Time
Making a study to use for a research experiment can be very challenging. The amount of variables that exist are almost innumerable in some cases. In creating and carrying out an experiment that I recently conducted, I found some challenges that I had to work around. For my experiment, I was trying to capture the effects of exercise on happiness. I had six weeks to complete this study, which proved to be a problem on its own, and during the six weeks I ran into a few problems with the study itself. The length of the study didn’t allow me to collect a lot of data after the baseline data collection was complete. I only had three weeks to carry out the actual part of the experiment that I needed. This made it hard to come to any conclusion about what was happening with the mood of the individual.
Motivation
Happiness is an emotion that everybody tries to hold on to throughout their entire lives. People constantly buy new things, pursue new relations, engage in new experiences to satisfy the desire to feel happy. One of the experiences that some people choose to experience is exercise and physical fitness. But does exercise really provide happiness? In many studies conducted over the last several decades, researchers have decided that it does, but I wanted to know for myself if it really does help. I did a study that measured a base level of happiness and then, after three weeks, measured happiness with exercise added into the mix. The study showed me that my happiness remained relatively the same overall but for a short while, I did feel better about myself. Exercising made me feel that I had accomplished a goal, it made feel good about not being sedentary. Even if it had little physical effects, exercising have me, if only for a shot while, a sense of accomplishment which lead to an increase of happiness. It felt good to be active again, to use strength that I hadn't used in months.
Results
Doing a study is a very interesting thing to do. Keeping track of data, carrying out experiments, and having new experiences can make doing a study fun. When I started in on this project, I started with taking a baseline to compare with. The baseline was taking a mood record which proved to be an enlightening record to take. It showed me how my mood was being affected and what level of happiness I considered myself to be.
As the study progressed, I introduced the exercising and kept looking at how my mood was affected. This is was also interesting because in lots of studies I had read, they told me that exercise would increase my happiness. I noticed something different though. The first week of exercise made my mood worse, it made me hurt and lose any ambition of continuing on. I even felt more tired and a loss of energy. The second week had midterms in it I didn’t have a lot of time to exercise but I worked through and got it done just because I felt committed to the study and needed to get it done. I didn’t feel like continuing the study so my mood again took a fall. In third week, I began to feel like the exercise was necessary and it felt good to workout. My mood levels began to rise and my body was starting to feel better.
After finishing the study, I looked at all of the results to see what had become of it. The results showed almost exactly what I felt. The first week of the exercise, my mood looked similar to the baseline but the second week, my mood fell, and the third week it raised again back to what the baseline was. Given more time I think the exercise would make feel happier than the baseline was and make my body feel better.
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