The Importance Of Tracking Moods | Mood Tracking Using Bullet Journal | Different Moods To Track | Other Ideas
In this video from a livestreaming tutorial I did on our YouTube channel, I'm sharing 5 mood tracker bullet journal ideas. You'll see me demonstrating and providing bullet journal page ideas for beginners which can be part of your daily spread ideas.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
WHAT IS A MOOD TRACKER
IMPORTANCE OF TRACKING MOODS
MOOD TRACKER WITH BULLET JOURNAL
MOODS TO TRACK
BULLET JOURNAL TRACKER IDEAS FOR MOODS
WHAT IS A MOOD TRACKER
A mood tracker or an emotion tracker is a tool that allows you to measure your state of mood. The purpose of mood tracking is to identify triggers within the day that affect your mood either positively or negatively.
There are different types of it: you can either use a bullet journal or a mood tracking app. In this article, we will focus on mood tracking ideas using a bullet journal mood chart.
IMPORTANCE OF TRACKING MOODS
Let's look into why you would get into the process of tracking your mood in the first place.
From your experience, it's quite clear that your mood alternates from day to day. And in some cases a few times within the same day. Tracking moods allows you to identify which activities trigger what types of moods or emotions within you. Thereby affecting how you feel for the rest of your day or at least a significant part of it. With most things, it is up to you to take control of what you can. In this way of tracking moods, you are empowered with the right information that allows you to change your mood. You can choose to perform activities that bring you the desired outcome. Ones that you have based on activities that are associated to certain emotions/moods you have identified from your tracker.
Mood trackers or emotion trackers are very important for your mental health. The sooner you can see what affects how you feel and think, the sooner you will be able to take actions towards the right direction and care for yourself.
MOOD TRACKER WITH BULLET JOURNAL
There are a few reasons why there are lots of individuals that search for "mood tracker bullet journal" or "emotion tracker bullet journal". Basically, how to create a tracker with a bullet journal and to use it for tracking moods. Below I will mention the three main reasons you may want to use a bullet journal to track your moods.
Reason #1: Personalization
A bullet journal, also known as BuJo, is a personalized method of organization and planning developed by Ryder Carroll. This method is based on a dotted journaling system. Where dots in the journal can be connected to create spreads and layouts to meet your unique needs. For that reason bullet journaling has become popular for various activities. Such as organization of weekly tasks, goals, or objective tracking and habit tracking.
In the next chapters, we are sharing 5 different types of mood trackers that you can use or adopt based on your needs, monitoring the important elements for you, for your own sanity and mental wellbeing.
Reason #2: Stress relief
Drawing and painting are considered important practices for mental well being. A most significant reason why art therapy sessions are on the rise. More and more individuals are looking to feed the creative part of their brain to create a calmer perspective to their everyday busy and stressful lives. Using a bullet journal for mood tracking allows you to tap into the creative side of your brain. Thus, adding some type of a therapy session to your day even on a small scale can bring more focus and awareness to how you feel. Providing you with space to evaluate what is good for you and what is not.
Reason #3: Time for reflection & appreciation
Another crucial reason more and more individuals prefer bullet journal mood trackers is that it provides a time in their day spent away from electronic devices. We are inundated with various screens in our daily lives, from mobile and tablet to computer, laptop and TV screens. Although if it works for you it's okay, but using another app just adds more screen time to your day. Also increasing your chances of getting distracted and spending more time browsing through social media, the web or chatting.
Is it that bad? Well, it is if it is actually the thing that causes more stress in your life. Exposure to blue screens disrupts your sleep pattern which affects your mental health, creating a vicious cycle. Social media have proven to have a similar effect whereby an individual compares their worst moments to the best moments of others' lives, making them feel bad about themselves.
Scientifically, drawing, painting and writing using your hands or other parts of your body (some physically disabled people use their mouth or their feet) allows you to absorb and remember information better. And it also benefits your brain from having multiple perspectives. Writing by hand activates the right hemisphere of your brain, which is the artistic side of the brain that we tend to neglect when writing using a digital device.
MOODS TO TRACK
There are really lots of moods or emotions you can track in a tracker, however, most of the time it may not make sense to track all of them. It makes more sense to track a handful of those that you see come up more frequently to you. Or those that you do not see come up that frequently but are important for you to experience.
Most are designed to track approximately five states from extreme happiness to extreme sadness. You can do that too and also include a neutral state in between. However, there may be other states of mood you would like to track such as excitement, stress, jealousy and calmness. You may be trying to eliminate stress in your life and lead a more calm life, so tracking anxiety and calmness will make more sense to you than tracking only how happy or sad you are. If you would like to cultivate gratefulness in your life, then this may be an important emotion to track.
Below you will find some moods that you may want to evaluate and decide if it is worth tracking them in your bullet journal mood tracker.
- Excited
- Happy
- Sad
- Disappointed
- Calm
- Anxious
- Jealous
- Energetic
- Loved
- Creative
- Alone
- Cranky
- Frustrated
- Lost
- Tired
- Grateful
It's a personalized evaluation system of your mental health, so create it in a way that suits your needs. The aim is to discover more about yourself and how you can better your life.
BULLET JOURNAL MOOD TRACKER IDEAS
As mentioned earlier, there are so many different types of mood trackers you can create. But finding out which one will work for you comes down to two things - what you would like to track and how much time you can dedicate to create it and fill it in realistically. In addition, you may want to experiment with various templates or layouts until you find the one that works best for you.
Below you will find 5 main bullet journal ideas for tracking moods:
#1 - Life Aspect Vs Bullet Journal Mood
This bullet journal mood tracker is quite a detailed one as it includes various aspects of your life that you associate with how you feel each day. While also looking at and noting the overall mood or feeling in that day.
This type of tracker is helpful to understand what happens in your life. To find out which parts of your life affect how you feel or your experience of the world the most at various times of the year. This also helps you identify areas you give more focus to at specific time periods while potentially neglecting others. With this, you can plan how you can bring more balance to your life no matter what life throws at you.
In order to create this bullet journal tracker for moods, you need to decide which moods you would like to track and also which areas of your life. In the example above, you will find the following aspects:
- Personal
- Romance
- Work
- Nutrition
- Fitness
- Self-care
- Overall
However, you may want to add or replace some of them with others such as:
- Home environment
- Finance
- Nature
This is completely up to you and takes into account the points of focus for you at the time you put the tracking system in place.
As for moods to include in your mood tracker, we already provided some in the previous chapter, in this specific example, we included the following:
- Thrilled
- Happy
- Tired
- Sad
- Calm
- Anxious
Revisit the list in the chapter Moods for Mood Tracker to identify the ones that will fit your needs best.
Each mood has been assigned its own color that you will paint each box with based on the life aspect and the day of the month.
#2 - Leaf Mood Tracker
The leaf tracker is one of the easier mood tracking layouts you can create. You can actually create a tree with branches or like in the image shown above, a swirling vine where you place as many leaves as many days in the month there are.
In this case, you just track your overall mood of the day and you can assign a color to each mood that will allow you to paint each leaf with.
In this example we have:
Green => Thrilled
Blue => Happy
Grey => Tired
Black => Sad
Yellow => Calm
Red => Anxious
In some cases, if you have space left in any of your tracker layouts, you can either draw and paint something that expresses you. Or keep notes to provide more context as to why the specific mood expresses the specific day of the month. So when you get back to it after a while, you'll know and be reminded of what was going on.
#3 - Mood Tracker Chart
A tracker chart is a fantastic tool that can visualize in a chart format your moods' ups and downs.
To create this mood tracker, you can split the page into two axes, x and y. The X axis will stand for days in the month and Y axis for your level of mood from low to high. The design of this tracker does not make it practical or that easy and clear to track a variation of moods. Instead, you would usually use it to track fluctuations in your mood.
In the example above, we set the neutral mood as point 0 and then determined -5 as the lowest level and +5 as the highest level of mood fluctuation. The number point can obviously change depending on how it is easy for you to measure and visualize your mood fluctuations. You can simply decide to use a number system from 1 to 10 or 10 to 1. It is all up to you and can be easily personalized.
In addition to how you evaluate your mood at a certain time point, you can add notes next to each of your emotional states in order to refer back to them if needed.
#4 - Mandala-Type Mood Tracker
There are different types of mandala designs but this is the simplest form of a mandala tracker.
In order to create this design, you can use a compass or a piece of paper and two pens. In order to use the latter method, you create two holes at each end of the piece of paper with each pen. While keeping the paper with one pen pinned at the middle of the page, you move the other end of the paper with the second pen creating a circle. You can either use two pieces of paper where one is lengthier than the other to create the circle within a circle effect or you can use the lengthier version creating one more hole at a lower level.
When your two circles are ready, connect them with lines while creating the space between the lines as many as the days in the month.
In this example a grade of happiness and sadness is created but you can always create more moods in a way like we did for the first two tracker layouts.
#5 - Emotion Boxes Mood Tracker
The last bullet journal tracker layout that we will discuss is a more "boxed" type. If you enjoy straight lines, and boxes (we are not here to judge) you probably will love this type of tracker.
In the example above, the first line includes the types of moods to track and then empty boxes as many as the number of days in the month. Here, we specifically fitted 7 boxes per line. The space below the boxes can be used for note taking or to draw and paint something that you feel like.
We hope that these will be great inspirations for your own mood tracker bullet journal layout to help you achieve your mental goals and optimize your mental health.
We'd love to hear back from you!
Did you enjoy the article? What kind of mood tracker layout are you using or planning to try? Would you like to hear more about bullet journaling? What kind of bullet journal spreads would you like us to provide? Let us know what you think by commenting down below, and do share your own layout style, we're excited to see them!
Join our friendly art community Painting Inspiration Daily on Facebook. You can share your art and ideas, watch LIVE tutorials, and be inspired to paint! Check out more creative bullet journal ideas and tips from these live streamed videos - How To Bullet Journal For Artists and Bullet Journal Page Ideas For Artists on our YouTube channel!
- MEET THE AUTHOR-
Christina is the Wizard of Storytelling at ZenART, resident digital marketing strategist and bullet journal evangelist. The person behind the email campaigns you receive as well as advertising messages you see on search engines and social media. She also helps our amazing ZenARTists get the best out of what we offer. She is a health scientist who loves experimenting with healthy recipes and shares what works on her YouTube channel.
