One Year of Mood-Tracking
What you can learn about yourself in five daily seconds by keeping a record of how you feel over the course of a year.
A friend once said to me:
You know what’s unique about you? You’re so interested in how things change over time. How the small, almost undetectable, variations add up to something considerable, something which, unless looked at from afar, would go amiss.
This struck a chord with me, as I realised this is something I’ve been doing for years on all aspects of my life. I log the tasks I accomplish at work, the workouts I complete, the books I read, the people I sleep with, the votes I cast, the vaccines I receive, the emotions I experience and sometimes even the foods I eat. It would only be a matter of time* until I started recording my moods too.
If this sounds like a nightmare, you might be missing the point, and I will make it my goal to explain. The point of all this is not to “regulate” your life in all its aspects, nor is it to force you to have a sense of accountability. It simply aims at providing us with a special insight: the patterns we wouldn’t be able to spot as we navigate through life week by week.
You might realise a certain month has been tough, or a certain day has been absolutely delightful… but are you able to recall periods of your life where you were substantially less satisfied? Or unmotivated? Or more realised? Most importantly, how do you know that over the past few years you’ve succeeded in working towards your overall happiness and fulfilment? Mood tracking does this. And more.
How it works
To start tracking your mood and unlock the insights it provides, you need two things:
- A tracker
- 5 seconds a day
A tracker could be anything, from a piece of paper, a diary or an Excel spreadsheet. My suggestion, however, is to make it as easy and practical as possible. In the world of today, that probably means your smartphone.
There are a lot of mood tracking apps out there. I use the one which comes with the iPhone since iOS 17. It’s simple and ads/frills free, and it integrates with other health-tracking features such as workouts, hours of sleep and daylight exposure. We’ll dive into factors which affect your mood later.
The app asks you to rate your day as pleasant, neutral or unpleasant. More specifically you can decide between slightly or very (un)pleasant. Then it offers the choices of some emotions based on your day rating: happy, pleased, confident, etc… or sad, anxious, stressed and so on. Finally, it asks to choose which factors are the most relevant reason for how you are feeling that way. Is it work related? Is it your partner? Health? That’s it!
Using an app on your phone usually means that you can easily do it just before bed, and if you forget you can receive reminders. It also allows for easier data insights. But any method works. Some people love to have a more concrete tracker such as a colour-in paper sheet. Why not?
The other thing you need is five seconds every day. In other words, consistency. It is surely a small commitment, but it’s easy to forget. If that happens, you can always backfill previous days — no biggie. In my experience, it’s best not to leave it for longer than 2–3 days. It then becomes difficult to remember how you actually felt that day, as all past emotions become a bit muddled up by later events.
For example, you could have been anxious about giving a presentation the next day. But later in the week, knowing the presentation went well might make you belittle the nervousness you were actually feeling beforehand.
So please, make sure you’re on top of it. It can also be a moment to reflect on what you were grateful for that day. Gratefulness is an essential part of meditation and has been proven to improve one’s quality of life.
Insights
Alright, so assuming you’re in and you are willing to give mood-tracking a god, what can you expect to learn from it? The answer is that it is deeply personal, but I can give you an example of what I learned after one year. Take this as a sort of “here’s one I made earlier” example. A month or two from today, you will likely already be spotting useful patterns about yourself from tracking your daily emotions. Here’s what I discovered.
Overall trends
Looking at the yearly data as a set of monthly averages allows us to discern patterns regardless of single “bad” or “exceptional” days or weeks. Let’s begin by looking at August 2023 to July 2024.
- Big life events. The first thing you should be able to notice is the impact of the most prominent events, positive or negative. My mood in the first four months looks decidedly lower than the rest of the year. During this time, I was living in temporary accommodation with only a small fraction of my things, until I finally moved into my own place.
- Peaks and dips. The other things you might notice are exceptionally good or bad months. You can delve into your notes for those months to find out what was going on. In my case, March has been a really happy month thanks to my family visiting and a wonderful birthday with my friends, however April saw me really stressed and exhausted as I realised I had spent too much time and money on my new place and needed a break.
- Overall trajectory. Finally, it would be interesting if you could identify an overarching direction of your mood. Have you been feeling better than one year ago, worse, or the same? To find out what you can do for more pleasant days and a better life, let’s delve into associations. My mood seems to have been improving over the course of the past year, largely helped by having settled into my own place, and having discovered and actioned more hobbies and travel plans.
Associations
Trends are all well and good, but it would be more interesting to find out the factors affecting them, so that we can prioritise those activities which seem to lead to better days and keep an eye on those which do the opposite.
If you app or tracker allows it, and you’ve been adding the reasons for your emotions every day, try to access a view of your recorded moods according to these factors. This is easy enough to do with the Health app of the iPhone. Health > State of Mind > Show in Charts > Associations.
These views highlight how the moods which were affected by the selected factors (Community, Travel, Self-Care etc.) compare to the average mood for that month. In other words they show whether or not these factors have had a positive or negative (or no) impact on your state of mind.
I identified four categories of factors based on their influence on my mood:
- Big Mood shooters: Community, Self-Care, Travel, Money, Spirituality
These are the ones which have made my mood shoot up with big sudden bursts and they are the ones shown above.
- Mood consolidators: Partner, Friends, Hobbies, Fitness
These factors are the ones that have had a less abrupt, yet more constant and regular positive impact on my daily mood.
- Fickle factors: Family, Identity, Tasks, Weather, Current events
These are the ones whose impact on my mood varies. Sometimes it’s positive but sometimes it’s adverse… like the weather. Identity, as another example, is something which at times I have felt strong and confident about, while at other times it was the cause of my lows.
- Mood demeaners: Health, Work
These factors are not necessarily problematic in my life, yet whenever I reported them as affecting my mood, they have done so negatively.
Conclusions
My experimenting with mood tracking has made me not only more conscious of what troubles me and what I am grateful for at the end of each day, but it has also made me mindful of the fact that emotions really do come and go. While in the midst of a “blue” period, it’s easy to despair and assume the future will always be like the present. Or forget that we had a wonderful day out with our friends or family not long before.
To me, mood tracking has been useful to determine which aspects of my life I should cherish and which ones I should work on in order to live a better, more fulfilling life. I would be curious to see year-on-year trends, to determine the impact of seasons like summer, spring or winter, with its cold nights. I hope to be able to spot even more patterns about my state of mind. Perhaps there will be a part two?
So what are your mood shooters and consolidators? It’s time to find out!
