Love and intimacy have a huge impact on someone’s well-being, with Maslow measuring love as third on his hierarchy of needs. Without love, you cannot achieve self-actualization, so therefore love is vital to well-being (Koltko-Rivera, 2006). In March it was the anniversary of the relationship between my girlfriend and I. We went out for dinner and then walked around Brighton. I remember feeling really calm and content around that time, and on Mood Panda my score went from an average of 6.6 up to an average of 9.3 for the weekend. Oxytocin would have had a direct effect on my well-being. Oxytocin is involved with maternal bonding and sexual behavior (Ishak et al., 2011). Oxytocin also aids in close bonding by maintaining low levels of anxiety while reducing fear and increasing trust; furthermore, it maintains communication between the amygdala and the brain stem. Conversely, an over-hyper amygdala is associated with depression (Ishak et al., 2011). The intimacy my girlfriend and I share will also have a positive impact on my well-being. Increased intimacy and development of relationships contribute to feelings of positive well-being. Our anniversary is a testament that we are very intimate and have really developed our relationship (Kuiper et al., 2016).
The way I recorded my results was by either uploading them onto Mood Panda at the time or if I could not at that time, remembering how I was feeling and recording them when I next could. I installed a positivistic approach by using quantitative data (Sale et al., 2002) and not qualitative data. My decision to do this was because quantitative data would be quicker to record and analyze. However, it only gave me a very limited understanding of how I was feeling at the time, whereas qualitative data would give me a more in-depth view of my feelings and well-being. Qualitative data is based on the subjective opinion of the participant while being fluid and not constraining the participant to only a few options (Bryman, 1984). Because I could not regularly update my mood panda, there were times I had to do it from memory. Early work by Loftus et al. shows that there can be memory impairment due to misinformation affecting the original memory. So, I could have experienced something, talked about it with someone, and changed my opinion on the memory, thus altering my well-being score (Rubin, 1996). This then would not be internally valid. In fact, Karl Popper argues that it is not good science (O’Hear, 1995).
To conclude, physical exercise, groups, and love all have had a positive impact on my well-being over the past few months. They all bring different subjective aspects of well-being to my life, with football bringing me closer to people and allowing me to lessen the physical stressors in my body. Love allows me to become more intimate and helps relieve me of depressive symptoms. However, my method for recording my results was not wholly reliable. Next time I would use a mix of qualitative and quantitative data to yield a more reliable data set.