22 Mood Tracking
Purpose:
This activity will help participants to explore methods for tracking their moods and noticing the lifestyle patterns that impact emotional states.
Learning Objectives
Participants will:
- Build habits of noticing and naming their emotional states.
- Examine patterns of feelings related to time of day, life style factors or other triggers for comfortable and uncomfortable emotions.
Why It’s Important
Mood tracking can be useful for a number of different reasons. For example, it might help you:
- Identify external and internal triggers that cause mood changes or mood swings.
- Learn more about how factors such as sleep, diet, and daily activities affect your moods.
- Develop coping techniques to help deal with negative moods and unwanted behaviors.
- Spot patterns and better understand shifts in mood.
- Determine if behaviour changes or treatments are helping improve your mood.
Activity Directions
- Full Group Discussion: Ask the group why they think that research has found that tracking our moods can be a useful technique for increasing wellbeing. You could ask people to quickly use google on their phones or lap tops and report back on research that backs this claim.
- Examples: Show some examples of online and hand drawn mood trackers. Ask participants to choose one method for tracking and let them know that they will be tracking their moods for the next month. Remind them that humans tend to focus on the emotions that they are finding probematic, but their mood tracker should also reflect moments of gratitude, happiness, awe, delight and fun. It is important to look for the patterns and glimmers of joy as well as for those of sorrow, stress and frustration.
- Check-In If you meet weekly, ask participants to form groups of three and check-in for ten minutes on what they have noticed about their moods during the past week. (Note: They do not need to share “why” they were feeling a particular feeling, rather this is an opportunity to identity patterns, lifestyle factors, triggers etc.)
- Review and fine-tune: If this is an ongoing group or someone that is coming for regular counselling or life coaching appointments, it could be worthwhile to collect and keep the weekly mood trackers and take time every six weeks to review them together to look for overall insights and patterns. This can also be a way to evaluate whether the therapeutic approach is helpful or whether it might be important to make changes or seek out other kinds of assessment or support.
Examples
“When you learn to notice and name your emotions, you can gain more power over
them.” – Dr. Emma McAdams from Therapy in a Nutshell
On-line mood trackers: best-mood-tracker-apps-verywellmind
Here are some examples of weekly and annual mood trackers that can be downloaded and photocopied or adapted for journalling:
therapynutshell/Emotion-Tracker
Extension Assessment Actvity: Personal Wellbeing Experiment
When emotional intelligence was part of a first year University Life Skills course, one of the assessment activities involved a personal experiment where students chose a well-being strategy and implemented it every day for two weeks. Strategies came from a big menu of activities we had covered during the course: 20 minutes of physical excercise, 10 minutes of meditation, sleeping hygiene, gratitude journal, pomodoro time management technique etc.
In addition, they needed to track their mood, productivity and energy levels each day. At the end of the term, students presented their personal experiment findings and the group examined common themes they had discovered.
Padlet is a great on-line platform that is for sharing group reflections. It can be used in online workshops or in a classroom or conference setting where the comments or responses to a question are posted live. Here is an example of padlet from a course that explored emotional awareness and wellbeing strategies.