Happiness Runs in a Circular Motion?

This is a repost of the latest article I wrote for Forbes on the trend of tracking your emotions.
________________________________________________________

The ability to quantify many areas of our lives has led to the emergence of a new trend – the trend of tracking your emotions, specifically happiness. These apps allow people to track their emotions much like they would track fitness, calories or spending. But, can this focus on tracking happiness actually undermine us, especially in our career or business successes?

The idea of quantifying our activities using technological tools is not new. Many of us use apps like Nike+ or RunKeeper to track our runs, calorie counters such as Meal Snap to track our caloric intake, and financial tools like Mint to track our spending.

Launched in 2009, Track Your Happiness is a mobile research project that allows users to track their happiness and find out what factors – for them personally – are associated with greater happiness. According to data from the app: “46.9% of people's time is spent thinking on something other than what they're doing. In fact, what activity a person was engaged in only accounted for about 5% of a person's happiness, whereas whether that person's mind was on- or off-task accounted for over 10%.” So, in other words, a wandering mind is an “unhappy one.” Some apps are taking this idea even further and are looking at the idea of happiness through a person’s social network. Happstr is a mobile app that allows users to mark geographical locations where they’re feeling happy, and to see others' "happiness spots" on the map. It’s purpose is to get users to focus on and record the best moments of their lives. It enables them to benefit from the well-being of others by sharing that happiness with their social network. The app is based on research that shows a person’s happiness can be easily elevated by the network effect of happy people near you.

While the idea of sharing and recording personal happiness is interesting, these apps are problematic since they lead to counterfactual thinking. Happiness, like all emotions ebbs and flows. It can depend on any number of factors such as whom you were with, when you were there, and even the weather. Additionally, by tracking your happiness, it causes you to always be looking backward through rose-colored glasses rather than staying in the present.

As noted in a 1995 study, “When less is more: Counterfactual thinking and satisfaction among Olympic medalists,” published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: "People's emotional responses to events are influenced by their thoughts about 'what might have been.' The authors extend these findings by documenting a familiar occasion in which those who are objectively better off nonetheless feel worse."

Apps like these drive us to compare ourselves and our emotional state with others, causing us to focus on what we don’t have rather than what we do have. It undermines our successes.

Interestingly, this applies across the board. Successful business leaders as well as Olympic winners even fall prey to this. For example, the same study found third place Olympic winners are sometimes even happier than second place because the "silver medals winners did upward comparisons to the gold medal winner, while the bronze medalists did downward comparisons to people who didn't win medals." And, this is evidence among business leaders in competitive fields as well. According to Jena McGregor’s Washington Post article, “The psychology of how Olympic gold, silver and bronze can go to your head,” “Leaders in competitive fields are always comparing themselves to those who came in first, when they might enjoy their success a little more if they learned to compare themselves to those who didn’t come close to winning at all."

This trend of tracking our emotional states leads us to focus backward rather than forward. To quote Daniel Gilbert, one of the creators of the Track Your Happiness Project, in his book, Stumbling on Happiness: “The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.” Happiness is a raw, human emotion—not something that can be tracked like calories and purchases.  Much like a mood ring one might find at a toy store, such apps shouldn’t be taken seriously. The very thought of it makes me sad.

Lifelogging: The Ability to Quantify Yourself

With more and more data available and at our fingertips, it has become possible to track every area of our lives. We can track our finances, our location, our friends, our movement, our jogs, our calorie intake, and even, our sleep patterns via digital channels.

Below is a video of Hasan Elahi's Ted Talk on tracking his entire life in response to ending up on the FBI watch list by accident:

This trend towards tracking everything is impacting the health and wellness sector in a unique way. In the last few years, a new trend has emerged, Lifelogging. According to the Lifestream blog, Lifelogging is the process of tracking personal data generated by our own behavioral activities. While Lifestreaming primarily tracks the activity of content we create and discover, Lifelogging tracks personal behavior data like exercising, sleeping, and eating. Lifelogging revolves around analyzing and learning from data to help optimize personal behaviors.

Some interesting apps and devices are capitalizing on this trend:

• UP by Jawbone is a wristband + iPhone app that tracks your activity and sleep. The idea is that the wristband inspiring you to move more, sleep better and eat smarter. 
• Nike+ is one of the best-known examples for tracking exercise. You can track your workouts via Sportband, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPod Nano as well as online. 
• BodyMedia FIT is an armband to track physical activity and sleep patterns. Tracking is done by iPhone or Android apps as well as online. 
• iHealth Blood Pressure Dock is the first blood pressure monitoring system for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. 
• Meal Snap asks you to take a photo of your meal and then estimates how many calories your meal was. It tracks your meals and progress towards your diet goals over time. 
• Sleep Cycle is an iPhone app that acts as an alarm clock. It analyzes your sleep patterns and wakes you in the lightest sleep phase so you wake up relaxed and refreshed. 

And, this Lifelogging trend even extends into tracking changes in personal appearance. People are tracking how their face changes over time with the Everyday app, an app that allows you to take a picture of your face every single day. As noted by Techcrunch, the app functions in the following way: “When you first load up Everyday, you’re asked to take a picture of your face. Once you do this, you’re asked to align a grid to where you nose, mouth, and eyes are. This means that for each picture you take, your face can be in the same position…. And there’s also an overlay photo mask of your original face picture (which can be switched on and off) to help you align your face. And the real key may be the alert system, which allows you to set a time each day to get a Push Notification to take the picture of yourself, so you don’t forget.”

Moreover, communities are developing around Lifelogging. For example, the Quantified Self community is an online community around the users and toolmakers who share an interest in self-knowledge through self-tracking. The community includes a forum, a guide to available self-tracking tools and projects, and videos around the subject. Additionally, it has even expanded offline into Quantified Self Show and Tell meet-ups and an annual conference.

As the ability to quantify yourself through real-time data becomes more and more engrained in society, it will be interesting to see the results. Will people gravitate to the idea that they more they know, the more they will be able to better themselves? Or, will it result in a backlash?

For more information on this topic, here's a link to a collaborative post I wrote for work with Alina Koyfman, "Mobile Devices: My Tool for a Better Me."