&amp;#x200B;

|Day|Sleep \[h\]|Sleep Quality (1-5) \[-\]|Exercise \[min\]|Time with friends \[h\]|Quality of work (1-5) \[-\]|Nutrition Quality (1-5)  \[-\]|Reading time \[h\]|Cups of Coffee \[-\]|Mood (1-10) \[-\]|Anxiety (1-10) \[-\]|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|1|9.5|3|0|2.0|3|3|0|2|8|5.0|
|2|8.33|3|0|3.5|4|2|0|3|8|6.0|
|3|8.17|3|0|0.7|3|3|0|3|8|5.5|
|4|10.0|2|33|6.0||2|0|3|9|3.0|
|5|9.00|2|0|8.0||2|0|3|9|4.0|
|6|7.92|2|0|2.0|3|2|0|3|7|6.0|
|...|...|...|...|...|...|...|...|...|...|...|

&amp;#x200B;

Hello everybody.

I would like to get a little bit "scientific" here and help you and myself get to know ourselves a little bit better. This might be trivial to some but I only thought about doing this recently. Some like to write diaries, but I think that it's also great to fill out Excel worksheets with numbers.

This is my most honest advice for people who want to get behind of what makes them anxious in the first place. We are often overwhelmed by our anxiety that we don't even have the slightest idea of how to reduce it anymore. To at least find some correlations between certain daily habits and your overall mood and anxiety levels you can perform correlation analysis (if we are lucky, some correlations might be due to causality).

I urge everybody to create an Excel table and document as many daily habits as you can. This is what I have been doing since 6 days, but I will keep doing it for as long as I can. To understand myself a little bit better.

(See table)

Now I know that it is hard to quanitfy feelings, but the science of psychology basically bases on these measures. You don't have to be a psychologist to find some patterns in your daily life, and quantifying your feelings is the way to go. Try to be consistent, try to be honest with yourself and do this for some weeks.

As soon as you feel that you have enough data you can start creating dot plots and use linear regression with Excel. I'm sure most of you have already done this at some point. This is an example of what both my "mood" and "anxiety" levels as personally perceived plotted against my "time with friends" look like.

[https://imgur.com/a/KVjjU3x](https://imgur.com/a/KVjjU3x)

These 6 datapoints retrieved from the latest 6 days might suggest a positive correlation between my time spent with friends and my mood levels (and mood most probably correlates with anxiety), and a negative correlation between my time spent with friends and my anxiety levels. A slope of 0.2165 suggests that according to the linear model for every hour spent with friends my mood increases by 0.2165 on average. The R² of 0.6335 (R² lies between 0 and 1) suggests, depending on your what you consider significant, that the linear model can pretty confidently describe your data. I don't know exactly, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but I wouldn't trust regressions with R² of lower than 0.4, although I read some psychologists consider such effects as still significant. Btw. is R² the same as the Pearson correlation? I don't know.. please tell me. So basically what I could learn from this data is that time spent with friends alleviates my anxiety and increases my mood levels. On the other side it could also mean that the better I feel the more I do with friends. It's up to you to interpret this data.It would be interesting to find similar patterns with my daily caffeine consumption or other things such as my thyroid medication. Of course I will need much more data. I will keep you updated in some weeks. Anyhow, and please don't judge me for my poor statistics knowledge, but I think this is a very powerful way to find trends in your anxious life and take measures.

I hope that this will help you.

Cheers and all best to all of you!

&amp;#x200B;

Notes:

(1) You can also manipulate your data, such as cluster it. Let's say there is no acute/daily measurable effect between your medication and your anxiety levels, but only a long-term effect. Thyroid medications usually take weeks to kick in.  What you can do in this case is to calculate the mean of your thyroid medications intake of 20 days and plot it against the mood level of the last day after these 20 days for each day individually and then perform linear regression. Does that make sense? Just be creative and try to make it as meaningful as possible.

(2) Also it's absolutely no problem if there is gaps in your table. Excel will make sure to ignore these days when plotting them and calculating your correlations. So if you ever get lazy to document your day don't worry :)

(3) It's also better to have scales ranging from 1-10 rather than 1-5. It's harder to quantify abstract features such as "food quality" using a 1-10 scale, but it will be more easy for you to describe slight deviations. Btw. you could also track your calorie intake or your fat/carbohydrate/sugar intake. Sugar being a very interesting one since it is known to correlate with anxiety (similar to caffeine).

(4) You could also subdivide your anxiety levels into "morning", "noon" and "evening" and find trends during these time-spans. And if needed take the average to describe your daily anxiety level.

(5) Be aware of non-linear relationships. In that case linear regression won't be very helpful. Let's say 6 hours of sleep make you feel bad. 8 hours make you feel good, but 10 make you feel bad again. In that case you might have some kind of function with a maximum. In that case you should inspect your dot plot and search for where your maximum lies.