Mood Tracking for Happiness
Back at the start of 2021, I declared the year to be my “year of months.” In lieu of making a slew of resolutions at the beginning of January, I decided to take it month-by-month, focusing on one habit at a time. This post is part of a series on those habits. You can find all the installments here.
I’m unapologetic about my penchant for tracking things. It’s just so satisfying to see the daily minutiae of my life all laid out in colored grids and neat lists. Over the years, I’ve tracked my word counts, my clothing wears, my spending, my migraines and their triggers, my household tasks, my reading, my screentime, my food, and my exercise. One thing I’d never tracked before was my mood.
That changed in February of this year when I decided to make mood tracking my habit of the month. While it appealed to me to have a visual representation of my mood over time, the most important reason I wanted to give tracking my moods a shot was the impact of the tracking itself. In the same way that simply keeping a food diary aids in weight loss efforts, I hoped that simply noting my mood at regular intervals would swing me towards happiness-improving choices. I looked at it as a mindfulness exercise and, quite honestly, an opportunity to catch myself early in negative spirals and turn them around.
Mood tracking isn’t a new concept. It’s a standard component of a lot of bullet journals, which I’m pretty sure is where I first heard of it. I’m entranced by bujo adherents—and I can’t resist all those gorgeous photos on Instagram—but for various reasons, I’ve never leaned in to the routines of setting up and maintaining one. I like to keep my planning and tracking simple, with tools that are straightforward, intuitive and quick to use.
To that end, I tested out several different mood tracking apps before landing on one called Moodistory. It bills itself as “low-effort,” which is exactly what I wanted. The app had a number of pre-set color schemes and ratings levels, but my love of the pretty bujo schemes had me setting it up with my own custom colors. I chose a continuum that made sense to me—from a sunny orange to represent good moods to a cloudy blue-gray for bad days. The more intense the color, the more intense the mood. I also chose not to include a “neutral” option, knowing that my tendency would be to choose that more often than not. Instead of defaulting to a non-answer, I wanted to make sure I was taking a moment to really examine my mental state. Forcing myself to decide on a positive or negative state seemed the best way to avoid falling back to an easy but meaningless choice.
For the first month, I set Moodistory to ask me about my mood at three semi-random times throughout the day—once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once in the evening. The app averaged out my choices and displayed the results on a monthly calendar. Here’s how it ended up looking:
Even though I didn’t think seeing the monthly visuals would be super-useful, it actually turned out to be quite enlightening for me to realize how strongly hormonal cycles impacted my moods. It helped, too, to see a big picture showing that, on average, I’m more often happy than not. Just knowing that puts the bad days in perspective. I can see them for what they are—aberrations rather than a trend.
As I anticipated, though, the very act of mood tracking was just as useful as the end result. I’ve found the same to be true of almost every mindfulness practice I’ve undertaken. Moments of awareness are their own reward, and they really did help in altering my mindset in the moment. Bad moods didn’t last as long, and I had the opportunity to acknowledge and savor good ones. Better yet, choosing those colors to represent my mindset sometimes had the subtle effect of coloring my perception of my days. Teetering on the edge between two levels and consciously choosing the better mood often made me feel better. Seeing myself as happier made me actually happier.
The whole mood tracking experience was good enough that I opted to continue after the month was over, albeit in a slightly less intrusive way. I’ve gone down to just one random reminder per day, and am excited to see how the monthly trends change as life shifts into a post-pandemic “new normal.” I’m grateful for the daily nudge to stop, notice, and record how I’m feeling. Mood tracking is a momentary gift to myself, a small ritual that reminds me that my feelings matter, they impact my daily life, and a second’s worth of thought can change my perspective for the better.
