Know Thyself

How well do you know yourself? Are you confident in your thoughts on what does and doesn’t make you happy? These are questions I have pondered and thought about a lot (an unhealthy amount someone might say). If academic psychology has taught me anything, it is that often enough we don’t know why we do what we do and feel the way we do. Who would have thought that the colour of a girl’s scarf, the letters in our names or even wind speed could have profound effects on our behaviour and life?

The typical psychology study takes a very large group of people, manipulates something and then sees what happens. From this we have shown various interesting things. Recalling memories can make us feel happier, we assume attractive people are more trustworthy and a stressful relationship can be damaging to our health. But how do we use this information? One sensible suggestion would be to assume the findings probably apply to us as well. Generally all human brains and bodies share very similar chemistry and structure. But what do you do if you think you stand out from the crowd? Or can’t find a psychological study that is relevant to your interests. It’s quite obvious: study yourself.

This blog will hopefully reveal some fairly interesting psychology research and findings. It will also reveal how strange I am. As I conducted a psychological study on my own mood for 2 months. For the love of this blog, for 60 days, before going to bed at night I asked myself ‘how happy do you feel Eric?’ and made a rating on a scale. I then entered this into a database and also entered responses to a number of questions (for example ‘how many hours sleep did I get last night?’ ‘did I read a book today?’) before finally turning my computer off and starting to act normal again. I wanted to know what might make me happy and unhappy. So rather than searching through journals and papers I studied my weird self.

Obviously such a study has a number of weaknesses. Two pertinent ones are that 60 days isn’t a massively long time in the grand scheme of things, so making big conclusions would be difficult. More importantly, all results reported are correlational. This means that they only show that two things are related. Such a study cannot prove cause and effect. But, we can at least make suggestions about what the results mean by looking at studies with bigger groups of people and also by using some common sense and reasoning. So, to the results………

Excitingly a number of things appeared to influence my mood. Exercise being one of them. On days that I had exercised I tended to be in a significantly better mood than on days in which I skipped the gym. This is probably not surprising, for years we have been force fed the benefits of exercise for healthier hearts and thinner waistlines, but to also know that it may be making me feel a bit happier is also good news. And there is good reason to believe it may be beneficial. Steinberg et al (1997) found that after participants assigned to a weekly exercise programme experienced increased positive feelings and decreased negative feelings pre to post exercise session. The mood enhancing effects of exercise have also resulted in calls for it being prescribed as a treatment for depression. Longitudinal research by Paffenbarger et al suggests that regular exercise may be protective against depression. Looking at a population of American college males, analysis revealed that those that partook in regular exercise were far less likely to experience depression over a 25 year follow up period.

Another finding, although a little unexpected was that if I had been drinking the night before, my mood tended to be substantially lower the next day. Furthermore, analysis of my data showed that this couldn’t be explained through a lack of sleep, having been in a bad mood the previous day (hence, a possible decision to drink) or being less likely to exercise. The hangover seems like the most likely cause then. Yet, most of the time I wasn’t drinking enough to cause one. Research on alcohol and mood is quite mixed. Many studies have actually found alcohol to enhance mood over shorter periods of time or have no effect. Whilst others have found it increases the likelihood of experiencing depressed moods over longer periods.

Reading is often a great joy of mine. My data may even suggest that I should be partaking in this pleasure a lot more often. On days that I had read my mood was strongly elevated. This was confusing at first. However, as I tend to read shortly before bed, perhaps this finding makes a little more sense. I am 100% sure reading a book won’t be a new treatment for depression anytime soon, but as my reading exploits tended to be minutes before making my happiness rating, the positive feelings and enjoyment may still have been bouncing around inside.

A final and controversial issue; my ex-girlfriend. Was she any good? Or was she just a massive bitch? For those ‘interesting’ people that believe in ‘the one’, like listening to The Lighthouse Family and call their partners ‘babe’ I have some bad news. If you have just broken up with a girlfriend/boyfriend and are currently crying at your computer whilst listening to The Smiths, I have some slightly better news. She didn’t seem to do very much at all (isn’t this always the case?). Having seen her the previous day didn’t result in a more positive mood. Having seen her earlier on in the day or knowing that I would be seeing her later on also had no effect on how happy I felt whatsoever. And who said romance was dead?

Conclusions

As this blog was all about me there are few implications for you. For me, there are many:

a) Exercise is pretty good.
b) I should be much happier about being single.
c) I have a lot of spare time on my hands.

I was quite wrong in my original preconceptions over what would shape my mood. Amongst others, my amount of sleep, eating unhealthily and amount of music listened to had little or no influence on my happiness rating.

Bad Times

As previously discussed in an earlier blog feeling good is normally what we want from life. Nobody wants to be in a bad mood and experience negative affect. It just isn’t a lot of fun. However, many misconceptions over what can cause us to feel happy or sad exist and although old wives tales sound good, they aren’t always accurate. Feeling down? What can turn that frown upside down? A nice sunny day with the birds singing? Thinking positively and telling yourself ‘You can achieve anything’?

Disappointingly research suggests that these two common notions are probably not going to make us feel that much better. Furthermore, dependent on the person one of them is likely to make you feel a whole lot worse. Generally we aren’t all that good at working out what does and doesn’t influence our mood. A case in point is the weather. A popular held belief is that when the sun is out and the birds are singing we tend to feel a lot happier, active and enthusiastic. A large scale by Denissen et al. 2008 examined how weather conditions may influence mood. The study involved over 1000 participants in Germany. Participants were recruited through various internet advertisements and completed the study over the internet. Each night (for 30 nights) participants would log onto a specially designed website and answer various questions. The questionnaires assessed a number of constructs. Positive affect (the amount of positive emotion one feels), negative affect (the amount of negative emotion one feels) and tiredness (you guessed it: how tired one feels).

Researchers then accessed weather data from the German weather institute matching participants post codes to the relevant weather reports from the area. Did the temperature, wind power or amount of sunlight have an effect on positive affect? Did the world literally and mentally glow more? Results from this study suggest not. Warmer and sunnier days did not tend to make individuals experience more positive affect. The good weather didn’t make individuals feel more active, inspired or determined. Additionally, previous studies have come to similar conclusions.

So if weather can’t make us feel better can it make us feel more afraid, anxious and distressed? Did weather have an impact on how bad our German friends were feeling? Yes it did. Lower temperatures, less sunlight and high wind speeds were associated with greater negative emotions and feelings. Finally, the data also suggested that fewer hours of sunlight resulted in greater feelings of tiredness. But it must be mentioned that these effects were only small but nevertheless significant. It would therefore appear that rather than looking forward to summer we should probably be worrying more about winter. More interestingly, could these small changes in mood shape what we do with our day? Could a cloudy gray morning influence you in choosing not to take a chance with a job application or controversial art exhibit?

Self help books are a vast and lucrative business. They tend to tell us not only do we have to feel good about ourselves, but we also have to tell ourselves this and believe it. Should you? I would be extremely sceptical about this. In an ingenuous article entitled ‘Self help statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others’, Wood et al. 2009 examined what the effects of such self help statements may be. The experiments tended to be quite simple; researchers assigned participants to either a self help statement condition or no-self help statement condition. Participants were required to continuously write down any thoughts or feelings that occurred during a 4 minute period. In addition to this, the self help statement group were required to repeat to themselves ‘I am a loveable person’ every time they heard a doorbell. The bell was rung every 15 seconds automatically. After this all participants completed a number of measures covertly assessing mood and their current positive/negative feelings about themselves. Prior to the experiment all participants had completed measures of self esteem (self esteem is essentially how positively you view yourself).

Across the studies the researchers found a strong trend of repeating the over the top typical self help phrase ‘I am a loveable person’ to make individuals with low self esteem actually feel worse about themselves. In comparison, for individuals with high self esteem the self help phrase repetition had a very small positive effect. The irony behind this of course is that it’s fairly likely that self help books attract those that aren’t all that happy with themselves. Thinking a little deeper it isn’t just self help books that might trigger the use of such statements. Friends and magazines advising to ‘think positively’ may cause this inadvertent back firing too.

Why did the researchers discover this unexpected finding? One explanation may be that self help statements direct some attention or thought toward exactly the opposite: why you aren’t such a loveable person. Yet, it is a tricky one to answer and the researchers couldn’t find any obvious explanation from their data

Implications

When colleagues declare they are feeling great because of the sunny weather outside bring them crashing back down to reality.
Blindly thinking positively isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Perhaps such instructions are sometimes just too unrealistic and hopelessly optimistic and thus remind us why we are forcing ourselves to say them.

If you are extremely fond of yourself then go crazy with self help statements. Based on Wood et al. you might feel even better.

Try not to let the weather get you down.