“How are you feeling today?”
It’s a loaded question to say the least. To a stranger one might blindly respond, “great, thanks, how are you?” no matter the chaos one’s life may be in. To a friend, the reply might consist of a bit more information, sharing more happy, sad, or in-between emotions. But what is the response when you pose the question to yourself? One app is hoping to capture that answer and more.
How Is The World Feeling Today is hoping to track the emotions of 7 million people over a one-week period, starting Monday, October 10, which also happens to mark World Mental Health Day.
“Despite the increase in awareness of mental health over the past several years, there’s still a long way to go before mental health conversations are the norm. We think everyone taking part in the world’s largest mental health project is a pretty good conversation starter,” the project’s website reads.
Beyond starting a conversation around mental health, the app is also hoping to provide medical professionals with tools and insights into the world’s emotions.
“What we think is the most exciting thing about the project is that all anonymous data collected will be made open source for anyone around to world to use,” Lee Crockford, the project’s cofounder, tells GOOD via email. This means any mental health professional, non-governmental organization, or individual can use the anonymous data collected. He adds,
“For those in the mental health sector, this is a indicator of when is the best time to tackle anxiety, for transport companies it’s useful data about their customers, and for law firms it provides data on how they might structure their days.”
The app’s interface is simple, sleek, and engaging to use. Once users sign on, they are taken through a quick survey about their lives, including questions on religious affiliations, job status, familial relationships, and more. After the survey, users are then asked about their emotional state and where they are while feeling a certain way, to help both the individual and one-day mental health professionals identify stress triggers.
“It’s all part of a tapestry,” Crockford explains of how the app can fit into a larger mental health plan. “Different people respond to different methods, services, and approaches. I think there’s certainly room for both.”
Along with tracking our individual emotions, the broader goal of the app, Crockford says, is to help combat the global suicide epidemic. According to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, “from 1999 through 2014, the age-adjusted suicide rate in the United States increased 24 percent, from 10.5 to 13.0 per 100,000 population.”
The app’s initial launch in 2014, which garnered more than 20,000 responses, also provided important and telling data about just how stressed out we all are. “Referring to the data from our 2014 pilot, one of the big surprises was how similar men and women actually are in their emotions,” Crockford says, additionally noting, “example data from the 2014 Australian pilot could [provide] specific data like: Men aged 14-24 in law were most anxious between the hours of 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. on weekday mornings when commuting.” Women, Crockford adds on the site, tend to experience peak stress in the middle of the day and in the beginning of the week.
The app aims to help people not only recognize obvious stress-inducing moments such as being stuck in traffic or preparing for a big meeting, it also hopes to help people become more aware of “smaller nuances,” in their daily lives that may trigger a stressful or anxious response. The more a person uses the app, the more aware the app, and the person, will become of these moments. Once the app recognizes a pattern, it will then suggest resources or tools for users to combat their anxiety.
How Is The World Feeling Today, which is available on iOS and Android, estimates the global cost of mental health to reach more than $2.5 trillion per year. Hopefully, as a collective voice, we can all help find more effective ways to combat stress and anxiety in the world.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.