When and Where Do You Stress? Ambitious Project Aims to Map Daily Life

For years I've struggled with anxiety and stress not making me functional. My peers often glorify the results of my work, allowing me to do interesting projects and working at Google, but inside a wretched ball of anxiety. Whats worse, is that the anxiety is the driver of my external success.

It wasn't till recently that I tried actuating on stress in my life, by accepting that my work is exceptional because my workflow is exceptional. I begun taking time off whenever I felt like it, self-assigning projects and ignoring unrelated requests from others etc.

That being said, some of my most stressful periods are when I'm doing nothing. The reason I got to Google is because I can't 'turn off' -- but I've come to realize that making good decisions at Google Scale requires a peaceful mind. Fear and anxiety leads to short term pain-reduction decisions that aren't often the best for the long term or large scale problem.

Its a sort of horrifying filter I haven't quite solved yet, but the first step seems to be quantifying my stress, like this article, actively reducing it, and accepting that the "turking" stage of my life needs to step back to make way for more intelligent decision-making and discipline.

I'm pretty pessimistic about the project - a lot of what stresses people out is the sort of thing that's quite difficult to explicitly model and identify. I'm thinking of things along the lines of "the way that guy looks at me", or a statement that's nice on the surface but has a bullshit implication of "haha your life has issues" that's hard to deal with. It's also very difficult to know that the trees and houses that you walk past on your way to public transit makes a difference in your stress levels.

The likely result is that it'll take note of some of the thirty or so life variables that are easiest to measure, and whether or not changing those will actually help with stress depends on the thousands of others that are much less legible.

This reminds me of a small study Katherine Bennett at Art Center has been working on http://www.designinvestigations.com/blog/2015/10/19/experien...

To gather sample data they simply texted participants asking them to take a photo of what they are doing and describe current conditions.

It occurred to me from reading her post that there is room for much better ethnographic tools on smartphones that could allow for much bigger crowd-sourced studies. Correlating that data with ResearchKit could also be fascinating.

My question is what's actionable? Are you going to stop commuting or working? Does it really matter if BU is less stressful than Harvard? For me seeing that I'm stressed would only trigger a feedback loop.

At a meta level people I think do understand if they're stressed or not. The question is larger if that matters or if you thrive on it. I don't think it's always a bad thing.