I Tracked My Mood For 3 Months - Here's What I Learned
If you’ve been following my Instagram stories, you might have noticed that I’m really feeling the whole BUJO thing this year. And maybe you also noticed how I’ve been doing these elaborate mood trackers for every single day of the year so far. So, if you’ve been wondering what the deal with that has been, here’s what I’ve learned from three months of mood tracking. Now, I’m not going to lie. Initially, I thought all these mood trackers that BUJO artists were doing on their BUJOs were a little excessive and unnecessary. I thought it was something for people who have more time on their hands. But the more I was setting up my 2020 BUJO for last December, the more I started to wonder, “Why not give it a shot? What’s the worst that could happen? It’s just colouring in a space at the end of the day. It’s going to take me 5 seconds at best. Why not?” So I talked myself into it and decided to give it a go for three months and then see how it goes from there. And what I have realised/ found out over these three months has been rather fascinating if I can say so myself.
Let me tell you how I track my mood first. At the end of each day, i.e., when I’ve decided I’ll go to bed, I would finish up my standard night-time routine and then take a minute to review the day. Then I would decide whether I would label it as a “tough day”, “neutral day”, “good day”, or “great day”. I also have a page set up for one-line journaling for each day of the month adjacent to my mood tracker. This is where I’ll scribble in something significant from the day. Which often serves as my rationale for why I labelled a day as such. Now, is there any rationale behind choosing these labels of tough, neutral, good, or great? Nope. Did this involve a lot of research before I decided to give it a go? Definitely not. Did I do this consistently every single night? Are you kidding? Of course I had my slip-ups. But overall, I was pretty consistent. And three months in, it only feels like a logical move to keep doing it for the foreseeable future. So here’s what I have learned from this experience.
Full Moons be Cray-Cray
Right off the bat, the first thing I noticed was that I feel a burst of aggression/ anger/ rage driven upset during a full moon. I don’t know why, but this has been very consistent. And this has been happening since well before I did my mood tracking. Random journal entries, WhatsApp conversations, and entries in my period tracker app all consistently show that I experience Hulk-level anger during the peak of a full moon phase. I always knew I had my intense moments, but I didn’t realise it was this consistent and predictable. What’s more is that a Google search on this actually shows proper research on moon phases and moods. And though they might not be statistically strong or valid, they all indicate a general correlation between people feeling angry and the full moon. And here’s what I found even more interesting, it’s not just a female thing, about how our cycles follow the moon. Apparently, there are police officers who insist that there’s a correlation between full moons and crime rates. Hospital admissions show some spikes. People report experiencing poor quality of sleep during a full moon and thus poor wellbeing the following day. The TLDR of this is basically that although there’s no scientific evidence, many people report an adverse effect during a full moon. Which is so crazy to me. And now I feel like a werewolf. I'm kidding, I just remind myself to take a breather during the full moon now and to be more careful when talking to others. Because I also noticed that I tend to pick a fight around this time. So instead, I sit quietly in my room and try to mind my own business as much as possible these days. Wait, are my canine teeth starting to look more like fangs?
Focusing on the bigger picture
Forcing myself to evaluate a day as a whole, instead of having one bad moment, or one fantastic moment define my entire day has been great for a variety of reasons. It has made me consider and be aware of the ebb and flow of life more than letting singular moments dictate my mood for the next few hours or the next few days. Sure, a message from a good friend can be a welcome change on an otherwise shitty day, but one bad email doesn’t have to mean that a day where I had a nice, long, and open-hearted chat with a family member is a bad day. And this sort of re-evaluations and assessments brings me to my next point.
It has evolved my life into the whole “Easy to spot a yellow car when you’re always thinking of a yellow car” situation.
Focusing on the bigger picture and tracking my mood has also had an impact on my mental health. Which I feel is the most obvious and pronounced difference in my life since starting this. For the longest time, I’ve been feeling like I’ve had bad days and that I’m in a not so great phase of my life right now. And it’s not that I choose to focus on the negative, it just feels like a negative state of mind has been the default. This then cues my self-fulfilling prophecy and cyclical thought pattern of: I’m not in a good place -> bad things are happening to me -> I’m not in a good place. But when I sit down and actively evaluate the day, weigh the good and the bad that has happened, it has started to shift my focus. One, I tend to look at things more in terms of what’s in my control and what’s not regarding my mood. Two, I’ve just become less likely to wallow. And if something bad did happen on that day, I’ve come to realise that it’s more likely the day will rate overall as “neutral” rather than “tough”. And when I review the past few days, or week, or month, I see more “neutral” than “tough”. Which has started to make me feel better about my life and has sort of rebooted my outlook – I’m getting closer to the more upbeat person I am at my core, and I’m starting to feel like life is not so bad. Even if I’m not classifying most of my days as “good” or “great”. Maybe this might be a given for some, but mood tracking has been found to play a significant role in the road of getting better for those with mood disorders.
Hormones and moods
And just like most women, most days that I’m on my period get classified as a “tough day”. I mean. Cramps, migraines, extended periods of discomfort and just a dip in overall mood because of hormones? It can be tough. But it’s also been interesting to learn that I’ve not classified every single day of my period as a “tough day”. There is more ebb and flow to it than I thought.
I think overall, with where I am at life right now, this mood tracking is something I would be doing for quite some time. Because it clearly has a significant impact on my mental and emotional wellbeing. But is it something I will be doing for the rest of my life? I don’t know. Only time will tell. I always thought meditation was something I would do for life every single day but now, I feel like it’s something that’s best for me to do at well-placed intervals rather than every single day. Considering how meditation and mood tracking are both about bringing a heightened sense of awareness to your inner self, maybe mood tracking would soon be something I do once in a while rather than every single day too. But for now, I think I’m going to be doing it every single day until I’m in a much better place with my outlook and perspective.
*Subscribe to my monthly newsletter, "Thendral's Telegraph" here!*
