The Art & Poetry of Mary Coleman

I finished the mask and head of the figure in my PPE painting yesterday and did the folds of the outstretched arm today. It’s coming together better than I had hoped and I’m actually starting to like it. The glove looks better with the figure filled in behind it and I don’t think I will alter it any further.

I’m almost finished with Jane Eyre and have gotten into Mansfield Park. Today I listened to the latter while jogging and doing chores and I’ve been making my way through the former before bedtime.

I ran 2 miles and tomorrow I plan to run 4. That will be my intention of 4 days of exercise this week fulfilled. My new running shoes are coming next week which will be good because the ones I have aren’t cushioning me enough.

My anxiety levels have been a lot lower since I have avoided sweets. I did have two minor panic attacks last week, but other than that I haven’t had that pervading anxiety I was getting in December. It comes and goes instead of lingering as a constant. Improvement in diet does a lot for my mental health. Also the re-introduction of exercise is hugely beneficial. I am starting to get cravings for sugary foods though. They were really strong yesterday and I almost broke down and bought doughnuts but decided against it in the last minute.

It’s not crazy but I would like a mood tracker that allows you to enter all the elements of your day that might be contributing to your hourly mood. This would keep track of what you ate (with an option to see how different macros corresponded to mood), sleep, meditation practice, life stressors, medication, and exercise for some examples. I would also like it to log panic attacks and a bit about the panic attack: what it involved, what led up to it, what helped it go away etc…

Currently I keep track of all this in my day planner but it would be nice to have it in an app form that could show hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly graphs to get an idea of patterns. For example, a graph of how much sugar you had and what your overall mood was that day. In this app you could customize graphs to show different elements of your day and how they corresponded to your mood hourly or daily.

It would be nice to have an overall idea of what is most impacting my mental health so I could either do more or less of the thing. I had a look at apps that currently exist and most of them just allow one mood to be tracked a day and do not take into account hourly changes (and the one I found that did allow hourly logging was 60 dollars a year). Apple’s mood tracker can do hourly, but does not include elements that might contribute to that mood (like specific stressors, food, exercise, meditation etc…).