Every ArcScore assessment gives you a snapshot of nine life dimensions. Real life, however, is not a series of snapshots — it is a moving arc, and the moves track the events you log. Whether your score is climbing, sliding, or recovering, there is almost always a tagged event in the story.
This guide walks through the eight event categories ArcScore accepts when you log a life event, and shows how each one tends to map onto the three arc patterns the /timeline page auto-detects: a growth_phase, a decline_window, or a recovery_curve. Read it once and the labelled bands on your timeline will start to feel less abstract.
The eight life-event categories
When you log an event on the Life Events page, you pick from a fixed taxonomy of eight categories. They were chosen because they each show up repeatedly in arcs and they correspond to predictable dimension swings. The category you choose is what /timeline uses to place a labelled pin on the chart.
career_change
Promotions, new roles, layoffs, sabbaticals, career pivots — anything that materially shifts how you spend 40+ hours a week. career_change events almost always precede a growth_phase in the Career dimension. If the change is involuntary, expect the growth_phase to lag the pin by two or three assessments; volunteering changes usually show a steeper slope because the recovery energy is already in motion when you log the event.
relationship
Engagements, marriages, separations, the addition or loss of a close friend, a move in or out of a difficult dynamic. Relationship events are the most dimensionally diffuse — a single relationship pin often drags Relationships, Social, and Mental scores together. In healthy arcs you will see a short decline_window immediately after a difficult relationship event followed by a recovery_curve; in stable arcs a positive relationship pin is usually the seed of a multi-quarter growth_phase.
health
Diagnoses, recoveries, the start of an exercise habit, sleep changes, a chronic condition stabilizing. health pins almost always produce the cleanest delays — a Physical growth_phase following the start of a new routine typically takes four to eight weeks to register on an assessment, because the new behaviour has to compound before the score moves. A serious health event instead tends to produce a sharp decline_window across Physical, Mental, and Habits at once, with a recovery_curve whose slope tells you how well your support network is doing.
relocation
Moves — across town or across countries. relocation is the category most likely to look like noise in your arc before it makes sense. Relocations classically produce a short decline_window in Social (your surface-level network resets) and a parallel growth_phase in Learning (you are encountering a new environment constantly). If your Social decline_window extends past three assessments without a recovery_curve, that is a real signal — not a measurement artefact.
financial
Salary changes, debt payoffs, a windfall, a major purchase, the start of a more aggressive savings plan. financial pins are typically the highest-impact, lowest-frequency events you will log. A financial win tends to seed a Financial growth_phase that bleeds into Mental and Purpose (because the cognitive load of money drops). The opposite is unfortunately also true: a sustained Financial decline_window that does not bend back is one of the early indicators of a broader arc contraction.
loss
The death of someone close, a major personal loss, a miscarriage, a pet, a long-held identity. loss is the category whose influence lasts the longest on the timeline. A single loss pin will often be followed by a Mental and Purpose decline_window that runs for two or three assessments, then transitions cleanly into a recovery_curve. The recovery slope is the metric we care about — it tells you whether your support system is metabolising the loss or whether it is compounding.
achievement
Big completions: finishing a degree, publishing something, hitting a fitness goal, completing a long project. achievement events are interesting because the arc response usually lags the event by several assessments — the in-the-moment score raises, calms down, and then the real growth_phase shows up two or three cycles later, when the new identity has settled. Lumping achievements in with other makes this delayed signature invisible, which is why the category exists.
other
The honest catch-all. Use it for events that don't fit the seven categories above — a worldview shift, a long travel stretch, a creative breakthrough that is not strictly an achievement. The downside of other is that /timeline cannot infer a pattern from it, so it appears only as a labelled pin without connecting automatically to a band. Reserve it for genuine ambiguity.
The three arc patterns on /timeline
Every labelled band on your score arc is one of three types. The detector in ArcScore looks for them automatically using a small linear-regression test on consecutive assessments, so the band only appears when there is enough data to be honest about it (at minimum three consecutive points).
growth_phase
A growth_phase band is drawn when an unbroken run of three or more consecutive assessments shows a positive slope of roughly 0.4 score points per month or steeper, with a regression fit (r²) of at least 0.5. In practice this means your arc is genuinely trending up, not just bobbing. career_change, achievement, and the back half of a health pin are the most common precursors to a growth_phase. The steeper the slope, the more often it traces back to a single high-impact event in the months preceding the first assessment in the band.
decline_window
A decline_window is the mirrored condition: a run of three or more consecutive assessments with a negative slope matching the growth threshold. loss, health, and the front of many relationship transitions are the classic openers. What makes a decline_window useful is that it tells you how long the slide has been going — if you see a long decline_window band without a recovery_curve following it, that is a signal worth acting on rather than a measurement to wait out.
recovery_curve
A recovery_curve is the third pattern, and the one most people under-use. It is drawn when an assessment is a local trough — strictly lower than every neighbour within two indices — and the assessments that follow show a positive-slope window of three or more. In other words, a recovery_curve always begins at a bottom and always follows a decline_window or a major negative event. The one-two punch of decline_window followed by recovery_curve is the canonical loss and health signature on the timeline. If you see a recovery_curve without a preceding decline, it is almost always a recovery that started before your earliest logged event — go back and log what you missed.
Reading your own arc
Open your timeline with this taxonomy in mind and the labelled bands stop being decoration. The growth_phases tell you what is working; the decline_windows tell you what is costing you; the recovery_curves tell you how elastic you are. Between them, the pinned event categories explain why each band started where it did.
The fastest way to put this into practice is to take a fresh assessment and log anything you have not yet logged since your last one. Even two or three well-tagged events are usually enough to see a labelled pin lighting up a portion of your chart that was previously just data. Once you have done that, the next retake will start producing bands — and the next one after that will start producing recovery_curves, which is the most useful thing the detector surfaces.
Whenever you are ready, take the assessment and then head to your timeline to see which pattern your arc is currently living in.