1. For most people, the average day follows a pattern of peak, trough and rebound.
Some of life’s patterns hide in plain view, so commonplace that we don’t even notice them. Two professors of sociology from Cornell discovered one such pattern fairly recently while studying Twitter trends. These scholars analyzed half a billion tweets from over 2 million users in 84 countries to find what people were feeling and when they usually had those feelings.
They found that there is a pattern of peak, trough and rebound during the course of a day for most people. The morning tweets tended to be more positive, hopeful and energetic. This positivity would taper off during the afternoon until about 5 p.m., and then pick back up by early evening. This pattern was the same across time zones, cultures, climates, religious value systems and geographical location. This positive affect was generally higher on weekends, but the basic shape of the curve remained intact: peak, trough, rebound.
Other studies have examined factors related to positive and negative affect, like feelings of happiness, warmth toward others, general enjoyment of life and emotional stability. Unlike the Cornell study, which extrapolated mood from tweets, these studies involved self-reported feelings on a pre-established rating system, which increases accuracy of the findings (although it’s hard to beat a sample size of 500 million tweets!). In all these cases, the shape of the curve was extremely similar.
These findings have remarkable and important implications for life and when to make decisions.
