: not hot, not cold.
My head feels totally 'clear', without any bad feelings at all (anxiety, tiredness, etc.)
The biggest change I've made to my habit recently (within the past day or two) is that I've started eating a lot of flax and chia seeds every day (like, maybe 5-10 teaspoons each). I'm seriously suspecting that that's what's making the difference.
Obviously another big difference from the past few months is that 1) I don't have a daily deadline / stand-up that I need to stress about, which means 2) I can sleep as long as I feel like it, whereas in the past I'd often been waking up before I would've chosen to otherwise. But I don't think this explains all of the difference in how I feel. I suspect the flax/chia is partially responsible for the amazingly 'clear' feeling I have in my head.
2017.02.17 - Context: Yesterday morning I showed Max my halfway progress on the month-long project he had given me and he said that I made good progress, so I decided to take the day off to celebrate and relax. I went to the gym in the morning and then spent a bunch of time watching those Jeffrey Paulding Armchair General videos on Combat Mission. Main point: In the evening I went to the Hustler club in SF, arriving at ~11am and leaving when the place closed ~3:40am. I spent ~$75 ($15 entrance, $20 during the dance special with a $5 tip, $2 tipping the bathroom guy, and then ~$38(?) at the main stage on ~2 dancers who I thought were the best), and today I feel so, so good. I really feel great. There's a 'spring in my step', I feel friendly, etc. I need to remember to do this more. I just need to figure out the best time to do it, because it's expensive, so I don't want to do it too much. Maybe once a week on an off night (Thursday?).
Attributes / variables that show up in these entries
Sleep!!!
The happiest I can remember myself being was when I was unemployed in the summer of 2013, getting ~9 hours of sleep every night, spending all day sitting outside, watching girls.
Eat healthy!!! (Vegetables!!!!) (No corn syrup / cookies / crackers / junk food!!!)
I don't love eating broccoli / brussel sprouts / peas but I can't deny that they leave me feeling great later.
I love eating Oreos but I can't deny they leave me feeling horrible later.
Drink enough water!!!
At times I've had it happen that I'll need water but I won't feel thirsty, I'll just feel bad / depressed / sad instead. I remember this happening many times when I drink a bunch of protein powder.
When I'm very busy I don't have time to monitor all of these variables, and so I'm more likely to end up feeling gross from messing up some of them (eg not getting enough sleep).