Coloring Your Emotional World: A Gentle Guide to Mood Tracking and Journaling

Why Track Your Mood?

Mood tracking is similar to a daily check-in with yourself! The main purpose of mood tracking is recording and recognizing your emotional patterns. This allows you to reflect on the reasons behind your feelings and how they affected your ideas and behaviors. By keeping track of your moods, you can gain valuable insight into yourself and make positive changes in your daily life.

Not sure how you're feeling? You can use the Feelings Wheel as a visual tool to help identify and label your emotions: https://feelingswheel.com/

How to Use a Mood Tracker

While there are many variations of mood trackers, every version serves the same goal: helping you to recognize and better understand your emotions with daily habit tracking. In mood tracking, consistency is key to seeing your emotional patterns. Make an effort to set aside a specific time every day to reflect and log your feelings in a journal. 

To start, you can create a simple grid layout for the month to track your moods. Or, if you want to make it more creative, you can draw a different shape to fill in every day for the month instead! Once your mood tracker layout is completed, you can choose which colors will be used to represent your emotions. These colors can be labeled on a “color key” in either the front or back of your journal. 

By the end of the month, you will have a beautifully colored mood tracker reflecting your days. Take a moment to acknowledge and reflect on your moods by writing a journal entry. Do you notice a shift in your mood during specific periods? Recognizing these patterns allows you to see exactly how your environment and schedule impact your inner peace. You can also utilize this tool to track intensity of your anxiety, duration of sleep, or your water intake. With mood and color tracking, the ideas are endless!

Your Palette of Feelings

When creating your mood tracker, you can choose which colors represent your feelings. The fun part of this tool is to be creative and express yourself! Feelings such as happiness and joy can be represented by vibrant colors like orange or yellow. While feelings of sadness may be represented by cool-toned colors like blue and purple. Other daily feelings, such as feeling tired or restless, could be portrayed as green or pink. The colors on your mood tracker should feel personalized to you and your feelings. 

When to Seek Extra Support

While tracking is a simple yet powerful tool, there are times when our “color palette” may feel consistently heavy or dark. If you find yourself experiencing consistent low moods, overwhelming anxiety, or patterns that feel difficult to manage alone, reaching out for support is a good next step. Your mood tracker can actually be a useful tool in therapy sessions! Bringing your journal to therapy provides you and your therapist a detailed overview of your feelings. You don’t have to navigate your emotions alone. If you are ready to explore your emotional patterns deeper or are seeking mental health services, the team at Inner Healing Therapy is here to support you. You can schedule an appointment online at innerhealingtherapy.info or give us a call at 630-246-2955.