Every day throughout 2020 I asked myself three questions about my happiness. I’d rate out of 10 how much happiness I felt on a given day, my levels of anxiety, and whether the day felt worthwhile.

Since we’re now firmly in to 2021 I’m looking back on my scores for 2020. I wasn’t quite as unhappy as I had expected. Plus, I now have a few ideas about how to improve my happiness for the year ahead.

My happiness was up and down day-by-day, as is typical for most humans, and so the graph shows my happiness as a 7-day moving average. It helps me to see the periods where I struggled and/or thrived and understand the bigger currents that were happening in my life.

A few surprises

What has surprised me the most is the stability of how happy and worthwhile my days felt throughout 2020. That was testament to the relationships I have in my life. It was my anxiety that took a hit.

Compared to the start of the year my anxiety got a lot higher in March. Understandably. My own situation was precarious but like many I was paying a bit too much attention to the news – trying to make sense of what was happening and searching for some clarity about the future. There were a few days when panic took hold. I feast less on the news now and that has helped.

It wasn’t until I found myself a permanent home in July that my anxiety started to reduce. That was a relief. I found a great little spot with good access to some decent hills. And to boot I finally took the plunge and moved in with a long-term love.

You might even say things were better than had 2020 not been dominated by a major health pandemic. But then the woman I moved in with broke her arm and it was back to feeling anxious and my days felt a little less happy and a little less worthwhile too. We got through it and we learnt a lot about one another in the process. All things considered the year ended well.

Tracking happiness for more than 3 years

I’ve been tracking my happiness for more than 3 years now. And doing so has helped me bring more happiness to my days – I better understand what is important and what is not.

It all began when I set off on an ambitious cycle journey after years of building up a career researching happiness. In that career I was quite unhappy. I wanted to start applying my research to me daily life and as I cycled to the happiness capital of the world, I began asking myself how happy I was each day.

	Happiness	Anxiety	Worthwhileness
2018	6.9	3.9	8.4
2019	7.8	2.8	9.0
2020	7.6	2.4	8.9

What’s more surprising when I look at my happiness in 2020 is that it is only a lit bit lower than in 2019. And 2019 was one of the best years of my life. Throughout 2018 as I cycled to Bhutan my happiness was even lower still than in 2020. I trust my happiness scores. When I was riding to Bhutan I faced a fair few challenges. The thing is that through my journey I figured out some things that have helped me be happier ever since and had I not known them then 2020 might have been much worse.