Mood Tracking (Transcription)
Hi, everyone and Happy Tuesday! Hope you’re enjoying this beautiful weather (if you’re in the Midwest). I am going to talk today about “mood tracking”, why you should track your mood, what the benefits are, and then also a couple of apps that can help you do that in terms of tracking your mood. The reason is that I like to have clients track their mood. So if you’re in therapy, this might be helpful for you.
We see each other maybe once a week for an hour or sometimes every other week for an hour and a lot can happen within that time between one session to another. So when clients come to me for the weekly visit and they kind of think “what happened this week, what did I feel? I don’t remember. There was a lot going on.” The reason is when you’re in those intense moments where an event happens, maybe you experienced a panic attack on Monday, and then your session is on Friday. You might forget what was going on around that time. Or you might forget what you were feeling exactly.
And it can be difficult to remember because on Monday when you were having the panic attack, I’m sure those emotions were really intense. And you knew what you were feeling and you might’ve known why you were feeling that way, but a couple of days pass and you might’ve forgotten. So it can be difficult to bring that to therapy and try to talk about it when you don’t remember anything that you felt or what was going on before that. So that’s one reason that can be helpful.
And if you’re not in therapy, then a benefit of this would be one to be able to express your emotions and feel your feelings. I love to tell people to feel their feelings because a lot of times people hide from their feelings, especially if it’s negative ones.
You really want to have an outlet to help feel your feelings and figure out what’s going on in your body and in your mind (and what’s happening). It can be really helpful to just have that outlet. If you think about journaling (which I know can be an intimidating word, and some people will look at me and say, I’m not journaling), it’s similar to journaling, but this way, at least it’s more structured. You don’t have to think of what you want to write about, and then just kind of write about it as you go. So that’s one benefit. Is it being an outlet to express your feelings?
Another benefit is you can help identify patterns and triggers for your behaviors or for the way that you feel in your mood.
In general, if you look at this, like if you went to a doctor and they said, I think you have some sort of food allergy, but we’re not really sure what that is. They’re probably going to tell you to start tracking what you eat and how you felt afterwards. And the reason they do this is to find patterns. Let’s say all of a sudden, you realize every time I eat something with dairy in it, I felt really sick while you’re probably allergic to dairy. Right? So it’s similar in that sense where you can help identify any sort of patterns or triggers that you have by tracking your mood. You can maybe after a week or two, see, you know, every time I’m talking to this person, I get really anxious. So why is that? What can I explore more into why that is, that I’m getting anxious around this person?
Or every Monday I get really, really anxious as well. Maybe I start having panic attacks. Is it because you’re nervous about your Workday or your work week? You know, what could that be? So it can help you identify those patterns and triggers. You can at least either avoid any triggers that can be avoided, or at least have an idea that you’re going to be stepping into a trigger, which can give you more control over your feelings, because you know that it’s going to be happening. It’s something that will probably make you anxious. And anxiety, a lot of times, is a loss of control. So it can help you control it a little bit more and maybe help you feel less anxious. So those are some of the benefits of tracking your mood. Whether you’re in therapy or not, I think it’s a great idea.
And you’re able to just identify those patterns. You’re also able to have an outlet to let your feelings out and just have that on your side and a couple apps that are good. Ones are Daylio. That’s a really good one. Because it, again allows you to track and you can actually put in like different emojis of how you were feeling. You can add notes to it, things like that. The other one is called mood tracker. So that’s a pretty easy one that you can remember. But you can also Google these two there’s a bunch of articles of like the five best mood trackers for you. So feel free to do that. I think that’s helpful. And then I’ll put a couple in the the post as well. So you can see those two. So hopefully that helps. And I hope you have a great rest of your week and I will see you next week!
