I believe that “mental state” is a misnomer. While trying to rewrite this articles main points on my own, I constantly felt my explanations getting mucked up by the phrase. I eventually opted to use “emotional state” in its place, and will be doing so likewise for the rest of my comment.

1. The opening note leads me to an important point: emotions =/= mental state. They are certainly a part of it, but they are not the whole.

Suppose, for instance, that you've been forced to stay up later than usual the past few days, and haven't gotten enough rest. Maybe you've only had five, six hours a night. we'll say. All other things being equal, the day after this streak of less-than-okay sleep, I anticipate that you'd find yourself working less than stellarly.

This has just about nothing to do with emotion. It has everything to do with your brain not getting all that it needs to function acceptably. Just replace “sleep” with “food” or “sex/human contact” and the idea would hold.

If the hardware isn’t running that well, I’d darn well say that regardless of how happy you might be on that day, your “mental state” is probably still below average.

To take the metaphor further: No matter how happy the IQ 70 child is about having received lots of chocolate on a particular day, one can’t really call her mental state a good one.

That is why I would’ve used “emotional state” in this writer’s place.

2. I’m going to point out that “mental states” are - for some people, yes - the end goal. That is not true for all people. This seems patently obvious to me.

Take anyone who donates large fractions of their incomes to charity. Their cutesy emotional state week-charts would be full of frowny faces! Sporadically (whenever they would do their donations), they would be happy, but that is not what they care about! That is not how this kind of person would evaluate their life! They would evaluate it by how much impact they had on the world, not by their happiness.

Though, for most people, sure, happiness is a pretty good measure of how well your life has been going.

3. I feel as though the super zoomed out looks at emotional states over the course of years is a little silly. The average of years worth of emotion… it just doesn’t seem to me like you could extract all that much out of the information, even if you did have a pretty good record (like a journal or something.)

Like, ideally, you’ll want to evaluate your emotional (and overall mental) state regularly so you can pivot towards better states as quickly as possible. You don’t, I don’t know, wait ‘till the end of each month to look back on your records and then decide what to do when you could’ve just looked at a week’s worth of data and come to the same conclusion. You wouldn’t wait a year to change when you could’ve made the same change with a month’s worth of info, yeah? Sure, go ahead and what the forest is to make sure that it’s not burning down, but you could probably just look at the trees in front of you to find that out instead.

4. Can I say, I just really like those drawings, they’re very cute and cool. The building blocks of each person’s life in the “Expanding the Metaphor” section was especially cool.

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Actionability-wise, keeping records of how well you were thinking and what you were feeling on a particular day is definitely useful information to keep.