Quantifying Your Mood & Tracking Your Identity Hours
The following is an excerpt from Module 2 of our digital course. Learn more about the full course and get started now.
In a recent blog post, we introduced the five factors of personal health and performance. We also took a closer look at the first two factors: energy and calm. In this post, we’ll be covering the next two factors in greater detail: mood and identity hours.
Let’s talk about the mood scale.
On the mood scale, you select two different numbers as well. The first number is the high-mania number. It’s the highest level of mania you experienced during the measurement period. Your high-mania number is, numerically, the low number on the left. Think about the highest level of excitement you got to in the period we’re talking about. Remember that going in the mania direction doesn’t actually always feel bad. Sometimes actually it feels really, really good, and that’s why it can be dangerous because we can get stuck there, or we can find ourselves craving going back there again because of the excitement that comes with it.
If we’re feeling mania, we’re feeling fast, racing thoughts. We may have insomnia and that often comes through as an experience where we say, “Look, I just don’t need as much sleep as other people”, or “Man, I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep recently, but you know what, I still feel great. I have tons of energy.” That is the mania having its way with us.
It can make us think that we don’t need sleep and make us work right through the night and get only a couple hours of sleep and plough right through the next day again. It can make us hypersensitive to stimuli around us. We can be obsessive about projects we’re working on. We can feel really intense energy above and beyond what we’d normally expect to feel. We can also feel abnormally irritable, especially with people that are getting in the way of what we’re producing, what we’re thinking, and what we’re doing in those moments of mania.
Put that first number on the left for how high you would normally experience mania on an average day. Remember, the center line here is between 5 and 6 on this scale. Numerically, it’s 5. The way I like to do this is start there in the middle and move to the left and pick the number that feels right for how manic I would get on an average day. If you’re very centered and you don’t have these types of experiences ever, then maybe it’s a 5, and that’s fine.
Now the second number here is the deepest level of depression that you found yourself in over the measurement period on an average day. Let’s talk about what a 10 looks like. A 10 on the depression scale is persistent sadness, loss of interest in the work that you’re doing, or maybe in everything. Loss of interest in the things that normally make you happy.
Maybe you’re feeling hopeless, feeling worthless, certainly judging the things that you created during moments of mania or even just moments of creativity and production and design, looking back on them and judging them harshly and wondering why you ever thought they were great in the first place. You could be feeling mood swings, rapidly up and down, and just general discontent, feeling unhappy with where you are. The word people most often use to describe this state is simply, “sad.”
Select the number towards the depression side of the scale. Again, start around 5 or 6 and move to the right until you find a number that feels right for the lowest mood that you feel like you experienced over the measurement period, over the last 90 days.
Go ahead and circle those two numbers, your high and low mood points, fill them in, and then just draw a line in between them again to create that range where you’re living right now. Ultimately, the goal here is to shrink both of those extremes towards the center. Living around 5 or 6 is an incredibly balanced place. Some people call it being centered.
We want to stay near the center of the scale so we’re not burning too much energy and getting distracted by these swings from one end to the other. Again, we have lots of tools coming up in the program to help us actually accomplish that.
Next is the identity hours chart.
Identity hours are the time that you invest on an average day in the measurement period in any of the things that make you who you are as a person outside of your work identity. Outside of your being the driving force behind your company, the entrepreneur. We’ll talk a lot more about identity, and even inventory all the activities that we do to serve each of our identities later. That’s coming up soon.
But for now, think about the time you spend doing things that are not related to your identity as an entrepreneur. These are really things that fall squarely into your personal or family life, those are all encompassed here. What are the average hours that you’re spending on these things each day?
Nothing related to your professional identity as an entrepreneur; not going to that board meeting that helps everyone remember you’re the smartest person on the block and they should invest in your next funding round; not that nonprofit that’s so critical you volunteer your time with to support your identity as an entrepreneur. It’s not that trade group association that you spend time with. It’s not traveling for business. It’s not everything that you do around the edges of your entrepreneurial identity either. It is strictly things that you do to serve yourself and your family or your friends… activities, time, whatever it may be.
Think about the average number of hours that you spend each day serving these other identities. If you have an identity around being a healthy person and you go for a run every morning for an hour, that’s a great example. If you have an identity around being a great spouse or partner, and you have dinner with your family every evening for 30 minutes, then that time absolutely goes here. If you have a routine where you take your kids to school every day and drop them off and come back before you start your work day, then that time can go here as well.
Our next post will cover the final factor of personal health and performance: happiness. Once discussed, we’ll recap the five factors and learn what our scores mean in relation to Founders First’s personal health and performance scorecard. This will give us a better understanding of our current mindstate.
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