I discovered Daylio when it popped up in Google Play Store as I was searching for a totally different app, a city-based social networking app which a friend of mine suggested. Listed as Editor’s Choice with a 4.8 rating, Daylio is a diary, journal, and mood tracker. Interesting. I like journaling. I forgot about the social networking app and gave Daylio a try.
Because journaling is not a new habit for me, at least on paper, I started logging my days using the app. I liked the idea of a digital but offline diary. The capability to tag daily events and activities based on moods or emotional states compels one to reflect. Daylio does that so it didn’t take long for me to get the premium version. It also helped that my weeks were punctuated by absolute highs and absolute lows due to a couple of life changing events leading up to Christmas and New Year’s, tapering off after the holidays.
Throughout the whole season, there was the ebb and flow of finding one’s bearings after a loved one’s abrupt passing, the sudden putting of someone’s belongings and papers in order, the overall rearrangement of everyday life and duties. The holidays were a great reminder of loss. There was always one less chair, one less wine glass, one less voice in the house. The absence was palpable that it moved among us. This much is an understatement.
Yet it was also a timely reminder of what one still has. Because as it turned out, shared loss has a way of allowing us to attend to each other a little more so that the empty space can now be filled by the presence, warmth and affection of those of us who share the loss.
The emotional roller coaster included the mounting pressure, increasing isolation and rejection that go hand in hand with ending up as a lone startup founder. Then came an unexpected but non-life threatening medical diagnosis that led to an elective surgery. Finally my yearly visit to my roots, my home country to be with family, lifetime friends, and colleagues for most of my career, gave me absolute joy with a tiny amount of reverse culture shock.
With all that’s taking place, I stepped back to try to make sense of it. In an overwhelming moment, how did I feel? How did I respond to events happening within and outside my control?
This deeper emotion was a result of a certain value that was either present or absent at that moment. I asked myself: was there a presence of calmness? Was there a lack of control that gave me a sense of failure? My list is still a work in progress. I learned that the easiest way to visualize it is through something called “wheel of emotion”. An example of which can be found in the work of Robert Plutchik. But my journey towards awareness of the spectrum of emotions took the route of my discovery of values.
I encounter the topic of values regularly in personal growth workshops and as prerequisites for team-led startups. On a personal level, our values are the core principles we live by. They go hand in hand with our beliefs. These may come from us, our parental programming and social conditioning. In the context of a startup, we evaluate our values not just for the sake of team fit but because the values we operate from drive our approach to leadership and create our startup’s culture.
People may have different metaphors for values, such as one’s internal compass. But for me, at the root of values are really needs. The answer to our “why”. Values drive our life-altering decisions. That may happen at the conscious level, in this case we are aware. But often times, we are not.
And that is the first key: Awareness, the ability to bring automatically arising feelings and split-second reactions to the level of consciousness. The second key is the discipline of no judgment, to allow to feel and process true emotions, not to write experiences off as good or bad, right or wrong but just as they are.
As soon as I wrote that, my brain squirmed justifying that my split-second reactions are my form of self-care, my way of fighting back against everyday slights— real and imagined. My brain also likes to be decisive by making a choice instead of getting nowhere with infinite possibilities, hence a final vote, a judgment. But knowing my predisposition, maybe I can cultivate curiosity and openness over being right and exacting.
At first glance, Daylio does 2 things for me: raising awareness of the values that are either fully present or lacking at a specific event and the practice of taking a moment to accept emotions as they come and go. The app shines in its level of simplicity and ease in integrating to my routine. The stats section provides an analysis of activities that evoke a certain emotional response.
Reflecting how my culture enjoys gathering around the table to eat, not surprisingly, one of my values, connection is met when I spend time with friends and family over a good meal. It is probably the easiest peak emotion I can attain. I only have to be present with them. But what if my closest and dearest are on the other side of the globe whom I only see once a year? Now let’s take it to a more encompassing level. How might it look like for expatriates, migrants, immigrants, refugees, exchange students?
How might we have connection and a sense of belongingness among humans we have not shared a long history of familiarity and togetherness with? Or who may present a slight language barrier for us? I believe it is attainable. And maybe, just maybe, the key ingredients are empathy, inclusivity and the willingness to celebrate what unites us.
On one hand, meeting with my new team for work projects makes me feel productive and gives me a semblance of normalcy in an uncertain universe. On another, synergy is the single, highest value I aim for when I am working with teams. Synergy for me involves value creation, effectiveness, motivation, collaboration, trust and camaraderie. How can I have more of this at work?
At a closer look, Daylio serves as my values discovery tool. I use it to capture the essence behind seemingly passive events that I came to cherish or those everyday magic moments so I can create more space for them to happen. Because it is one thing to be aware of one’s values and another to take responsibility and translate them to actions.
The thing is, it is comfortable to be armchair philosophers and decide about our values. After all, don’t we all share the same needs? We all seem to need a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. We crave for belongingness probably no different from the same Homo Sapien tens of thousands of years ago who needed his tribe to survive the Savanna.
But if meaning and purpose or a sense of belongingness and connection are important to us as we claim, is this consistent with how we live our life? How do we actually spend our days? How do we calibrate our day-to-day decisions so that they are on the level of the things that are most important to us? How do we align our habits with our values?
I find this work around values a lifelong internal process. But it took me a season of surprises around loss and reconnection to start being vigilant and create the discipline of checking in with myself. Am living my values in my actions, or just in my thoughts? While Daylio was clearly developed as a microdiary and mood tracker, using it in a way that can support my work around my own values — however passively — helps me stay grounded.
