[Ntrails]

Imagine you could peg your mood to any index you like, that it was a free choice. Performance at work, social activities, personal relationships, physical prowess, heck the sodding FTSE 100.

If you had that free choice, what would you choose? I assume a weighted aggregate of some kind including some of the above?

The truth is you can peg it to anything you choose, and you do that by prioritising these things in your day to day life. If you spend 1 day a month doing exercise, you're implicitly weighting that lowly in your mind. If you spend 10-12 hours a day working, that's how you weight it in your "mood index".

Just my opinion of course.

[jressey]

This is so important to understand. You are in complete control of how satisfied you are with yourself.

My strategy is to pay attention to the present, for example if I had a 'bad' day at work and feel stress at home, I might think about how nice the pjs feel on my skin, or "Trees, wtf those are awesome!"

You are free to exist outside of societal and moral constructs that you perceive (in this case excelling at work). Once you know the source of your dissatisfaction, simply stop feeding it.