Monthly Mood Tracker

One page, thirty-one cells

Seven columns by five rows, giving 35 boxes of which 31 are days and four spare. Underneath sits the key: five levels, each with a printed colour swatch, labelled Great, Good, OK, Down and Low by default.

The labels are editable, so if those words are not yours you can use your own. The month field is blank — write it in, and the same sheet works for any month.

Colouring in beats writing

Ten seconds a day, one box, one colour. That is the whole commitment, and it is deliberately smaller than a journal entry because the tracker you actually keep is the one that asks almost nothing of you at the end of a bad day.

What you get in exchange is a picture. Thirty-one written entries have to be read and remembered; thirty-one coloured squares can be taken in at a glance, and patterns that were invisible day to day become obvious — a bad run every third week, a dip that starts each Sunday evening, three good weeks you had entirely forgotten about by the time the bad one arrived.

Five levels, not ten

Fine-grained scales sound more accurate and are harder to use consistently. Is today a 6 or a 7 out of 10? You will not answer that the same way in November as you did in June, and a scale you apply differently in different moods ends up recording the scale instead of the mood.

Five is enough to be useful and coarse enough to be repeatable.

Making it more useful

Add a mark in the corner of the box for context — a dot for a bad night's sleep, a line for a day off, an asterisk for anything unusual. Over a couple of months the correlations start to show themselves, and they are frequently not the ones you expected.

Print several and keep them together. One month tells you very little; six months tells you a great deal, especially about the seasons.

A note on what this is

It is a piece of paper and it is not a clinical instrument. It does not diagnose anything and it does not replace talking to a doctor.

What it does do is give you something concrete to bring to that conversation. "I have felt low for a while" is hard to act on. A sheet showing eleven Low days out of thirty, clustered in the second half of the month, is a different kind of statement — and if what you are looking at worries you, please take it to your GP rather than to another month of tracking.

Also useful

The monthly planner if you would rather track alongside your commitments, and the 30-day habit tracker for behaviours rather than feelings.