How to Track, Manage & Cope with Your Moods

Call them moods, emotions, states of mind, or feelings—they’re with us all day, every day, for better or worse. Our moods affect what we think (and how and why), how we approach our daily lives, and how we behave. Paying attention to our moods is an important part of understanding ourselves and maintaining our mental and emotional wellbeing. Mood tracking is a helpful tool for organizing our mood monitoring—and provides an opportunity to understand our moods and motivations more clearly.

What is a Mood Tracking?

Mood tracking brings order to monitoring moods—an effort to turn emotions into data points. If this seems cold or disconnected, try thinking of it like solving a puzzle: If knowing what causes your moods is the missing piece, mood tracking will help you find what fits into that space. Need to identify a trigger so you can cope? Tracking can help with that too.

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What are Some Mood Tracking Benefits?

Knowledge is power. The more we know about the ins and outs of our feelings, the more we know about ourselves—what we want and need, what motivates us, and what our path to mental and emotional wellbeing might be. Here are ways mood tracking helps us reach these understandings:

• Bird’s-eye-view of emotional ebbs and flows. Stepping back from the moment-to-moment lets the big picture come into view. A deeper understanding of moods is impossible without reviewing them over time.
• Identifying patterns. Our moods may be more predictable than we think. Without a record of our moods moment to moment or day to day, it’ll be hard to see if there’s a pattern. Identifying patterns can shed light onto what makes us tick—how our feelings and motivations work together.
• Identifying triggers. “Why did I do that?” “What do I keep feeling this way?” Mood tracking may help answer questions like these. Triggers can cause behavior patterns—the trigger may put patterns into motion. If an event—or another feeling—triggers a mood or behavior, tracking can lead to the triggers’ discovery.
• Understanding how everyday activities affect mood. Adding the activities of daily living—eating, sleeping, grooming, socializing, working, etc.—to mood tracking provides another layer of understanding. Moods don’t exist in a vacuum; your tracking shouldn’t either.

Approaches to Mood Tracking

There are several ways to track moods, including:

• Charting. If you like your data visual, consider choosing a charting approach for mood tracking. If PowerPoint and Excel don’t make the endeavor feel too much like an assignment you’d rather not do, they can unlock valuable visualization options. Pen, pencil, markers, and paper could work just as well.
• Drawing and/or color coding. Done separately or in addition to another mood tacking modality, shape and color can add another layer of understanding to your data. Whether you choose different colors of ink based on mood or try your hand at a mood mandala, this approach might be for you if you find that a creative flair makes mood tracking more enjoyable.
• Journaling. There are many benefits to journaling, and mood tracking is definitely among them. Though there are as many approaches to journaling as there are benefits, journal approaches that tend to work well for mood tracking include calendar journaling, bullet journaling, narrative journaling, and daily logs. Pen and paper might be your preferred approach, but you can also type (or talk-to-text) your way through your mood tracking, and organize your thoughts in a desktop or online version of a familiar note taker or word processor, like Word.
• Mood tracker apps. The newest and fastest-growing approach to mood tracking, mood tracker apps are not only popular, but the medical establishment has also taken notice and begun studying their efficacy.^1,2 There are apps specifically designed to track moods and other day-to-day details that may affect feelings, but any app for writing, notetaking, or drawing could be used for mood tracking, like Microsoft OneNote.

Mood tracking approaches don’t end here, but these are tried-and-true options with low barriers to entry—which you’ll come to understand is key.

How to Choose the Right Mood Tracking Approach for You

Habit is key to mood tracking, and the key to keeping up with a good habit is routine. Make a good habit routine, and it’ll become second nature. It’s usually easy to make a habit of something that’s, well, easy. It can also help to see a clear benefit to keeping up with the routine. Ask yourself these questions to narrow down your approach to building this sustainable self-care practice:

• What is convenient for you? Convenience matters. You can buy all the pretty stationery and fancy pens you want, but if you don’t use them or forget to bring them with you or misplace them, they’re not going to help you keep track of your mood. What’s easy for you to use during the times of day you’d like to do your mood tracking?
• What do you find enjoyable to do? Maybe the pretty stationery is more important to you than convenience—and that’s OK, as long as it’ll help motivate you to keep up with your tracking. If you find writing by hand pleasurable, that may be the best approach to you. Conversely, if you really dig making bulleted lists in a notes app, or the gamification of data collection that comes with dedicated mood tracking apps, one of those might be a more appropriate tool.
• How flexible do you need your mood tracking to be? Do you need the open canvas of a sketch pad or regimented layout and use cases of an app designed for mood tracking? Knowing what you respond to will help guide your decision.
• Do you want to use something you already have, or do you want a new tool? You don’t have to spend money or time getting a new notebook, a new app, a new program—a new anything. If it would genuinely benefit your process, then go for it! But don’t let it stand in the way of starting.

Mood Tracking Tips

Unsure how to start? Started already, but worried you’re not doing it right? Here are some tips for making the most of your mood tracking practice:

• Set a schedule and stick to it. Morning, noon, and night. A daily check-in in the evening or a review of the day before in the morning. Track at regular intervals to help identify patterns. It’s OK if your tracking schedule isn’t perfect—doing something is better than doing nothing—but the more regularly you can track, the better.
• Track the same non-mood details every time. If you track it once, track it again—how long you sleep, when you eat, when you exercise. Consistency can reveal how your moods change in relation to the activities of daily living.
• Don’t leave out the happy moments. Anger, sadness, anxiety—uncomfortable feelings we might want to learn how to manage more healthfully, but not the only moods worth tracking. Happiness, excitement, anticipation, and other positive states of mind are just as important to track. There are patterns and triggers (good ones!) to be found there, too!
• Be honest with yourself—and your tracker. Your mood tracking is just for you. For it to be the most effective tool it can be for monitoring your mental and emotional wellbeing, you must do your best to track truthfully. Leaving something out or making something up will only keep you from fully understanding your moods and how to manage them.

Turning Mood Tracking into Coping & Management

Tracking moods is just the beginning, not a means to an end (though it does feel good and can be helpful in its own right). After tracking, the next step is to look at what the tracking has uncovered: patterns, triggers, cycles, cause and effect, reactions to stress or trauma or the unknown. When we start sifting through tracked moods, the things that stand out can illuminate the path forward.

Additionally, the practice of putting moods on paper (or screen) will reinforce your understanding of your moods and strengthen how well you can communicate about them—a great benefit for engaging a therapist or a supportive friend when talking through what you’ve learned, and when pursuing new management tools.