Short Term Happiness Research

(This is somewhat of a continuation of a blog I posted in September, where I was trying to figure out why I was feeling a bit down/sluggish sometimes)
http://frankiestyn.blogspot.jp/2013/09/dissecting-my-own-psyche.html


I've been thinking about something as of late. I've always paid a lot of attention to doing things that will lead to an awesome life in the future and thus hopefully longterm happiness. It's not too hard to know what to do to achieve longterm happiness and (although somewhat harder) it's not that hard to actually achieve longterm happiness either. I simply set goals I want to achieve and I work hard to get there.

Something I've been paying more attention to as of late is day-to-day happiness. Being happy right here right now in this moment. A couple of months ago I started to notice and pay more attention than before to the fact that I'd have periods where I was really happy and motivated and periods where I was not as happy and motivated. Prefering the happy and motivated periods, I set out to try and figure out what was going on.
A little footnote is that although I recently starting paying more attention to this, it's certainly not something new. I had swings like this just as much if not way more as a professional poker player where they were closely linked to how well I was doing in poker. Which is why I wouldn't recommend the professional poker lifestyle to all that many people, because your happiness is somewhat dependant on something that is not 100% in your control and it can be REALLY hard to deal with.
Anyway, when trying to figure out what was going on with my moodswings I realised, there'll probably always be ups and downs, that's the way life is. Nonetheless I felt like I should be able to figure out some causes as to why I was feeling a little down sometimes, because when I take a step back and look at my life I don't see why I would ever be down, unless maybe I am ill and in pain. So what I decided to do was, conduct research on my day-to-day happiness. Here's what I did:

 I had to cut out certain extremely private parts

At the end of each day before I go to bed I rate each day a number from 1 to 5 and write down:

-Why I rated it the way I did.

-The very best moment of my day.

-The very worst moment of my day.

-What I'd do differently if I could relive the day.

I've been doing this to try and gain some insight in what makes me happy on a day to day basis and why my moods have been swinging. There's some days missing here and there. A bunch when I fell seriously ill at the start of October and then about a month's worth when I was abroad. I really wish I would've done it during my travels too, because it could've given me valuable insight. A couple others recent ones are missing too. Mostly unproductive and kind of unhappy days where I didn't bother filling it in. The 18th of November(didn't fill it in) is the only day so far I'd rate a 1 in the past 3 months, although being very ill on the 3rd of October came very close aswell.

Overall I definitely think I am seeing some trends:

1) Whenever I meet with friends I generally have a good day. These days stand out from other days. They're not so monotomous and I guess I also just really enjoy socializing.

2) Being unproductive and wasting time pisses me off tremendously. The feeling I'd have liked to have done other things with my precious time is not a happy feeling.

Also I'm not sure yet, but there's been a few events that caused me to be unhappy for a couple of days up to a week. These are too complicated and I don't have enough of them yet to draw any conclusive evidence, but I'll definitely keep on monitoring these, because I think they may be the(or at least a) key to what I'm looking for.

Yesterday and today have also been quite interesting. For the most part they had all the ingredients to be good days, but overall my mood has been so-so. I'm not exactly sure why. One very possible cause is not being able to workout. I still have the muscle in my left shoulder/upper back that needs to rest for a couple of more days. The muscle doesn't bother me much during the day so it's not the cause of unhappiness, but it's not 100% yet so I couldn't go to the gym. This may have caused me to be less happy, because I enjoy the gym and because of a change of routine and maybe slight lack of structure.
Another thing I realised today while I was analyzing my own psyche on the train is that possibly paying so much attention to whether I'm happy or not is not good for my happiness. I guess I realise life is not forever and time is valuable and I want to consciously enjoy as much of it as I can and I don't want it to be over before I realise it. But doing so and focussing too much on enjoying things may make me enjoy those very things less. Just going with the flow and relaxing a bit more may be a good thing here.

I could probably go on a rant about the meaning of life here, but let me save that for some other time.

One other possible contributing factor is one I won't share with you in this blog. Some of the people closest to me may have some sort of clue what I'm talking about and 1 person knows me so well that this person knows without a doubt what I'm talking about. It's a bit complicated and it may or may not be contributing. I'm not sure.

Anyway, I'll keep up the research and hopefully learn even more things about what makes me happy on a day-to-day basis. I feel like I have the long-term happiness thing down quite well, hopefully I can master the short-term, day-to-day happiness aswell!

I was planning on translating this blog into Japanese aswell for practice, but I've already spent a decent bit of time on this. I may translate it tomorrow or something, because it's bound to be a good exercise. May take me quite a while though! But 哲学 is always interesting, so I may give it a shot.