How are you?
I am fine, thank you. Have you realized that everything you think and do is inspired by your mood? It is not a surprise that so many of our conversations start with "How are you?". Mood impacts almost every aspect of our daily lives.
Mood impacts our health-related decision-making and well-being, and our well-being relies on us understanding our emotions and associated experiences. As every situation or event inevitably leads us to feel different emotions, the key is to learn to manage them and react to them the way we want. Tracking our own emotions might not seem like a big deal at first, but in point of fact, it can offer important insight into the way we think and help us understand the behavioral patterns we tend to adopt. [1]
Everyone’s moods shift now and then. It’s completely natural, and we should permit ourselves to feel all of these emotions. However, we sometimes might react to these emotions in the heat of the moment, not in the way we would have wanted. Even though you may not be able to dictate how you feel at every given moment, you still have the opportunity to take an extra step to know what each emotion means and how you can assess yourself while in that state of mood. [1]
5 Reasons to Track Your Mood
Mood tracking means recording your daily thoughts that affect your state of mind and behavior. There are several reasons why emotion tracking and mood journaling are powerful tools to take care of your mental health.
Mood tracking is a great way to build self-awareness and identify personal factors that affect your mood daily. Instead of keeping all the racing thoughts in your head, you get to unpack them. Writing these things down will help you understand and manage yourself better. [2]
Mood tracking is an investment in your future, and once you get started, it requires nothing more than few seconds of your day. Just a few taps, words, or lines are a great start. Here we have presented 5 of the reasons we think you should start mood tracking.
1. Helps you build a deeper connection to your mental well-being
Creating a good and solid connection to yourself might sound easy. But really, how often do you stop and think about how you actually are doing today? Instead of focusing on ourselves, we tend to let other people’s lives and social media steal our attention too often. [2]
Feeling happy? Feeling sad? Feeling anxious?
But can’t say for what reason. Paying attention to your feelings helps you build a deeper connection to your mental well-being and eventually figure out what you need so that you can respond intentionally instead of becoming overwhelmed. [2]
2. Helps you spot when things are not OK
Each person experiences things differently. What is normal for others may not be right for you, and tracking your mood will help you understand what is. This is important since recognizing your “normal” will also help you note whether or not it would be time to seek professional support when things start to look different. [2]
3. Reveals what your triggers are
Emotional triggers are situations, people, opinions, memories, or events that cause a strong and excessive emotional reaction within us.
Triggers create certain patterns which can lead you to act in a certain way in a certain situation or with a certain person. Identifying the thing that triggers you will help you find out how you can take actions that best serve your highest self and gradually break the deteriorating patterns of your mental health. [2]
4. Helps you to communicate clearly
Reflecting on your feelings can help you recognize how other people impact you. If you notice some people make you feel a lot of joy, you may want to create opportunities to spend more time together or express your gratitude. When you notice that you’re feeling annoyed or frustrated because of something, you may want to create a healthier boundary and balance between yourself and the bothering thing and let people know what you can and can’t give.
Tracking your mood helps you learn how to express your emotions and describe them to others easier, for example, to your health care professional.
5. Supports your healing process
If you keep inflating the balloon with air and you don’t stop, we all know what eventually happens. The air needs a vent to flow. The same applies to emotions. If you keep suppressing emotions and don't give them a vent out, the consequences are probably not so good.
Mood tracking helps you sort through the difficult things that have happened in your day that will help you start processing the emotions that have arisen and begin making sense of them.
Writing things down gives you a record of the past, helps you process your emotions, and allows you to come to a deeper understanding of yourself, which is a core piece of the healing process. [2]
About Medified App
Mood tracking is a positive psychology technique for improving mental health and is also a self-help method for people suffering from mood disorders such as anxiety, clinical depression, and bipolar disorder.
Medified offers an easy and motivating tool to reflect your feelings on the go and allows you to see how they influence your everyday life. The daily queries help you self-assess your daily mood factors and symptoms and provides you with individual feedback supporting your mental well-being and recovery. All the queries and tasks are based on clinical research and long-used methods in professional work. Now with Medified, these are available for home use in a CE-certified application.
Medified can be used as a proactive personal mental well-being tracking and a digital communication tool between mental health recoverer and healthcare professionals meaning that with Medified, you can also share your mood information securely and easily with your own healthcare professional to foster a shared understanding and receive better care.
Download Medified to your iOS or Android device for free and start taking care of your mental well-being today www.medified.fi/download.
SOURCES:
1. “The power of tracking your mood.” Sanvello, 2019. Assessed March 13, 2021. https://www.sanvello.com/blog/power-of-tracking-your-mood/
2. “The benefits of mood tracking.” Bluejayofhappiness, 2019. Assessed March 13, 2021. https://bluejayofhappiness.com/2019/04/07/the-benefits-of-mood-tracking/