Tag Archives: stress

Steven Jonas: Tracking My Stress

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Ernesto Ramirez

We are only four short weeks away from hosting our second Quantified Self European Conference and our excitement is building as we receive more previews of the talks and presentations we’ll be hosting. As you can probably guess, putting on a conference can be a stressful endeavor. Luckily stress tracking and management has been the focus of many different Quantified Self tools and experiments. There are no shortage of interesting methods for tracking both the physiological and psychological manifestations of stress and many more are probably on the horizon. More interesting, and of great interest to us within the QS community, is what is possible once stress becomes trackable and understandable.

Steve JonasSteven Jonas, a data analyst and organizer for the QS Portland meetup, will be giving a Show & Tell talk about his experiences with tracking stress at our upcoming conference. Having started with tracking his sleep in 2005, Steven has gone on to engage with multiple tracking projects including his experience with knowledge tracking and spaced repetition.

He’s been tracking his stress levels using the Emwave2, a neat tool for tracking and visualizing heart rate variability, for quite a while. Steven has taken his stress/HRV tracking beyond just intermittent testing and has experimented with hooking up his EmWave2 to his computer while working and installed software to alert him when it detect periods of stress. You can watch his previous talk about this process here.

This may seem like overkill to some. You might be saying, “Of course work is related to stress! What possibly could he hope to find out?” The beauty here lies in the unexpected and interesting findings that creep to the surface when multiple data streams are integrated. In this Show & Tell talk Steven will be explaining how this constant monitoring helped him understand how particular behaviors acted as triggers and how he could manage those triggers in order to reduce and defuse stress.

Low-level, seemingly mild stress still drains my energy, and many of my behaviors and things that I avoid are related to this stress. I developed a new ‘stress sense’, separate from the tool, that helped me see where my life was being affected by stress.

I hope you’ll join us at the conference to learn from Steven’s experience and take part in what is sure to be a great discussion!

The Quantified Self European Conference will be held in Amsterdam on May 11th & 12th. Registration is now open. As with all our conferences our speakers are members of the community. If you’re attending the conference and want to present your self-tracking project please let us know.

 

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Dave Marvit on Tracking Stress and PTSD

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Ernesto Ramirez

In this short Ignite talk, Dave Marvit from Fujitsu Labs of America talks about a prototype system he is developing to track stress and monitoring stressful events in veterans with PTSD. The Sprout system brings in and syncs multiple data streams allowing researchers, clinicians, and individuals to develop a deeper insight into what’s really happening during stress events. Make sure to listen to the end for a surprise twist from Dave when he talks about using the system to measure his stress while driving to work. (Filmed at the 2012 QS Conference.)

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QS PDX Recap (October 30, 2012)

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Steven Jonas

This guest post comes to us from one of our wonderful QS Meetup organizers, Steven Jonas. If you’re a Meetup Organizer and want to post a recap of your meetup just let us know!

Quantified Self Portland Show & Tell Meetup Recap – October 30, 2012

Puppet Labs opened up their space and generously hosted our October Meetup. We had some amazing talks and discussion. Read on for more about each of the talks and our post show&tell discussion session.

David Gwilliam – Text Message Analytics

David GwilliamVIDEO | SLIDES | TWITTER

Brief: After getting dumped, David needed an excuse to read his old text messages. Exporting all of his SMS’s out of Google Voice, he used a variety of tools to get them in a form that would allow for linguistic analysis and visualization. Doing so, he reconfirmed his belief that most of his communication was either to girls or about girls. As his project moves forward, he wants to improve the linguistic analysis by looking at significant phrases, rather than words, and tweak his D3 visualization so that it better represents clustering.

Tools and other things mentioned:

-His GitHub page for his project – http://github.com/dhgwilliam/google-voice-stats
-Twitter page – http://twitter.com/dhgwilliam
-Google Voice – google.com/voice
-Google Takeout – google.com/takeout
-Data Liberation Front – www.dataliberation.org/takeout-products
-Markdown – http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
-Redis – http://redis.io
-Ohm ORM – http://ohm.keyvalue.org
-Sinatra – http://www.sinatrarb.com
-Statistically Improbable Phrases – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistically_Improbable_Phrases
-Rack Cache – http://github.com/rtomayko/rack-cache
-Resque – http://github.com/defunkt/resque
-Rake – http://rake.rubyforge.org
-GCharts – http://mootools.net/forge/p/gcharts
-Pandoc – http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
-D3 – http://d3js.org
-jQuery -http://jquery.com
-Linguistic analysis equation – http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~paul/publications/rg_acl2000.pdf

Rob Shields – Search Your Life

Rob Shields

VIDEO | SLIDES | TWITTER

Brief: Rob was interested in passively recording his life, so he rigged his phone to hang around his neck and take a picture nearly every minute. He dumped the photos into Picasa and with tagging and face recognition used them to start answering questions such as “When did I last have sushi?” and “What was the name of that guy I met at the QS Data Co-op?” Rob found that knowing that the phone was recording events, it allowed him to be more present in the moment, since he didn’t have to worry about retrieving a camera to capture events. Going forward, he would like to have ways to add more metadata (like geotagging) to add context to the images that he captures, a wider lens, and be able to integrate it with other streams of data.

Tools and other things mentioned:

-Gordon Bell’s SenseCam – http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/sensecam/
-Autographer – http://www.autographer.com/
-Memoto – http://memoto.com
-Project Glass – http://plus.google.com/+projectglass/posts
-Google Goggles – http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/
-TagTime – http://messymatters.com/tagtime/
-Picasa -http://picasa.google.com
-Vicon Revue – http://viconrevue.com/product.html

Steven Jonas – Stressing Out Loud

Steven Jonas

VIDEO* | SLIDES | TWITTER

*from the QS Seattle meetup a week earlier

Brief: Steven discovered through an EEG assessment that he had a strong “freeze” response to stressful situations. This inspired him to use his emWave to monitor his stress levels, hack it to alert him whenever he got too stressed, and change his patterns at work. He found that keeping his stress levels in check allowed him to focus better and left him with more energy at the end of the day. Going forward, he would like to find a tool that allows him to annotate the data, and be able to track stress when he’s not at his desk.

Tools and other things mentioned:

-emWave2 – http://www.heartmathstore.com/item/6310/emwave2
-equanimity – http://www.meditate.mx/iphone

Daniel Reeves – Beeminder update

Daniel Reeves

TWITTER*

*sorry, no video

Brief: Daniel gave us an update on Beeminder, highlighting new functionality for connecting the great project management tool, Trello, as well as using Beeminder to keep track of your progress during NaNoWriMo. He also talked about a Pomodoro Poker, a hack night where participants bet on how close they can complete a task to a time limit (without going over).

Tools and other things mentioned:

-Beeminder – http://www.beeminder.com
-Trello – http://blog.beeminder.com/trello/
-NaNoWriMo – http://blog.beeminder.com/nanowrimo/
-Pomodoro Poker – http://blog.beeminder.com/tv/#comment-691153967

Discussion

discussionPrompt: One of the interesting things about self-tracking is the heightened awareness that you’ll gain. Noticing things that you could never perceive before. This could take different forms, sometimes like a sixth sense. For example, this is a device I built from a kit made by Sensebridge that attaches to your ankle and points in the direction of north. Over time, the wearers develop of sense of where North is that lasts even after they remove the device. Are these extra senses always good? Can they be negative?

Tools and other things mentioned:

-Sensebridge’s North Paw – http://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/
-Contour @USB – http://bayercontourusb.us
-Zeo – http://www.myzeo.com/sleep/shop/zeo-sleep-manager-mobile.html

Drinks afterward at Deschutes Brewery

The night ended with a lively discussion where the main topic was productivity systems where everybody shared what they use, what failed for them and why.

What’s Up Next?

All in all, it was a fantastic, invigorating evening. We hope to see you at the Data Co-op on November 27. What is a Data Co-op? It’s a regular part of our QS PDX meetup series for people with data that they’re working on, or people who want to see what data other people are working on, or people who want/have tips for working their QS-related data. If you track some kind of data about your life and are trying to make sense of it, join us during this open time and bring your data and a computer with you.

Topics that arose last time:

D3 and data visualization (http://d3js.org/)

Wolfram Alpha and analysis of meditation data

Scraping Nike FuelBand data with Firefox

And, of course, people brought dozens of projects with them to work on, and many ideas were shared in small groups. We plan on hosting the next Show & Tell in January and hope to see you soon!

Pictures courtesy of Ryan Casey. See more here.

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Catherine Kerr on Cortical Measures in Mindfulness Meditation

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Catherine Kerr does brain science related to mindfulness at Brown University Medical School. She points out that mindfulness traditions ask practitioners to simply focus closely on body sensations in order to bring attention to the present moment. Why does this help with depression? In the video below, Catherine explains some of her magnetoencephalopathy (MEG) research to answer this question, and suggests that detecting cortical changes may be one of the earliest, instinctive QS-related forms of self-awareness. (Filmed by the Boston QS Show&Tell meetup group.)

Catherine Kerr – Cortical Measures Related to Attending to the Body in Mindfulness Meditation from Gary Wolf on Vimeo.

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Steven Jonas: Stress Out Loud

Posted on November 4, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Steven Jonas discovered through an EEG assessment that he had a strong “freeze” response to stressful situations. This inspired him to use his emWave to monitor his stress levels, hack it to alert him whenever he got too stressed, and change his patterns at work. Check out Steven’s open, inspiring story in the video below, filmed at Quantified Self Seattle, as well as his slides.

Steven Jonas from David Reeves on Vimeo.

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Ulrich Atz: Experience Sampling of My Stress

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Alexandra Carmichael

Ulrich Atz was curious about measuring his stress levels. He chose three methods to do this: experience sampling, day reconstruction method, and heart rate. In the video below, he helpfully describes how he went about designing his experiment, how the different methods work and the challenges of each one, and what he learned. He was surprised to discover which method worked best! (Filmed at the QS Europe conference in Amsterdam.)

Experience sampling of my stress by Ulrich Atz from Quantified Self Amsterdam on Vimeo.

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John Sumser on Symptoms vs. Causes

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Alexandra Carmichael

John Sumser had a 7-year period of disasters after he quit smoking. He faced cancer twice, diabetes, asthma, divorce, family death, and more. Throughout this period, he was measuring himself. As he went back through his data, he found one central thing underlying all of his problems – stress. John tells his colorful story and what he learned below. (Filmed at the 20th Bay Area QS Show&Tell meetup at CCA.)

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Robin Barooah’s “Equanimity” – Meditation Tracker

Posted on February 4, 2010 by Gary Wolf

Robin Barooah presented his new meditation tracker, called “Equanimity”
at the recent QS Show&Tell hosted by MedHelp. A meditation practice
is a powerful tool for increased well being and yet, for something so
simple and cost-free, it surprisingly difficult to maintain. The
problem of “resistance” in meditation is well known. Even people with
long years of practice encounter resistance. I have been using Robin’s
tracker for a couple of days, and am looking forward to seeing if it
helps. One thing is already clear: it is a lovely design.

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Stress Eraser

Posted on December 17, 2007 by Gary Wolf

The Stress Eraser has been around for more than a year now, garnering positive feedback attracting heavyweights to the advisory board [PDF]
of its parent company, and advertising heavily. StressEraser.png. In one sense, the Stress Eraser is a classic QS device, a geeky quantitative aid to self-improvement. I almost want one. But the very thing that probably makes it an easy sale, right now, is just the thing that’s keeping me on the sidelines.
The Stress Eraser is a heart rate monitor that cues breathing exercises for stress reduction With a case, buttons, and display by Frog Design and a $299 sticker price, it’s a high status object. You place your finger on the edge, and information from your pulse is used to suggest a breathing pattern. According to many reviewers, it works.
The inventor of the device is Michael Wood, who, in admirable QS fashion, began monitoring his blood pressure in order to track his own stress. This lead him to the research on stress and biofeedback, and ultimately provoked him to develop a commercial tool that, unlike many similar systems, is completely portable and does not require a link to a computer. Clinical trials are underway to validate its effectiveness for both stress reduction and as a treatment for sleep disorders.
But although the Stress Eraser is being tested by researchers, it contains no way to store and track a record of a user’s response over time. In a video on the Stress Tracker web site, Michael Wood explains why not:

One questions that sometimes we get asked is why don’t you add a lot more numbers and meters and basically other stressful components, and that’s the reason why we don’t. The screen displays have to be soothing, they have to be simple and geometric…

I understand this reason. Many people would be intimidated by the suggestion that they track their own history of stress response, rather than simply obey commands. But there ought to be some way to offer this possibility as a hidden option, for fans and devoted self-experimenters. This is a $300 dollar device that cannot use what it learns about you to help you get new ideas about how/when/where you become stressed. Nor can it connect you to the trials that are measuring its effectiveness. Nor can it give you access to your data so that you can evaluate it for yourself.
John Biggs of Gizmodo tried out the Stress Eraser, and wasn’t too impressed. He says it’s kind of like doing whippets. I think he is probably wrong to be so dismissive. But at $300, I want this device to be linked.

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Wrist-Device for Real Time Stress Tracking

Posted on October 16, 2007 by Gary Wolf

A team lead by Thomas Kamarck of the University of Pittsburgh, an expert on measuring [psychosocial processes](http://pmbcii.psy.cmu.edu/core_c/index.html), is working on the type of wearable computer that I most want: a wrist-worn device to track physiological change in real time. The emphasis in this study is on psychosocial stress, and the device will measure sound, motion, ambient light, skin temperature, and “other factors.” I’ll post more information about the study when I have it.
eWatch.jpg
The purpose, as far as I can tell from [the press release](http://mac10.umc.pitt.edu/m/FMPro?-db=ma&-lay=a&-format=d.html&id=3068&-Find), is to begin to understand what kind of data are useful in tracking stress and predicting the onset of stress-related health problems. One of the most interesting elements of the (poorly named) “eWatch” is that it includes an interview module set to question wearers at timed intervals about their stress level. This may seem redundant. If you have the right automatic measurements, why put a demand on the wearer’s brain as well? But I think this interview element could be the “secret weapon.” In training ourselves to gain more control over normally unconscious processes and states, tools that remind us to check-in with ourselves at regular intervals will be useful. An eWatch, no matter how sensitive, will never be able to control our brain, it can only encourage us to notice our brain state, giving us a chance to intervene.
What interventions work best? At what pace should reminders come? What are the best physical indicators to track? The fact that [Kamarck](http://www.psychology.pitt.edu/people/faculty/kamarck.php) and colleagues are beginning to do rigorous studies with a device like the eWatch could bring us more clarity.

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