Before we dive in, here are some of the most surprising findings:
Alcohol makes me happier and doesn’t affect my sleep, happiness, or productivity the next day.
Ramen and chips ~3×'d my irritability intensity. Ovulating ~3×'d my grumpiness frequency.
Polyamory doesn’t hurt my emotional well-being (surprising to me) but it dramatically reduces my life satisfaction.
Antidepressants probably gave me depression.
2020 was actually my best year on record. More on this later in the post.
Weather totally affects my mood, specifically, grey overcast skies. Good thing I spent most of my life in the Pacific Northwest, a place famed for its sunniness.
Starting a charity approximately bajillion x’ed my mentions of the word “stressed”.
Meditation works for me - only when it’s a new meditation technique. Then the effect fades and only comes back if I try a new technique.
Cannabis, despite making me very happy in the moment, does not affect my mood overall, one way or the other.
Drugs, meditative states, and Christmas are the source of practically all of my peak days. Work accomplishments don’t show up in this list.
Polyamory and conflict (related) are the source of practically all of my worst days.
Largely my mental health is unpredictable and data analysis falls short of what I’d like to know.
Alcohol makes me happier, despite “what the science says”.
There’s currently a big fad amongst high achievers to stop drinking. All of the studies at a population level say that drinking as much alcohol as I do is unhealthy, and even if it doesn’t feel like it’s affecting my sleep, it does.
And yet - my analysis found that alcohol makes me happier and it doesn’t affect my sleep.
I’ve got an Oura ring and if anything, my sleep is better when I drink. I have better sleep onset, I don’t have the micro-awakenings or changes in the phases that everybody says happens.
I am just as happy and productive the next day as I am if I didn’t drink.
And overall, I’m happier. It doesn’t just not affect my happiness. I am, in fact, happier when I drink regularly.
I’ve tracked my emotions and a million other factors almost every day for the last 11 years. Before I go to sleep every night, I write in my “journal” (the qualitative cell in the spreadsheet), and then fill out various things in other columns like:
Emotional well-being
Life satisfaction (importantly different)
Energy levels
Productivity levels
Irritability
Physical symptoms (e.g. headache, cough, etc)
What meds or supplements I’m taking
What I ate
And many other things, depending on what hypothesis I’m testing at the time
So I can actually see alcohol’s effects.
Also, since I’ve tracked for so long, I can actually compare periods of time where I didn’t drink at all to the ones I drank every day.
And the results are loud and clear: periods where I drink every day I record as happier. Productivity stays the same. Irritability stays the same.
How does this square with all the science saying this shouldn’t happen?
Am I just a college student, coasting on my youth?
Thanks for asking, but I’m 36. Depending on your age, that will sound like a crone or like a baby, but I think I’m definitely past the “I’m just relying on my youth.”
It could be that all of the worst health effects show up later. I think this is plausible. This is why I have a yearly liver scan done. Liver damage is the first detectable sign of alcohol’s long term damage, and I’m intending on cutting down once I see any damage.
As it is right now, my liver scans show a pristine liver.
It could also be that a lot of the long term health outcomes are driven by the outliers. While I technically drink more than a lot of scientists say is healthy, I only drink socially in the evenings, I pretty much never drink enough to pass out, vomit, make bad decisions, or have a hangover (except New Years, which is allowed imo). I also drink drinks optimized for lower immediate effects, mostly vodka sodas. Drinks with more sugar or particulates (such as red wine) are more likely to cause the immediate negative effects.
Meanwhile, I’ve watched documentaries about alcoholics, and they’re regularly day-drinking, drinking alone, passing out, and the whole shebang. They’re drinking multiple bottles of wine equivalents a day. It could very well be that most of the stats about liver disease and the like are driven by the truly problematic drinkers.
Anyways, the underlying interesting thing here is that what happens on average isn’t necessarily what happens to you. On average, women are shorter than men, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t women who are taller than men. And if you track things, you can see what works for you instead of the population on average.
Ramen and chips triples my irritability intensity. Birth control stopping ovulation reduces irritability frequency.
First off, I don’t mean eating ramen like a normal human or like in Japanese cuisine. I’m not cooking it and adding vegetables and whole foods. I buy the bags, break the noodles into a crumble, then eat it raw with the seasoning, like a modern barbarian.
I don’t really care for sweets. But I’m a total salt junky. I will sometimes “snack” on just powdered soup stock.
So ramen and chips used to be my go-to comfort food.
I probably ate them every other day, usually as a full meal. (Good policy by the way. If you’re going to eat junk, make it the whole meal, so you don’t just add calories to your diet.)
I tried all sorts of moderation techniques. I didn’t store them in the house. I banned myself from convenience stores on the way to work. I set limits.
Nothing worked.
Chips and ramen are as crack to me.
So I did what one must do with crack - you must go cold turkey.
A little over a year ago I quit them entirely. No more chips and ramen for me. For life. Ever. Exceptions are something I cannot trust myself to not wiggle through.
Now, I track irritability, because I sometimes have waves of 1-7 days of irritability, where everything bothers me. Other people breathing, chewing, disagreeing with me, or even just being around me makes me crave murder.
Of course, murder is wrong, and I have impulse control, so murder is not had. But man, do I crave it.
After I quit ramen and chips, the number of days I rated a 5/10 irritability or higher went from 5% to 0.5%. Four out of ten days went from 9% of days to 3%. I still occasionally got irritable, but it’s never as intense as it was before.
I don’t know what caused this. It’s not the refined carbs. I still eat plenty of those. It’s just not in the form of ramen and chips.
Could it be some sort of chemical used as a flavoring in one or both of them? This seems plausible to me. A bunch of UPFs are associated with mood issues among children. No reason to not expect that to generalize to us crones.
The intensity went down due to ramen and chips, but I still often had low grade irritability. Days I rated a ≥2/10 irritability went from 27% of days to 21%, so practically the same.
But for the last 6 months, it’s gone down to only 7% of days. And it’s because I stopped ovulating.
On purpose mind you. I had studied my data and realized I don’t get PMS or moody when I’m menstruating (weirdly, those tend to actually be my best part of the cycle). I get moods from ovulating. My brain responds poorly to the sudden spike and drop of all the various hormones. So I experimented with taking birth control that suppresses ovulation (not all birth control does this).
Et voila! Frequency went down to ⅓ of its previous rate.
(It also coincidentally got rid of my occasional pimples as an unexpected bonus. Apparently this is such a common side effect it’s a regular recommendation from dermatologists. Who knew!)
The lesson you can pull from this is if you have mood issues, do experiment with your diet. Both adding good things and taking away bad things. A friend of mine halved her anxiety (which she’s struggled with her whole life) by starting to take an iron supplement.
It might just be that late night snack which is why you’re breaking up with your partner.
Likewise, if you’re a woman, consider taking an ovulating-suppressing birth control. Going through your cycle once a month for most of your life isn’t “natural” anyways. Hunter gatherers typically only had roughly 100 cycles in their lifetime, compared to the roughly 450 times modern industrial women go through.
Polyamory tanks my life and relationship satisfaction
I actually started tracking my emotions in 2015 because I wanted to prove to my husband that, actually, him falling in love and sleeping with other women made me unhappy. Then I just kept tracking because I’m an information hoarder.
Suffice to say, what’s interesting in my data analysis is that, despite my worst days being caused by poly (there ain’t no drama like poly drama), it didn’t actually affect my average day. Weirdly, one of my best months was during massive poly drama.
However
It tanked my relationship satisfaction and life satisfaction. Relationship satisfaction for the obvious reasons. I’m not a jealous or insecure person, otherwise I wouldn’t have tried polyamory in the first place. But it turns out your husband having sex and falling in love with another woman is just inherently insecurity inducing.
And for good reason! He always said that we could stop anytime I said the word. I always told him it was easy for him to say that given he wasn’t in love with somebody at the moment, but that would change.
And I was right.
Yay?
The other interesting thing is the difference between emotional well-being and life satisfaction.
Emotional well-being is the balance of positive to negative emotions in a day.
Life satisfaction is asking yourself “on a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life?”.
The two come apart quite often. Somebody might experience emotional well-being while playing video games all day, but their life satisfaction is likely low. Somebody might experience low emotional well-being waking up in the middle of the night to feed their baby, but their life satisfaction is likely high.
What was interesting about my experience of polyamory is that it did make me grow, in the sense of it forced me to pull out the big guns when it came to coping. During that great month in the midst of poly insanity, I exercised like a motherfucker. More cardio than ever in my life. I meditated more often then than almost any other time. Whenever I felt upset, I’d go for a run then go to the Tesco and buy smoothie ingredients, then meditate for 30 minutes. I worked at a treadmill desk, walking 4+ hours a day. I cultivated a thriving social life to distract me and support me during one of the worst periods of my life.
So I was “happy” in the sense of being able to overcome the negative emotions using every trick I knew.
But I was not happy with it.
I didn’t want to have to spend half my waking hours coping. I wanted my relationship to be a source of comfort, not something I had to cope with.
The thing that finally got me was when I did a thought experiment - what if I had a magic wand and I could simply not have polyamory make me unhappy?
I wouldn’t want that.
Because I just overall didn’t want to be polyamorous, despite having been poly for 7 years.
I didn’t want the intrinsically more drama than monogamy. I wanted somebody who wanted to just be with me. I didn’t want the incessant negotiation and emotional processing of it all. Even if I was emotionally fine with it, there’s always at least two other people involved, and I’d still have to deal with their unpredictable issues.
So I left.
I’ve been in a happy monogamous relationship for 6 years now and I’ve had less relationship drama in that entire time than I had in any random month while being poly. I was reminded that I’m actually a confident secure woman in relationships. My emotional well-being is about the same, but my life satisfaction and relationship satisfaction has reliably been high ever since.
So if you’re considering polyamory but you’re not sure, make sure to not just read the books written by people who like it. Read about people who had a bad experience with it too. Books about a topic are usually only written by people who are true believers. Look for the articles and tweets of people who hated it, it exploded their relationship, and they left and never looked back.
Also, make sure to distinguish between emotional well being and life satisfaction. They can point at very different things.
2020 was my best year and it’s a mystery as to why
2020 should have been bad. I got divorced. I was unemployed. I had no permanent home or even city I lived in. I was in a motorcycle accident in Uganda and was in pain and couldn’t walk for 4 months. Oh yeah, and there was a pandemic, if you remember that?
And yet it was by far my best year.
What the fuck?
My answer is roughly:
Yeah man, I have no idea
But here are some theories
One interesting thing - divorce doesn’t actually make people less happy. Just before the divorce causes immense suffering. But post-divorce people tend to be far happier than their baseline.
This reminds me of a question my mom, who’s twice divorced, asks people when they say they got divorced:
“Is that good or bad news?”
Absolutely, divorce can be very bad for those affected. But it also can have been deeply the right decision.
For me, the relationship had been causing me massive suffering prior (due to polyamory plus other factors I’m not going to discuss publicly because I still care for and respect the guy). So leaving led to relief rather than suffering.
It also helped that I did everything I could think of to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake. We brainstormed dozens of possible fixes, ranging from couples therapy to meditation retreats to applying mindfulness to it to trying different polyamory configurations. We prioritized them based on probability of working and ease of doing and worked systematically through the most promising ones. This was not a spontaneous decision after a bad fight. This was a rational decision come to over months to years, depending on how you count it.
Same thing happened for employment. I had been running charities for the past 7 years, and while that gave me good life satisfaction, it was also stressful as fuck. So, unemployment is usually a negative factor, but for me, it was a relief. Especially since I had savings and was still working on projects I thought were important, I just wasn’t getting paid for it. So I still had purpose, money, and self-respect, which are usually the reasons why unemployment is bad for people’s mental health.
Additionally, the pandemic never stressed me out. I worked in global health. When it started, I was living in a place that was having an active bubonic plague outbreak and had just declared itself “1 month ebola-free!”. Covid seemed and continues to seem pretty mild to me. But it’s all about your reference.
My final theory is that it was the mood stabilizer I was on (lamotrigine) combined with having low external stressors.
I had started the mood stabilizer during my deepest depression in 2019 (more on that later), and it seems likely that it pulled me out of my depression. However, there were a lot of confounding factors, and I was still dealing with poly drama the likes of which you have never seen if you’re monogamous. So I just went back to my regular levels of happiness. Lamotrigine might work well for me, but it can’t make going through poly drama fun. It’s no miracle cure.
However, once I was divorced and stepped down from my org, I no longer had those stressors.
I went from 28% of my days being rated as bad in 2019 to 8% in all of 2020. My average over the rest of my years has been ~22%.
What’s interesting is that I didn’t have more good days. I just cut off the bad ones.
Which is exactly what lamotrigine is supposed to do. Most mood stabilizers cut off the troughs and the peaks. They’re usually for people with bipolar, where they struggle with depression and mania. Lamotrigine is the only one that just gets rid of the lows.
I was on lamotrigine for all of 2020, and I had only two really bad days the entire year. One of which was a cancer scare (turns out it was fine). The other one was having to deal with the poly drama aftershocks one last time.
The problem is that I came off of lamotrigine right around the same time I started my next charity. So it’s unclear whether going back to charity entrepreneurship was what caused it, or the meds.
I’ve since stepped back from starting and running orgs, and I still have ~20% bad days, so that’s some evidence against it. I’m now trying lamotrigine again, thanks to this data, but it’s still too soon to tell.
Overall though, the interesting thing about this is that tracking can help you uncover your unusual times. And that external circumstances don’t necessarily always affect you the way you’d predict.
Antidepressants probably gave me depression
In early 2019 I experienced depression so severe I had to stop working for months. I was taking antidepressants and they weren’t working.
Except. . . it’s not that they “weren’t working”. As best as I can tell, they were the cause of the depression.
You know how on the bottle it lists possible side effects, and one of the possible side effects is depression? Well, that’s probably what happened to me.
“But why did you start taking antidepressants, Kat? Surely it just overlaps because you only take them when you’re depressed, right?”
Good question. And that’s what I thought too.
But then I looked at the data.
And it told an entirely different story.
Yes, I started taking antidepressants after a particularly bad week.
But that week was actually just a regular bad week according to the data. I get moods. I’m a woman. Or I’m on the bipolar spectrum. Or something. Anyways, it’s actually totally normal for me to have stints of 1-7 days of feeling low motivation, energy, and mood.
The difference was this time, a friend recommended I try antidepressants.
And that’s when I went from my usual waves of sadness to a tsunami. I couldn’t work. I contemplated suicide. I would experience the most beautiful and loving things and feel nothing but despair. I even had a brief day of paranoia, where I thought people were watching me on cameras. It went from 24% of bad days to 66%. It went from 4% of days I rated a 4/10 emotional well-being to 32%
It lasted for about 3 months. I tried one anti-depressant then another. Neither “worked”. And it was only when I came off of them that suddenly I was cured.
Of course, there were also confounds. I moved back to my hometown instead of living in London, which I had only moved to after being heavily pressured to by my totalizing ethics and totalizing community. But then I moved back to London, and I stayed cured.
I don’t know what lesson to take from this. My policy is to try psych meds, and if you have unacceptable side effects, just stop. The problem with this one is that it was causing the symptoms they were trying to cure, so it can be hard to know. Also, you have to experiment with psych meds for weeks to months (including the titrating on and off of them), and months of suffering is a lot.
Make of that what you will.
In fact, this might be what the conclusion of all this analysis is: I got a lot out of tracking all of this. Alcohol is fine for me, ramen and chips are bad for me, ovulating messes me up, emotional well-being and life satisfaction matter, but also in the end, psychology is too complicated for us right now. I still don’t know for sure what caused the depression in 2019. Despite having tracked it for over a year, I still don’t know if a psych med helped or not.
Overall, I recommend tracking. But it is by no means a cheat code that will help you understand yourself. It is just one tool among many. But you might find out that seemingly innocuous habits are bad for you, and that things that feel like vices are actually good for you in particular.
Before we dive in, here are some of the most surprising findings:
Alcohol makes me happier, despite “what the science says”.
There’s currently a big fad amongst high achievers to stop drinking. All of the studies at a population level say that drinking as much alcohol as I do is unhealthy, and even if it doesn’t feel like it’s affecting my sleep, it does.
And yet - my analysis found that alcohol makes me happier and it doesn’t affect my sleep.
I’ve got an Oura ring and if anything, my sleep is better when I drink. I have better sleep onset, I don’t have the micro-awakenings or changes in the phases that everybody says happens.
I am just as happy and productive the next day as I am if I didn’t drink.
And overall, I’m happier. It doesn’t just not affect my happiness. I am, in fact, happier when I drink regularly.
I’ve tracked my emotions and a million other factors almost every day for the last 11 years. Before I go to sleep every night, I write in my “journal” (the qualitative cell in the spreadsheet), and then fill out various things in other columns like:
So I can actually see alcohol’s effects.
Also, since I’ve tracked for so long, I can actually compare periods of time where I didn’t drink at all to the ones I drank every day.
And the results are loud and clear: periods where I drink every day I record as happier. Productivity stays the same. Irritability stays the same.
How does this square with all the science saying this shouldn’t happen?
Am I just a college student, coasting on my youth?
Thanks for asking, but I’m 36. Depending on your age, that will sound like a crone or like a baby, but I think I’m definitely past the “I’m just relying on my youth.”
It could be that all of the worst health effects show up later. I think this is plausible. This is why I have a yearly liver scan done. Liver damage is the first detectable sign of alcohol’s long term damage, and I’m intending on cutting down once I see any damage.
As it is right now, my liver scans show a pristine liver.
It could also be that a lot of the long term health outcomes are driven by the outliers. While I technically drink more than a lot of scientists say is healthy, I only drink socially in the evenings, I pretty much never drink enough to pass out, vomit, make bad decisions, or have a hangover (except New Years, which is allowed imo). I also drink drinks optimized for lower immediate effects, mostly vodka sodas. Drinks with more sugar or particulates (such as red wine) are more likely to cause the immediate negative effects.
Meanwhile, I’ve watched documentaries about alcoholics, and they’re regularly day-drinking, drinking alone, passing out, and the whole shebang. They’re drinking multiple bottles of wine equivalents a day. It could very well be that most of the stats about liver disease and the like are driven by the truly problematic drinkers.
Anyways, the underlying interesting thing here is that what happens on average isn’t necessarily what happens to you. On average, women are shorter than men, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t women who are taller than men. And if you track things, you can see what works for you instead of the population on average.
Ramen and chips triples my irritability intensity. Birth control stopping ovulation reduces irritability frequency.
First off, I don’t mean eating ramen like a normal human or like in Japanese cuisine. I’m not cooking it and adding vegetables and whole foods. I buy the bags, break the noodles into a crumble, then eat it raw with the seasoning, like a modern barbarian.
It’s basically a bomb of refined carbs, salt, and ultra-processed foods (UPFs).
I don’t really care for sweets. But I’m a total salt junky. I will sometimes “snack” on just powdered soup stock.
So ramen and chips used to be my go-to comfort food.
I probably ate them every other day, usually as a full meal. (Good policy by the way. If you’re going to eat junk, make it the whole meal, so you don’t just add calories to your diet.)
I tried all sorts of moderation techniques. I didn’t store them in the house. I banned myself from convenience stores on the way to work. I set limits.
Nothing worked.
Chips and ramen are as crack to me.
So I did what one must do with crack - you must go cold turkey.
A little over a year ago I quit them entirely. No more chips and ramen for me. For life. Ever. Exceptions are something I cannot trust myself to not wiggle through.
Now, I track irritability, because I sometimes have waves of 1-7 days of irritability, where everything bothers me. Other people breathing, chewing, disagreeing with me, or even just being around me makes me crave murder.
Of course, murder is wrong, and I have impulse control, so murder is not had. But man, do I crave it.
After I quit ramen and chips, the number of days I rated a 5/10 irritability or higher went from 5% to 0.5%. Four out of ten days went from 9% of days to 3%. I still occasionally got irritable, but it’s never as intense as it was before.
I don’t know what caused this. It’s not the refined carbs. I still eat plenty of those. It’s just not in the form of ramen and chips.
Could it be some sort of chemical used as a flavoring in one or both of them? This seems plausible to me. A bunch of UPFs are associated with mood issues among children. No reason to not expect that to generalize to us crones.
The intensity went down due to ramen and chips, but I still often had low grade irritability. Days I rated a ≥2/10 irritability went from 27% of days to 21%, so practically the same.
But for the last 6 months, it’s gone down to only 7% of days. And it’s because I stopped ovulating.
On purpose mind you. I had studied my data and realized I don’t get PMS or moody when I’m menstruating (weirdly, those tend to actually be my best part of the cycle). I get moods from ovulating. My brain responds poorly to the sudden spike and drop of all the various hormones. So I experimented with taking birth control that suppresses ovulation (not all birth control does this).
Et voila! Frequency went down to ⅓ of its previous rate.
(It also coincidentally got rid of my occasional pimples as an unexpected bonus. Apparently this is such a common side effect it’s a regular recommendation from dermatologists. Who knew!)
The lesson you can pull from this is if you have mood issues, do experiment with your diet. Both adding good things and taking away bad things. A friend of mine halved her anxiety (which she’s struggled with her whole life) by starting to take an iron supplement.
It might just be that late night snack which is why you’re breaking up with your partner.
Likewise, if you’re a woman, consider taking an ovulating-suppressing birth control. Going through your cycle once a month for most of your life isn’t “natural” anyways. Hunter gatherers typically only had roughly 100 cycles in their lifetime, compared to the roughly 450 times modern industrial women go through.
Polyamory tanks my life and relationship satisfaction
I actually started tracking my emotions in 2015 because I wanted to prove to my husband that, actually, him falling in love and sleeping with other women made me unhappy. Then I just kept tracking because I’m an information hoarder.
I’ve written before about how I think polyamory is net negative for most (but not all) people who try it, so I won’t dive into it here.
Suffice to say, what’s interesting in my data analysis is that, despite my worst days being caused by poly (there ain’t no drama like poly drama), it didn’t actually affect my average day. Weirdly, one of my best months was during massive poly drama.
However
It tanked my relationship satisfaction and life satisfaction. Relationship satisfaction for the obvious reasons. I’m not a jealous or insecure person, otherwise I wouldn’t have tried polyamory in the first place. But it turns out your husband having sex and falling in love with another woman is just inherently insecurity inducing.
And for good reason! He always said that we could stop anytime I said the word. I always told him it was easy for him to say that given he wasn’t in love with somebody at the moment, but that would change.
And I was right.
Yay?
The other interesting thing is the difference between emotional well-being and life satisfaction.
Emotional well-being is the balance of positive to negative emotions in a day.
Life satisfaction is asking yourself “on a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life?”.
The two come apart quite often. Somebody might experience emotional well-being while playing video games all day, but their life satisfaction is likely low. Somebody might experience low emotional well-being waking up in the middle of the night to feed their baby, but their life satisfaction is likely high.
What was interesting about my experience of polyamory is that it did make me grow, in the sense of it forced me to pull out the big guns when it came to coping. During that great month in the midst of poly insanity, I exercised like a motherfucker. More cardio than ever in my life. I meditated more often then than almost any other time. Whenever I felt upset, I’d go for a run then go to the Tesco and buy smoothie ingredients, then meditate for 30 minutes. I worked at a treadmill desk, walking 4+ hours a day. I cultivated a thriving social life to distract me and support me during one of the worst periods of my life.
So I was “happy” in the sense of being able to overcome the negative emotions using every trick I knew.
But I was not happy with it.
I didn’t want to have to spend half my waking hours coping. I wanted my relationship to be a source of comfort, not something I had to cope with.
The thing that finally got me was when I did a thought experiment - what if I had a magic wand and I could simply not have polyamory make me unhappy?
I wouldn’t want that.
Because I just overall didn’t want to be polyamorous, despite having been poly for 7 years.
I didn’t want the intrinsically more drama than monogamy. I wanted somebody who wanted to just be with me. I didn’t want the incessant negotiation and emotional processing of it all. Even if I was emotionally fine with it, there’s always at least two other people involved, and I’d still have to deal with their unpredictable issues.
So I left.
I’ve been in a happy monogamous relationship for 6 years now and I’ve had less relationship drama in that entire time than I had in any random month while being poly. I was reminded that I’m actually a confident secure woman in relationships. My emotional well-being is about the same, but my life satisfaction and relationship satisfaction has reliably been high ever since.
So if you’re considering polyamory but you’re not sure, make sure to not just read the books written by people who like it. Read about people who had a bad experience with it too. Books about a topic are usually only written by people who are true believers. Look for the articles and tweets of people who hated it, it exploded their relationship, and they left and never looked back.
Also, make sure to distinguish between emotional well being and life satisfaction. They can point at very different things.
2020 was my best year and it’s a mystery as to why
2020 should have been bad. I got divorced. I was unemployed. I had no permanent home or even city I lived in. I was in a motorcycle accident in Uganda and was in pain and couldn’t walk for 4 months. Oh yeah, and there was a pandemic, if you remember that?
And yet it was by far my best year.
What the fuck?
My answer is roughly:
One interesting thing - divorce doesn’t actually make people less happy. Just before the divorce causes immense suffering. But post-divorce people tend to be far happier than their baseline.
This reminds me of a question my mom, who’s twice divorced, asks people when they say they got divorced:
“Is that good or bad news?”
Absolutely, divorce can be very bad for those affected. But it also can have been deeply the right decision.
For me, the relationship had been causing me massive suffering prior (due to polyamory plus other factors I’m not going to discuss publicly because I still care for and respect the guy). So leaving led to relief rather than suffering.
It also helped that I did everything I could think of to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake. We brainstormed dozens of possible fixes, ranging from couples therapy to meditation retreats to applying mindfulness to it to trying different polyamory configurations. We prioritized them based on probability of working and ease of doing and worked systematically through the most promising ones. This was not a spontaneous decision after a bad fight. This was a rational decision come to over months to years, depending on how you count it.
I had also been doing this for pretty much all of the 7 years of being poly. So at a certain point, you have to say that you know what, I can’t change my internal state. I’ve got to change my external environment.
So when I got divorced, I felt awesome.
Same thing happened for employment. I had been running charities for the past 7 years, and while that gave me good life satisfaction, it was also stressful as fuck. So, unemployment is usually a negative factor, but for me, it was a relief. Especially since I had savings and was still working on projects I thought were important, I just wasn’t getting paid for it. So I still had purpose, money, and self-respect, which are usually the reasons why unemployment is bad for people’s mental health.
Additionally, the pandemic never stressed me out. I worked in global health. When it started, I was living in a place that was having an active bubonic plague outbreak and had just declared itself “1 month ebola-free!”. Covid seemed and continues to seem pretty mild to me. But it’s all about your reference.
My final theory is that it was the mood stabilizer I was on (lamotrigine) combined with having low external stressors.
I had started the mood stabilizer during my deepest depression in 2019 (more on that later), and it seems likely that it pulled me out of my depression. However, there were a lot of confounding factors, and I was still dealing with poly drama the likes of which you have never seen if you’re monogamous. So I just went back to my regular levels of happiness. Lamotrigine might work well for me, but it can’t make going through poly drama fun. It’s no miracle cure.
However, once I was divorced and stepped down from my org, I no longer had those stressors.
I went from 28% of my days being rated as bad in 2019 to 8% in all of 2020. My average over the rest of my years has been ~22%.
What’s interesting is that I didn’t have more good days. I just cut off the bad ones.
Which is exactly what lamotrigine is supposed to do. Most mood stabilizers cut off the troughs and the peaks. They’re usually for people with bipolar, where they struggle with depression and mania. Lamotrigine is the only one that just gets rid of the lows.
I was on lamotrigine for all of 2020, and I had only two really bad days the entire year. One of which was a cancer scare (turns out it was fine). The other one was having to deal with the poly drama aftershocks one last time.
The problem is that I came off of lamotrigine right around the same time I started my next charity. So it’s unclear whether going back to charity entrepreneurship was what caused it, or the meds.
I’ve since stepped back from starting and running orgs, and I still have ~20% bad days, so that’s some evidence against it. I’m now trying lamotrigine again, thanks to this data, but it’s still too soon to tell.
Overall though, the interesting thing about this is that tracking can help you uncover your unusual times. And that external circumstances don’t necessarily always affect you the way you’d predict.
Antidepressants probably gave me depression
In early 2019 I experienced depression so severe I had to stop working for months. I was taking antidepressants and they weren’t working.
Except. . . it’s not that they “weren’t working”. As best as I can tell, they were the cause of the depression.
You know how on the bottle it lists possible side effects, and one of the possible side effects is depression? Well, that’s probably what happened to me.
“But why did you start taking antidepressants, Kat? Surely it just overlaps because you only take them when you’re depressed, right?”
Good question. And that’s what I thought too.
But then I looked at the data.
And it told an entirely different story.
Yes, I started taking antidepressants after a particularly bad week.
But that week was actually just a regular bad week according to the data. I get moods. I’m a woman. Or I’m on the bipolar spectrum. Or something. Anyways, it’s actually totally normal for me to have stints of 1-7 days of feeling low motivation, energy, and mood.
The difference was this time, a friend recommended I try antidepressants.
And that’s when I went from my usual waves of sadness to a tsunami. I couldn’t work. I contemplated suicide. I would experience the most beautiful and loving things and feel nothing but despair. I even had a brief day of paranoia, where I thought people were watching me on cameras. It went from 24% of bad days to 66%. It went from 4% of days I rated a 4/10 emotional well-being to 32%
It lasted for about 3 months. I tried one anti-depressant then another. Neither “worked”. And it was only when I came off of them that suddenly I was cured.
Of course, there were also confounds. I moved back to my hometown instead of living in London, which I had only moved to after being heavily pressured to by my totalizing ethics and totalizing community. But then I moved back to London, and I stayed cured.
I don’t know what lesson to take from this. My policy is to try psych meds, and if you have unacceptable side effects, just stop. The problem with this one is that it was causing the symptoms they were trying to cure, so it can be hard to know. Also, you have to experiment with psych meds for weeks to months (including the titrating on and off of them), and months of suffering is a lot.
Make of that what you will.
In fact, this might be what the conclusion of all this analysis is: I got a lot out of tracking all of this. Alcohol is fine for me, ramen and chips are bad for me, ovulating messes me up, emotional well-being and life satisfaction matter, but also in the end, psychology is too complicated for us right now. I still don’t know for sure what caused the depression in 2019. Despite having tracked it for over a year, I still don’t know if a psych med helped or not.
Overall, I recommend tracking. But it is by no means a cheat code that will help you understand yourself. It is just one tool among many. But you might find out that seemingly innocuous habits are bad for you, and that things that feel like vices are actually good for you in particular.