The behavior I wanted to change was to hang out more with friends. I decided to track this by noticing my social behavior over three days over the long weekend.
Friday, January 13
My boyfriend and I talked to my roommate and their partner for 3 hours. It was pretty overwhelming. I appeared at the Okada social for five minutes before leaving, but I also talked to my boyfriend’s roommate a bit.
Sunday, January 15
Every Sunday, the club I co-direct meets for brunch. I enjoyed hanging out with them, but I still feel slightly disconnected every week. However, listening to everyone’s break updates gave me some ideas on things to catch up on with various members individually, later.
Tuesday, January 17
In class, I caught up with a friend from a previous creative writing class. I also had dinner with my boyfriend’s roommate and his friend, an international student I know.
Most of the weekend I didn’t interact with anyone else. On Saturday, I was focused on my business and finalizing the details of my launch plan, and on Sunday and Monday I decided to spend most of my energy practicing self care like reading two books, buying a cashmere sweater and slow cooking a thyme chicken soup because I was battling one of the hardest bouts of depression I have faced in a few months. This made me realize how big of an impact mental health can have on my internal motivation to meet my goal, but at the same time, was my inability to meet my goal facilitating the decline in mental health? During this week, I felt very stressed that I was losing interest in being social despite knowing it’s supposed to be good for me (which is why I set it as a goal).
I decided to map out these reasons through a fishbowl and a connection circle. To my surprise, I learned that not all of the factors preventing me from socializing more were due to a lack of internal motivation. For example, I realized that there may be conflicting positive habits at play. I love to spend time with my partner, but that also fills my cup to the point where I do not crave interaction with other people as much. I also noticed that I tend to use social media more educationally than socially, meaning I don’t tend to interact much with my real-life circle and use it more to consume information and content from strangers on the internet.
