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I've been attempting to solve this as well. I think stress is particularly difficult to measure as a simple number, as there are multiple forms of stress. For me, I've noticed urgency (stress on time), difficulty (stress on cognition), uncertainty (stress on confidence), and guilt (stress on emotions) make up my 'stress matrix'. I'm often able to identify the key strain during stream of consciousness, but only once I've made the conscious effort to backtrace. I'm also a musician, and ironically, I will often increase my total stress levels by procrastinating certain tasks, using an instrument as my weapon of distraction. Sometimes this has instigated negative feedback loops, causing me to avoid playing for an extended period. So my plan is to allocate a few minutes in the beginning and at the end of my day where I will reflect on the previous and upcoming cycle, including tasks and goals. Here I will have a -1, 0, 1 flag where -1 is "I am stressed," 0 is "I am relaxed," and 1 is "I am excited." I can either set these flags for an entire period (hour, day, week) or I can set them per object (task, goal). The default state is 0, as I'm more likely to set a flag if I'm experiencing emotion in either direction. Importantly, I will also set these flags retrospectively; so in the morning, I might flag a task as -1, but in the evening, it might be +1. There are some useful data points here that I should be able to achieve with minimal friction. 1) how often am I stressed or excited? 2) how often can I easily identify the source(s) of emotion? 3) how consistent are my emotional flags over periods of time? I also wonder what quantifiable data must exist in any form of extended journaling that can be unlocked via NLP or simpler heuristics. When I'm excited, do I tend to use more or less punctuation? When I'm stressed, does it take me longer to complete a journal entry? Thanks for the inspiration to jot these thoughts down. They've been lingering in my head for awhile. |
That's also a great point about NLP etc. I was kinda hoping that my "Average daily log entries" would show some kind of trend like that, but I guess it was too simplistic. It really might be worth recording journal data and just assuming that the tools for analysis will catch up later.