What Makes People Happy? We Have the Data

jawbone.com

15 points·otar··5 comments

As happy as I am with this, I would really like to see the impact of sleep on the mood a full day later, instead of just the mood that morning. There's a difference between waking up unhappy and consistently being unhappy. Of course you do have to watch out for correlation vs causation, but the full day gap would partially reduce that effect I would think. Still not scientifically cause + effect, but oh well.

If you have a newborn, believe me, you'll notice how lack of sleep affects mood.

Oh, I don't doubt that. I guess I'm wondering how indicative poor mood in the morning carries through out the day.

I find their assertion that steps+sleep=happiness interesting. I know from personal experience I'm happier on days I've slept well and get some exercise, but equally I'm more likely to sleep well and exercise when I'm happy, which makes untangling cause and effect a bit difficult.

Yeah I don't find their data convincing really. Ignoring that they have a biased sample to work from, and not knowing how the app works (do users elect when to tell their mood to the app? does the app ask? this could be a source of bias certainly), it is hard for me to look at these graphs and say wow. I'd imagine there are a number of confounding variables not being controlled for here. Life events that have nothing to do with sleep, etc? I'd be curious to see if that sort of thing was considered.

There is no statistical analysis happening here. This is just a presentation of what appear to me to be dubious looking graphs. I'm not convinced of any of this.

Additionally at the bottom of the page: "For the sleep analysis, we looked only at moods logged within 3 hours of the user waking up to reflect the impact of the user’s last sleep on the user’s mood."

That certainly introduces a lot of uncertainty.

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