Monitoring progress
I wonder how do people monitor progress in meantal healh and well-being?
If you're trying to loose weight... You weigh yourself. If you want to improve your career you look at your outputs and salary. And if you want to have a better mental health... you...?
@Aputik
@jperson99
I guess one has to monitor test results for specific areas of mental health, with time. Otherwise it's hard to see the progress done and easy to feel overwhelmed by what still needs to be done.
@Aputik
Good question. One way you can quantify it is by grouping emotions into “positive” and “negative” buckets (no emotion is bad, but some are less pleasant than others). Then, on paper, you can track the number of times in a week you experience a “positive” emotion and experience a “negative” emotion. This can be used, as long as the measurement criteria is constant, as a measure of the frequency you experience positive or negative emotions. Take notes on the side for aberrant environmental circumstances. If you see an increase in the frequency of positive emotion, it can be viewed as “better” mental health (although this is just an operational definition for this model).
@WayJay
theoretically the goal being increasing the frequency of positive emotional states from the work you are doing. Measurement is key to improvement in many things as it gives a reference and can serve as a model for goal setting, etc.
@WayJay
in part, however, some of this is subjective well-being as well. Intuition, other ways, that you can “know” you’re on the right path
@WayJay
The problem I find with intuition is that one can get lost in a period of mostly negative experiences and thoughts tending to catastrophyze without being aware of all the progress made.
Yeah that’s more about just having faith in the process and that what you are doing is indeed benefitting you. Often times real change is incredibly, incredibly unpleasant, so it can actually be a good sign if you are experiencing a bunch of negative stuff (although this may be counterintuitive). one other thing is that intuition is kind of beyond the level of thoughts (cognition) and is more at the level of emotions/gut feelings/etc. learning to identify and trust that internal compass is incredibly important. I think being able to view your thoughts as thoughts and being able to challenge them (which we learn a lot about here at 7cups) is very important in that endeavor
@WayJay
That's interesting and easy to do. I will give it a go.... I wonder if there is an app that helps keeps track of the frequency of negative and positive emotions. Otherwise, excel will do so that it can produce some graphs and visually understand progress.
amazing! Give it a shot. There were some old apps where someone attempted this but I don’t remember what it was called. It’s also a good part of the exercise to be able to define your emotions for yourself, kind of like active listening for yourself
@WayJay
I think I've just found one... How we feel.
I will give it a go!
