I grew up traveling around and my way of life is fundamentally international. When the coronavirus crisis hit, it therefore resulted in a fundamental shift in my day-to-day being – most prominently because I was not at college in Chicago, but rather living back with my parents on the other side fo the Atlantic, in Berlin.

But me being a fan of data and statistics, I didn’t let this exceptional opportunity to learn something about myself and the situation I found myself in go to waste without making some graphs.

Since the 1st of January 2019, I have run a spreadsheet where every day I log my personal well-being along with a whole bunch of other daily statistics, like steps walked, time I woke up, and whether I was angry, sick or sad.

This allowed me to directly compare my life before the pandemic to my life during the pandemic, and how things had changed. For that, I found an average daily value for each variable and compared the pre-covid period to the covid period. I did this for several reference time periods, but the one I think is the most comparable is my college year leading up to the outbreak in March, so September 2019 through March 8th, 2020.

I found some rather interesting, if not necessarily too surprising things. For instance, the average daily distance I traveled by car increased by 100%. Not too surprising, as I don’t have a car at college and very rarely take an Uber or taxi, but back in Berlin, my parents have a car.

My overall well-being took a hit, decreasing almost 25%. That’s not too surprising and wasn’t terrible, but there was an added number of stress factors (even though my stress actually decreased by 19%) and things that brought me down, such as a closed border between me and my girlfriend, who was over in Poland – a country that kept its border to Germany and for Austrians closed until June.

There is no moral to this story. I just wanted to share my cool graphs with you. Here are the other two graphs that I have selected of the many I have made; I thought that they have the most interesting and relevant time frames for comparison.