I am Always Late

It’s Friday afternoon and most of those who work in the offices or do any type of similar jobs usually feel great at this time of the day. Why? Because just few hours left till the working day is over, and then two long awaited days of rest come. A completely different picture can be seen on Monday afternoon: usually, everyone is feeling depressed, stressed out or nervous, because working week has just started and more job is coming any moment. This phenomena is something very common in all parts of the world, that is why it sometimes falls within a great interest of psychologists and scientists. There are many studies and researches dedicated to studying people’s mood and its influence on our productivity, psychological condition, stress management skills, etc.

In particular, there are a number of interesting facts which became apparent analyzing what people tweet. Scott Golder and Michael Macy, Cornell sociologists, analyzed about five hundred million tweets posted by about 2.5 million people from 84 countries around the world to find out what global tendencies in people’s mood are. No wonder why such technique was chosen, cos’ we usually tweet about the things that are quite important for us. And it’s very easy to figure out how does a person feel by reading his or her tweets.

To a big surprise, it turned out that most of us wake up every morning in very good mood, no matter how cranky or how stressed out we are in the morning. However, by the lunch time people’s mood starts falling down extremely, reaching its lowest point somewhere late in the afternoon. Then, by the early evening we usually start feeling better, and this interesting tendency is absolutely valid for all people, regardless of their cultural backgrounds or geographical location.  Therefore, people’s good mood peaks in the morning and in the midnight, making such factors as the amount of sleep and the amount of daylight important.

Workings schedules are considered another issue which plays a role in how we feel. For example, the study has shown that the peak of people’s good mood in the weekends is pushed 2 hours back, because we like sleeping more in the weekends. Also, people generally feel a lot happier in the weekends, and this tendency is related exactly to the opportunity to rest on Saturday and Sunday. For example, people who live in the UAE, where a working week starts on Sunday and ends up on Thursday, demonstrated quite low mood Sunday morning, cos’ it’s the fist working day for them. Besides of workings schedules, such factors as health condition, active lifestyle and spending a night in a night-club or with friends also play a role in forming people’s mood. The findings of this interesting survey were recently published in Science magazine (Science 30 September 2011: vol. 333  no. 6051  pp. 1878-1881).