What is a “Mood Tracker”? Everything you need to know about it!!
When I was reflecting upon 2022 and how those months were, I was hardly able to remember and recollect how my experience was across those months. So when 2023 started, I decided to capture moments (good, bad), moods (positive, negative), and reflections (mistakes, learnings) to have a meaningful year and also to reflect upon my experience as a person and how I would like to have them ideally..
One such initiative was the creation of “Mood Tracker”. Mood tracker is simply a notebook/digital note version where you create a calendar for a month and color code your moods across each of those days, at EOD. I started with surfing through Pinterest and created a Mood tracker template for me, with different templates for different months as I liked them. It looks something like this, with certain pre-defined moods which you’d feel usually.
Every day, I’d look back on how my day went, and how I felt that day. I color-coded “pink- happy, green- calm, red- angry/sad, purple- anxious, yellow- tired” and some more per what I felt suited better.
It helped me in multiple ways than I had imagined. It helped me -
1) Reflect upon my days every day.
2) At the end of each month, I was able to see how my month went, whether I had a good month, or not so good one & still look forward to upcoming period with hope.
3) I was able to see even if one month was majorly “red” (negative), following months were more of “pink” (happy). It made me realize things are not always bad. All good things take time, and it is okay to feel what we feel. All we need to do is embrace the multitude of emotions we are feeling and be kinder to ourselves.
4) It helped me associate my behavior with my mood and how I could regulate it to create a happy surrounding for myself and the people around me.
5) I also tried something new. Whenever something bad/ or something I’m not okay with, was happening, I would try, what can I do today, or how can I respond to this situation better, that will make me color code today as “pink (happy)” still. In a way, it felt like cheating my brain to respond to a situation in a certain way than I would do usually. But that helped me be conscious & mindful and act in a way I would ideally want myself to.
6) At the end I realized what started as a fun experiment and way to merely capture moments in my year, ended up being something more, something that helped me take baby steps towards becoming a better, mindful, conscious person.
It has just been 3 months and I’m already in love with this journey. I have inculcated a few new hobbies like”Junk Journaling”, which helps me find peace in chaos and enjoy & appreciate even the littlest of things, which we would otherwise ignore. I would cover more about junk journal in another post. But meanwhile, if you enjoyed reading this post about mood tracker and —
If you like to create your own “Mood Tracker”, here are a few steps on how to go about it.
1) Browse through Pinterest — “Mood Tracker ideas” for inspiration
2) Find a template that you like. You can create your own as well basis your creativity.
3) You can utilize something as simple as a notebook & color pencils or if you have a tab, you can create it in that.
4) Tracker Template creation — It could be a table, pie chart, boxes, or custom-made as you like.
5) Moods — you can include typical ones- Happy, Sad, Excited, Tired, etc, and ones you feel suit you better
6) Choose colors for each of these moods. I prefer using colors that relate to the mood themselves — (pink- happy, red- sad/angry, so when I look at it at end of the month, I get a high-level view of how those months are even without delving much). But, you can color code as you wish.
7) Once done, you can draw, decorate, or write around the tracker as you like. Feel free to be creative here, as this will be the page you gonna come visit everyday.
8) Your mood tracker is now ready and you can start using it!!!!! Ensure you are able to follow and regularly capture in it.
9) Extra tip- you could also write a one-liner at the bottom/ side on why you felt that day was happy/ or what made you anxious that day 😊 Helps, when you wanna look back after a few months, also makes you learn, how much you have grown as a person. (It’s okay, even if you feel there is not much change, it’s all about enjoying the process)
I hope you create yours and enjoy this journey as much as I did 😊
Sharing a Snapshot of my tracker for your reference!! Lemme know if you like it!!
