Mood Trackers: What, How, Why?
Continuing in my Demystifying the Process series, let’s take a deep dive into the tool that has been at the core of my cognitive behavior therapy journey: the mood tracker.
Silk+Sonder Mood Tracker
This classic mood tracker featured a mix of three generally positive emotions (creative, satisfied, focused), two negative emotions (inadequate, groggy), and challenged, which can be either a good or bad thing to feel.
What is a mood tracker?
In the simplest terms, a mood tracker is exactly what it says on the tin. It is a way to track over time the moods and emotions you experience. On its own, a mood tracker lets you reflect and get specific about what you are feeling. Even at its most simple, a mood tracker lets you see how often you were feeling good, bad, or indifferent. And that timeframe can be as long as a year or as short as a single day, depending on how often you want to check in with yourself. The more data you give a mood tracker, the clearer picture you will have when you look back.
These images are from the app AbleTo. While this is a paid app (or an app paid by your insurance) and thus I understand not accessible to everyone, it is the most comprehensive that I have used.
Most electronic mood trackers (including the version that will be coming to iOS 17 within the health app later this month, which is a huge step for mental health equity that I will address in it’s own blog post upon launch) will ask you to rank your general mood on a sliding scale from Excellent, Very Good, Good, Neutral, Poor, and Very Poor. You will then be prompted for additional qualifications like specific emotions (sad, joyful, tired, creative etc.) and/or what might be causing you to feel this way (friends/family, job, hobby, or whatever else is on your mind). The nice thing about a using these electronic, app based mood trackers is that they are very good at collecting and aggregating data over long periods of time. Apple, for example, will let you view your data in a diagram presenting a week’s view, a month, 6 months, and full year. (When I’ve got that much data, I’ll update this post with a better view of the diagram.)
How do you use a mood tracker?
Now me personally, I like an app based mood tracker for a quick check in during the day (turn on alerts, it’s great for really driving home the habit of tracking your moods, especially if this is a new practice), but I use the analog tracker that’s part of my Silk + Sonder journal for reflecting on the full day. And this is where I think a mood tracker really shines, is as part of a larger self-care toolset.
In Silk + Sonder, the mood tracker is directly opposite the habit tracker, which makes it very easy to visualize, month to month, what actions are helping you fell better. To use an example from my own life and journals, I can see that I report more positive emotions on days when I do go outside, I am more “connected” (if you know that feel, you know) on days when I run, and I struggle more emotionally when I don’t do any kind of writing.
Left to right: April, May, June. I recommend color coding your key, but you can also use stickers, doodles, numbers, or anything else that speaks to you and how you are feeling!
Another thing that’s nice about using an analog mood tracker as part of your journaling practice is that it frees you from the above structure of the electronic versions. If you have trouble with a sliding 1-6 scale and prefer to go right to the specificity, you can! One technique I’ve used in this method is to list only positive emotions; if you can only choose from, say for example, joyful, creative, loved, accepted, proud, and engaged, this forces you to reflect on and recognize the best parts of your day, instead of becoming caught up on triggers. The idea is simple, and some of the best advice I’ve received on my mental health journey: “you might surprise yourself.”
On the other hand, if you’re getting caught up on picking only six specific emotions to track, what I’ve been using for the past couple of months and finding very helpful is to create my own simplified sliding scale. As someone who received an autism diagnosis as an adult, part of my journey over the last year has been understanding myself through this new lens. Through mood tracking, I’m coming to recognize what situations leave me overstimulated, and how that affects my moods longterm. And so for the last couple of months, instead of tracking individual specific moods, I have been tracking where I fall on a scale from overstimulated to connected with the monthly theme. If I’m overstimulated, I can make it more of a point to connect with the habits that ground me, and if I’m flourishing I can see what habits and patterns are contributing to that and make sure I keep at them. I’ve learned quite a lot doing this, and it’s even helped me find and request accommodations that help me enjoy more new places and events.
Why should you use a mood tracker?
When I began using a mood tracker, I was battling a cycle of deep, chronic depression. If you’ve ever been in a similar hole, you’ll be familiar with the feeling that everything is, always has been, and always will be terrible. In cognitive behavioral therapy this is known as catastrophizing, a topic worthy of it’s own deep dive. Now if you’re experiencing this, tracking a series of negative moods can seem counterintuitive to breaking the cycle, but hear me out:
See, human brains are really good at remembering things that threaten our survival, and really, really bad at recalling everything else. A mood tracker is a way to give your brain a little help, so that the next time you feel like everything is awful, you’re able to go back and prove yourself wrong. Similar practices include gratitude journaling, tracking your glimmers (the opposite of a trigger), and affirmations.
It sounds crazy, but it’s actually hard to feel upset after writing something like this. I deserve to learn, grow, and flourish. Say it with spite if you have to, I’m not above using spite against the universe as a motivator when I have to.
As I mentioned above, one of the biggest reason to use a mood tracker is to be able to better recognize patterns and triggers. No matter how in control of our emotions we may like to believe we are, moods result from several varied external factors, including but not limited to: relationships and interactions with others, the food you eat, how much sleep you’ve gotten, too little or too much exercise, your hormone balance, even the weather. That control we want comes from being able to accurately pair our moods with what contributes to them, so that we can do more of what makes us feel good and do our best to avoid or mitigate what doesn't.
In addition to identifying behaviors that contribute to improving mood, there is also simple merit in identifying your emotions, having a space in which to note them, and then letting them go. Just like journaling practices such as the brain dump, writing down your moods and giving them a specific name can bring them a kind of finality. Especially when I am dealing with reflecting on a bad day, there is something very freeing about being able to put down what I’m feeling, and then literally turn the page on it.
If you’re ready to start mood tracking, grab your journal (or pick up a Silk+Sonder subscription here), or you can try apps like AbleTo, Calm, and others. Got another way you use your mood tracker? Let me know on Instagram @plannerfoxtales. And be sure to read more about the habit trackers mentioned above in 5 Ways to Set and Achieve Your Goals with Silk+Sonder.
Happy planning, and may you have more good moods to write down than bad.