What is mood tracking?
Moods can change so quickly and automatically that we often don’t know what set them off. Keeping a mood log can help you reflect on the people, situations, and thoughts that affect your emotions, and notice patterns in your habitual reactions so that your responses become a little less automatic. The worksheet below suggests noting your mood a few times a day, especially when you are upset.
How to track your mood
If possible, you might carry a notebook for recording your moods.
- When you notice a difficult emotion, noting the situation: day, time, location, and what is happening.
- Seeing whether you can name the emotions present (sad, lonely, scared, irritated) and rate their intensity from 1 to 100%.
- Paying attention to automatic thoughts, and noting the most common and gripping ones.
- Examining how accurate those thoughts are. Thoughts in a low mood are often unrealistically negative, so you might try creating more realistic alternative explanations.
- Reassessing your mood when you finish, and noticing whether it has changed.
- After a few days or weeks, looking over the log for patterns, such as times of day, specific people, or events linked to low moods.
Seeing those patterns can help you find other responses, prepare for difficult situations and people, and feel more in touch with your mood.
History of the mood log
Tracking daily mood and challenging automatic thoughts is a core part of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which grew out of the work of psychologists Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck in the mid-twentieth century. The method here is adapted from the CBT mood logs in David Burns’s The Feeling Good Handbook and from Christine Padesky and Dennis Greenberger’s Mind Over Mood.
Cautions
It isn’t always easy to track your mood during the day, and there is no need to be discouraged if you can’t record it consistently. Just beginning to notice what influences your mood can help. Becoming aware of automatic thoughts can also be unsettling if they are very negative. If you notice self-criticism, you might practice self-compassion for the difficult emotion instead.
A mood log is a self-reflection tool, not a diagnosis or a treatment. If low mood is persistent or heavy, a therapist or doctor can offer support that a worksheet cannot, and this practice can complement that care.
