Measuring Wellness During a Pandemic

Here I am claiming that writing contributes to personal wellness and well-being. I am sure many of you writers out there can agree with that statement, but as my mission continues to be to allow others to improve their health through writing, I tried to create a measurable way to gauge my wellness at the end of each journal entry. The most important thing I learned from this was that, for writing to effectively improve your well-being, it is not necessarily key to improve your mood right after you write, but rather that you experience something, whether it be a pleasant or unpleasant emotion. The more writing helps you feel, the more vulnerable you are being, and in turn, the closer to are to fully rationalizing what you wrote about. 

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My process of evaluation occurs through questions. On a scale of 0-10, a 10 represents a very positive emotion, while 0 represents a very negative emotion. As I programmed the excel sheet to average out all numbers and spit out a score. The further a score is from 5, or the neutral value, the more effective the journal entry. 

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Through this, I want to show how the process of journaling takes time, specifically when the entries surround a unifying topic. I journaled about COVID-19 and its impact on my life and the world around me. My progression of scores is shown below.  Each picture is a depiction of my mood and experienced emotion after a given journal entry was produced. Click on the images to uncover score.