Tracking patterns in your moods and habits can help you identify what causes panic attacks and what helps reduce your anxiety. Knowing what helps and hurts can be crucial, and you might notice patterns you didn’t even realize were influencing you.
What you track depends on your specific habits and concerns, but generally, tracking should take into account all or most of these:
- Diet (what you ate, what you craved, how your stomach felt, etc.)
- Hydration
- Sleep (how long, how hard it was to fall/stay asleep, etc.)
- Exercise
- Mood
- Medications or supplements
- Physical changes (illness, injury, menstruation, etc.)
- Anything during the day that impacted your stress or mood
Figuring out what affects your anxiety is only the first step — you need to act on the information you get from tracking! If seeing a certain person always spikes your anxiety, think hard about changing the terms of that relationship. If too little sleep is a problem, get disciplined about going to bed early, as hard as it is.
Set the habit
Tracking only works if you do it consistently. Logging your day in your tracker can be a great end-of-day ritual, like journaling lite. You can also use apps that nudge you to input information at set times of the day.
Tracking is there to help you feel better, not to add another pressure or source of worry. Be wary of any system that doesn’t work for your needs or schedule. If you find yourself feeling shame, anxiety, or frustration about skipping days or not remembering to use your tracker, find something that works better.
Types of mood trackers
There are tons of different options for mood trackers out there. Some work best for visual people who want a way to graph or chart various fluctuations. Some are geared toward people who want something beautiful to look at as part of their daily routine. Find one that works best for you.
In my experience, really pretty, pre-made trackers stress me out because I fuss about keeping them nice. Since I fill out my tracker before bed, anything on a screen won’t work. A lot of pre-made ones focus too much on diet or don’t include elements that I want to track.
So my strategy is to make a simple chart that has dates across the top and everything I track down the sides. Then I print it out and keep it next to my bed. At the end of the day, I fill it out. Doing it this way means I have to take care to look back and identify trends, drawing connections between what I did/ate/etc. and how I said I felt.
Sample mood trackers
If you don’t want to make your own, there are plenty of pre-made sheets and journals for mood tracking.
Physical/printable
- Stable Resource daily mood chart
- Therapist Aid daily mood chart
- Eli Lilly mood tracker sheet
- DBS anxiety calendar
- APS mood diary
- Recovery Diary
- Wellness Tracker
- Depression tracker
- Therapy Journals
- BlueLemonPaper (weekly/daily trackers)
Digital
- Comparison of mood tracking apps
- Worry Watch
- Moodtracker.com
- ABC Tracker
- The Healthy Place mood journal
- Optimism
- SAM
- Pacifica
- Daylio
- In Flow
Many of the apps & wearables listed here have mood tracking features.
This article is part of the “So You Had A Panic Attack” resource guide. Go back to the SYHAPA index page
