Vibe Logging: The Value in Tracking Emotions Through Time

 For many years I tracked how I spent every minute of my time – and I learned fun facts about myself – over the course of three years of data my average time spent reading fictional novels per day was forty-four minutes. But eventually I stopped logging my time; I’d learned it added roughly twenty minutes to my shower to wash my hair, and that I didn’t feel happy with my relationship when we spent under two hours of quality time together per day. The experiment was a success, but the returns were diminishing.

Then, seven years after the original time-logging project began, I had a new inspiration: vibe logging. The premise was that each day had a “vibe” to it – wistful, industrious, melancholy, frustrated, introspective – and that by keeping track of these vibes I’d learn something about how my mood shifted over the course of days, weeks, months, and – maybe, if I was ambitious enough – years.

I’ve been “vibe logging” for four years now, and I can say this project has been an astonishing success. It began as more of a whimsy, but it soon became one of my most powerful tools for battling chronic depression. Depression lies to us and tells us “it’s really always been this way.” But looking at my vibe log, that’s obviously untrue. In fact, as often as I cry, feel depressed, or have “a bad day,” my vibe log shows me the truth: that with great regularity I have good days, and even entire good weeks. Occasionally I have an entire month where there is hardly a spec of the “negative” vibes.

Equipped with the “proof” that my vibe log provides, depression can’t lie to me about my life. Nobody – including myself – can tell me any lies about my subjective experience of life, because I have a literal log of how I felt.

But let’s back up: how does a vibe log even work?

The important features of my vibe log for me are:

1. Easy to “see at glance.” This means I need to be able to look at a period of time and “drink it in” like artwork. I’ve already been journaling since I was nine years old – but there is no way to glance at these journal entries and get a sense of how I felt over the years. The vibe log needs to visually represent feelings through colors and/or symbols in addition to words so that the flow of subjective feelings through time becomes readily apparent.

2. Easy to use. I need to be able to update my vibe log daily even when I’m extremely busy, traveling, or unwell.

3. Easy to associate with memory. I need to be able to see the date of the vibes, but I also need to be able to anchor how I was feeling to data points that allow me to remember what period of my life I’m looking at. So in addition to the vibes and dates, I need things like the day of the week, friends I saw, phone calls I made, and other key events.

My vibe log achieves all of the above and more. I created it as an online spreadsheet that synchronizes with the cloud so that I can modify it on any device, including my phone. This way I can update my vibe log anytime I have access to a device with an internet connection. 

To be able to “see my vibes at a glance” I created each vibe with its own background and text color combination, putting some vibes in bold or italics, and including symbols with a few of them as well. I used my favorite colors for my favorite emotions (intuitive, introspective, inspired, happy, and insightful use blues and purples), I used stark contrast and dark themes for my worst feelings (afraid, isolated, grief, desolate, and dread all use a black background with white text), and I used loud colors for some of my loudest feelings (jealous, pained, manic, lustful, and angry all use variants of bright red in their theme). The important part was choosing colors that matched my experience – subjectively, of course.

By using a unique formatting for each vibe and an overall color-theme for my vibe log, I can glance at a month and see if there are a lot of my favorite colors – meaning it was an inspired, creative month – or if there were a lot of loud or dark colors, or even a mixture of these. I used more pastel colors for more mellow feelings, so that more peaceful months showed up in pastel greens, blues, and purples, whereas months riddled with upheaval would be black and gray peppered with bright reds and oranges.

To make the spreadsheet more meaningful, I not only included the “vibes of the day” but also columns for location, day of the week, and highlight events. This allowed me to easily associate how I was feeling with what was happening in my life. Of course, I was excited leading up to a big trip, and I began to see that I often felt fragile when hosting visitors for the holidays. I learned that feeling “resolute” one day almost invariably led to feeling “pained” the next day, and within a year of beginning my vibe log, I simply stopped letting myself get into a resigned, resolute mode of being.

I made a video just under a year into the process – which you can watch here – where I mentioned that no two months – no two weeks – looked the same, and four years into the process, I can say that is still true. Keeping a vibe log has taught me many things, and one of them is how uniquely precious every month is. Each cycle has its own original quality – some filled with peace, others with turmoil, but no two are alike.

There are, of course, many trends. Being industrious and creative often leads to feeling proud. A sense of yearning often goes along with feeling lustful, disappointed, sad, or lonely. In a given cluster of days, intuitive almost never shows up without also feeling introspective or insightful, and inspired is another common companion. Insecurity, predictably, often shows up with anxiety, but surprisingly, it also shows up with pride in the same few days – perhaps affirming how often pride is a coping strategy for an underlying sense of shame.

It says a lot about my life just noticing which vibes I decided to create in the first place. Somewhere along the way I decided that feeling “loved” was an importantly, distinctly different vibe from feeling “connected.” Someone else might have lumped these together. Whereas, I decided not to bother making a separate vibe for “restless” – even though I considered it a few times – and instead simply use “anxious” to cover restless, listless, worried, and of course, anxious. 

It also says a lot about my subjective experience to notice which vibes show up a lot and which I hardly ever use. Over 1,543 days of vibe logging, the most dominant vibe – by a landslide – is feeling “industrious.” I’ve marked this down as my dominant vibe for the day on three hundred and sixty seven days! That’s more than a full year’s worth of days! Put another way, on average, I feel at least a little industrious one out of three days. This is remarkable, as overall, I don’t think of myself as a “busy bee” sort of person – but I do love to “get things out of the way.” I hate procrastinating, unfinished projects, and abandoned inspirations. I love the sense of progress, cleansing, finishing, sorting, and beautifying. These desires, values, and drives of mine really show up in how I feel and, as a result, in how I behave.

Despite having many, many months during these four years where I’ve cried every single night, overall, I’ve actually been pretty happy. Feeling industrious has been about 16% of my time, and “pleased” is the distant second at 7.5% and “inspired” at 6.7%. This kind of data is something tangible that I can hold onto and review when I’m feeling like things “have always been bad.” That’s just not what the evidence shows. 

When I first got started with the project I had the idea that each day had a singular vibe, but as soon as I began I realized that each day, at the least, had a secondary vibe as well. Nearly a year into the project I was tired of trying to limit myself to the two most dominant vibes of the day. I ran into this problem too often: “I felt intensely cynical for an hour or two, but should I include that when most of the day I actually felt pretty relaxed, playful, and peaceful, and it was only after I got that news after dinner that I felt upset for a while?” I expanded my vibe log to capture five vibes, and named them primary, secondary, and so on. Then I applied a weighting factor so that the more dominant vibes would count for more, and the the most minor vibe (the fifth one) would count for the least when totaling up my vibes overall percentages.

When I first began vibe logging four years ago I created twenty-four vibes. Over the years I’ve added a vibe here or there when I felt frustrated that I couldn’t capture a recurring feeling very well with the vibes I’d already added. Now my log has a whopping forty-nine – but the least common nineteen of them only account for 6% of my subjective experience. Some vibes – like cynical – have never shown up as a “primary vibe” of the day – not even once. This is thankfully also the case for feeling “dread” and “isolation.”

Of the forty-nine vibes, my favorites are feeling inspired, introspective, insightful, connected, peaceful, playful, adventurous, lustful, happy, excited, loved, intuitive, grateful, and flirtatious. Over the past four years these make up 35% of my experience. 

The vibes that feel bad to me are: anxious, fragile, pained, sad, yearning, detached, lethargic, labyrinth, insecure, disappointed, fractious, exhausted, lonely, desolate, nonparallel, resentful, afraid, conflicted, grief, resolute, angry, regretful, isolated, and dread. These, together, also make up 35% of my experience.

That’s really not so bad – that all the bad feelings together are only taking up about as much of my life as my favorite experiences. And another 30% contains the more neutral feelings – like the often mentioned experience of being “industrious.”

My vibe log experiment underscores for me the truth in the mantra, “This, too, shall pass.” Whether it’s good or bad, it’s impermanent. We hate impermanence when it comes to things we cherish and love – that’s only natural. But it’s still reality, and remembering that impermanence can help us make the most of the good times while we’re here. By knowing that days where we feel great and energetic are limited, we can leverage that sense of energy and expansiveness to invest in the people, experiences, and things that matter most to us. And by remembering that the painful things in life are also temporary, we can resist the pain a little less, grieve our losses a little more fully, and relax into the reality that while the suffering of the moment is bad – potentially horrifying – it will eventually dissolve or transmute into something else.

Are you ready to try vibe logging for yourself? If so, I’ve made a simple template here which you can use to begin.

If you’re curious to learn more about my journey with my vibe log and see some of the cool charts I’ve made along the way, click here to check out my vibe log posts which include exploring my “hermit mode,” the inverse relationship between inspiration and anxiety, and the surprising correlation between sadness and inspiration.

Can I cook you dinner?

When people offer to cook for me, I usually politely decline. I know they mean well, and I love when people cook for me – but the reality is that “wanting to cook for someone” usually means you want to cook from your specialty repertoire, which won’t include anything I can eat.

“You can just bring me some organic berries if you like,” I tell people. This is usually pretty fool-proof – unless they aren’t attentive and buy moldy ones.

What can be even harder is turning down healthy, home-cooked meals in someone’s home – something they’ve already made and are sure will meet anyone’s criteria.

“It’s vegan,” they’ll tell me.

I smile and nod and say, “No thank you, it smells lovely but I really can’t.”

“Are you already full?”

“No, I just have a very sensitive body,” I’ll say.

“This is gluten-free and free of refined sweeteners too,” they’ll add.

My smile will deepen, because I’m glad people are cooking healthier and making more accommodations for others; I’m glad that they want to feed me and that they’re a generous person. But my sense of guilt and frustration will also be on the rise at this point. I’m trying to be polite, kind, enthusiastic, and honest all at the same time. Why is that so hard?

I take a second glance at the dish and become more specific now, “I can’t have quinoa.”

“Ah, that’s too bad. I’ve got some curried rice in the fridge I could heat up for you.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t eat pseudo grains – or most seeds, including beans and most nuts.”

At this point I’ve given up on full honesty, because it is too difficult to be both polite and honest. With most food intolerance it isn’t just a matter of what you “can” and “can’t” have but a matter of quantity, timing, and combination. 

Quantity

Technically, I could eat most nuts – in small enough quantities. But those quantities are so unrealistically small. And while we expect our friends to get to know us fairly well, we don’t expect them to memorize that we can tolerate around a quarter cup of almond butter in a day – but not all at once – and it must be cooked and mashed almonds, not raw or whole almonds, but if it were walnuts or pecans then the quantity drops to more like a tablespoon. It’s hard enough for individuals with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) or MAST cell activation syndrome (MCAS) to keep their own sensitivities straight – much less expect their friends and family to understand.

Timing

For many people with digestive problems, timing becomes crucial. You learn that eating within four hours of bedtime will lead to acid reflux later, or that eating something too potent first thing in the morning will leave you aching for hours. Intermittent fasting – the practice of eating within a limited time frame each day – has grown in popularity because of how much more freedom you can gain in what you eat simply by limiting when you eat. For six years I maintained a six-hour eating window – only eating from noon to six. This, at least, dodged the food offers because most evening social events were outside my window. Unfortunately, this meant I always wound up watching other people eat whilst denying myself.

Combination

Food timing is also relevant when thinking about food combining. Knowing which foods digest quickly (simple sugars such as those in fruits), and which foods take a long time (complex proteins and fats such as those found in nuts or meat), can help you line up your intake to prevent unwanted bloating and gas. By eating fruits first and allowing thirty to fifty minutes to pass before eating an entrée of vegetables and chicken, you may avoid a night of gas pains.

Cooking for Sensitive People

But wouldn’t it be nice if my friends could cook for me? I certainly love it on the very rare occasion it happens. One friend planned to make a grape pie and asked me what ingredients she could use. She listened, remembered, and brought a delicious pie which was delightful – and didn’t give me unpleasant symptoms afterward.

That happy grape pie experience was, sadly, the exception rather than the norm. Another friend of mine had wanted to bring me a birthday pie (in place of a cake, of course), and she used principles she thought matched my diet without actually checking with me on the particulars. I ate a couple bites but knew I didn’t dare more, and even those couple bites were regrettable later.

Such experiences can be mortifying. Here’s someone who cares about you, wants to please you, and went through a fair bit of effort and expense to bring you something you might like – and they failed. How can you be honest and kind in situations like these? Of course we try our best, “Oh, this is so beautiful and smells so good. I can only have a little, but I’m so glad you thought of me and brought this to share!” In the cases where I couldn’t even have a little it has been even harder to give a convincingly kind reaction. How do I cover up my disappointment? How can casual friendships recover from incidents like these?

The best solution I’ve found is avoiding them in the first place: I ask for berries when offered, and, for exceptional cases, I have one other trick up my sleeve: a spreadsheet containing a full list of what I can and can’t have – clearly delineated. Usually this intimates the would-be chef, and that’s fine. I have decided that it’s better that they don’t try than trying, failing, and making us both feel embarrassed. And if they do try, they’ll have my searchable, organized, detailed list to refer back to.

You can see – and utilize – my food list by clicking here. Make a copy of my list and then replace my answers with yours. Change the sharing settings so that “anyone with a link” can view. You’re now prepared the next time someone offers to cook for you.