Is a Mood Tracker useful?

Especially in the past year people struggeled with their emotions and feelings. It has been a stressful time with many ups and downs. I myself did have some issues balancing my good mood and my bad mood swings so I added something new to my Bullet Journal: a mood tracker. But is it useful in the bullet journal or just a nice to have thing?

When starting to bullet journal I noticed that a lot of people use many different ways to track their mood. I started with a minimalistic bullet journal and the most mood tracker I came across were awesome designed and a magnificent piece of art rather than a useful tool. I felt very insecure, because I knew I wasn’t a good artist.

But after re-thinking and with all these Lockdown-feelings I was convinced to give it a try. Perhaps I could find out a correlation why I am so depressed or unmotivated on some days?

Above you can see how I set up my first mood tracker: it’s included in a minimal trakcer spread where I tracked just everything that came to my mind. Food, medicine, period, habits – I pushed it all into one spread.

I added my mood line in the upper box to see if there are any conincidences with stress and sleep. After almost half a year using it in this minimal style I stopped. There were no coincidences to stress or sleep, and I felt the range from 1 to 10 too complicated for telling how I felt. Imagine: Do you feel like a 6 or do you feel like a 4? Is 6 happy and 4 tired? Or is 4 sad? Way too abstract!

In September I started to experiment a little bit. I decided to paint a bunch of flowers in the lower left edge and I left all the petals blank. During the week I added the petals in the color that resembled my daily mood: happy, ok, sad. It turned out so beautiful and I really liked using a mood trakcer in a weekly spread!

You can tell how much I liked this weekly setup mood tracker because I used it again. I planned on four different moods and ended up only using two. Nevertheless the design turned out beautiful!

I got lazy and in the following months I stopped using color codes and instead chose emoticons: =) =| =(
They were easy to make, small and fitted everywhere.

And after a while I didnt like the weekly tracking anymore so I switched to a monthly habit tracker where I included my moods. It allowed me to see if there are correlations between my habits (like reading, painting or being creative) and my mood. I know it always relaxes me to read a good book!

I started with filling out the boxes (full = happy, empty = sad), but switched that very quickly to emoticons again and marking the icon.

After handing in my master thesis I finally had some time to get to being more artistic in my journal. I’m so happy to have a little bit of time to be creative! So I switched to having one of those artistic and creative mood trackers I spoke of in the beginning. I also didn’t feel insecure about my skills as an artist anymore.

I have to admit, I loved it! It’s so pleasing to see how the picture comes to life with adding the colors according to my mood.

On the other hand, it was almost impossible for me to find out any correlations between my food, medicine, periode or habits. To be honest, I feel like it’s impossible to find correlations. My mood switches throughout the day and most of the time I feel okay and setteled just right where I am. The correlations are not important for me anymore, especially after finding out that having a bad mood on certain days comes from my period starting the next day. Other bad mood swings came from bad news, failing at doing something or because of arguing with someone.

So coming back to the question if a mood tracker is useful: for me it’s not any more. It was useful to find out a little bit more about myself. And after a while its just a lot of fun when creating creative journal spreads with color coded objects. You could turn your mood tracker in a whole painting!

So I’m keeping the mood tracker as long as I have time to do it. Perhaps when things are getting more stressful I’ll switch back to one of my previous tried versions – or try a new one.

And this is my advice for anyone of you: If you are curious if a specific spread in a bullet journal may work for you, just give it a try! The least thing that could happen is that you’re not using it. The best thing is that you find something you like or that brings you joy!