Improve Your Wellbeing with Mood Tracking
Reviewing your wellbeing is good for your health. Learning what affects you is also helpful for making decisions about any improvements needed to take better care of yourself.
Management expert, Peter Drucker, stated:
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
For high achievers, I believe this maxim applies to performance and wellbeing. So, just as tracking your habits can help you achieve more, mood tracking is worth consideration as a method for analysing and improving your wellbeing.
Defining emotion and mood
In addition to feelings, the terms emotion and mood are often used interchangeably to describe a state of wellbeing. Due to this, there can be some confusion about their meanings, so let’s take a brief look at each.
Emotion
An emotion is your reaction to something and generally connected to an event. It’s a term used to define the affect you experience and usually occurs immediately or shortly after an event occurs.
For example, you may describe a positive and engaging experience like watching a film, as causing you to feel inspired.
Triggered by specific situations or events, emotions tend to be short-lived. In other words, they can be fleeting. Depending on your situational context, its therefore possible to move from feeling anxious to joyful in a short timespan.
Mood
Your mood, on the other hand, doesn’t need to be connected to a particular event. Nor does it need an obvious trigger. Your moods are generally longer lasting and can persist for several hours, days, or even weeks.
As a result, you could find yourself waking up in a ‘bad’ or 'good' mood, and have no idea why.
Therefore, your emotions are fairly generalised, triggered by an event, and can change quickly. Your moods, however, are less specific, don’t need a trigger, and can last for longer periods of time.
The impact of mood changes
It's worth noting, mood can impact your energy, ability to focus, and decision-making process. One study found the participants' ability to process information was directly correlated with their mood.
The study further highlighted the role mood plays in our ability to gather and process information. It also pointed to the impact these processes have on our abilities to make good choices.
Your mood is therefore important and worth taking note of. We all experience mood changes from day to day. However, making sense of them can be a challenge.
A mood tracker, could be an effective tool for helping you become more aware of yours. And subsequently, help you with taking actions to create change.
Benefits of mood tracking
Your health and wellbeing are integral to your effectiveness in every area of life. Tracking your wellbeing is therefore a valuable practice to develop. A common form of tracking is journalling with paper and pen.
However, for some busy people, the idea of writing a daily journal sounds too arduous. Nonetheless, a commitment to tracking your mood can help you to know what affects and alters your state from day to day.
Below is a list of six benefits you could take advantage of by tracking your mood on a regular basis:
1. Mood tracking helps you to spot patterns in your life
By tracking your mood you’ll be able to identify patterns in your life. For example, you may notice a pattern of lower mood on Sundays.
With further examination, this may be due to feeling anxious about the prospect of returning to a job you don’t enjoy on Mondays.
2. Mood tracking helps you to connect feelings to events
Your emotions are impacted by the events in your life. Having a record of your mood enables you to make connections between what happens in your day and your overall state of wellbeing.
For example, you may notice where confrontation or conflict leaves you feeling depressed or frustrated. Or, where meaningful connection with loved ones or prayer leads to joy and contentment.
3. Mood tracking helps you to identify and understand your hot spots
Your hot spots are any events or situations which trigger an emotional or behavioural response. They can be either internal or external. For example, recalling a memory or receiving a text message from someone close.
In identifying the factors that contribute to your mood you can start to make simple changes to increase what improves your wellbeing, and less of everything else.
4. Mood tracking helps you to gain insights into what keeps you well
In learning to identify and assess your mood, you’ll be better able to understand what you need - moment by moment - to look after yourself.
As your needs vary from day to day, paying attention to your mood provides useful information to help you identify what'll help you most.
You’ll then be better equipped to respond to your feelings productively, rather than simply reacting with default choices and behaviours.
5. Mood tracking helps you to better assess and manage your relationships
As you become more aware of your state, you’ll grow more capable of recognising how others impact you.
Recognising the impact a person has on your mood can also help you to determine the value of your relationship, state your needs, or set boundary changes.
6. Mood tracking helps with therapeutic support
If you’re working with a therapist, keeping a record of your mood can prove to be a valuable use of your time.
A detailed history of what's been happening in your life and their impact on your mood, can provide valuable insights and discussion points.
Discussing your findings with a therapist, you’ll also be able to explore what is or isn’t working and consider making appropriate changes.
Mood tracking options
Any feedback which enables you to make connections between your thoughts, feelings and behaviours, is helpful. Knowing this information will assist you with making choices to improve your experiences and wellbeing.
There are various tools, in both digital and paper formats, you could use to get started. Here are some of your options:
Daylio
Daylio allows you track your mood using visuals rather than words. It also offers a range of videos as prompts to best reflect your mood, in addition to letting you link mood to activities.
MoodKit
MoodKit provides four integrated tools to help improve mental health. With options to track your activities, thoughts, mood, and journal entries, it draws on the psychological principles of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).
iMoodJournal
iMoodJournal offers both mood tracking and journal entry options. The duality of this app enables you to spot possible reasons for changes in your mood and provides helpful report charts.
You can find a more extensive list of digital mood tracking options, here.
Daily Mood Chart
With a helpful guide, this Daily Mood Chart helps you rate your mood on a sliding scale. It also invites you to monitor sleeping patterns to identify any links.
Mood Chart
Also using a using a scoring system, this Mood Chart by Harvard’s Dr. Peter Bingham, is a little more in-depth. It takes into consideration factors like medication and key observations to help track triggers.
Create your own
If you want more flexibility, there’s also the option of creating your own. To be creative and make one more suited to your needs, this step-by-step guide might be helpful.
Summary
Your health and wellbeing matters. For this reason, effectively monitoring it is important. Tracking your mood could help you understand yourself and make better decisions about what makes you happier.
Attempting one of the tracking options mentioned above, will provide valuable insights into what impacts your moods negatively or positively.
Not only could tracking your mood help improve your happiness and wellbeing, but it might also help improve your overall performance in life.
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If you think you might benefit from working with a counsellor or coach, book a free Exploration Call with me to talk about what working together might look like.
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Photo credit: @tengyart
