Mood Tracker: Log Mood, Sleep and Energy to See the Pattern

About this tool

A mood tracker, also called a mood chart, mood journal or mood diary, is a simple daily record. The value is not in any one entry; it is that memory for mood is poor and biased by how you feel right now. Asked in a low week how the last month went, many people describe a low month. A couple of weeks of entries may confirm that impression or show something more varied, and either way you are reading a record rather than a recollection.

What to record matters more than how. A rating of mood on a fixed scale, hours slept, energy, and a line about what happened covers most of it. Adding medication, alcohol, exercise or menstrual cycle day is worth doing when you suspect a link. Keep the entry to under a minute, taken at roughly the same time each day, because a simple record you keep is easier to read back than a detailed one you stop filling in. A short or patchy record is still worth bringing to an appointment.

Mood charting has a clinical history in bipolar disorder, where daily mood and sleep records are a standard part of care and where sleep change often precedes mood change by days. It is also used in depression, in premenstrual dysphoric disorder, where the diagnosis requires prospective daily symptom ratings across at least two symptomatic cycles, assessed by a clinician, and in general practice to see whether a treatment is doing anything.

Two cautions. Rating your mood many times a day can tip into monitoring that increases anxiety rather than reducing it, so once a day is a sensible place to start unless a clinician has asked you for something different. And a tracker describes, it does not diagnose. What it is genuinely good for is walking into an appointment with eight weeks of data instead of an impression, which changes the conversation.

A mood tracker turns vague impressions into a record you can actually learn from. Memory is unreliable about mood: a hard afternoon can color how we remember a whole week. Logging a simple rating each day, alongside sleep, energy, and what happened, reveals patterns that are otherwise invisible, like a dip every Sunday night or a lift on days you exercise.

Clinicians use mood tracking too. For conditions like depression and bipolar disorder, a few weeks of daily ratings give a doctor or therapist far more to work with than a single snapshot in an appointment. Bringing your tracker to a session can make the conversation more concrete and the plan more tailored.

Keep it light. The best tracker is the one you actually use, so a quick daily rating beats an elaborate log you abandon after three days.

The best evidence here is narrower than the practice. A systematic review by Faurholt-Jepsen and colleagues looked at electronic self-monitoring of mood in adults with bipolar disorder and found that self-rated mood corresponded more consistently with clinician-rated depression than with clinician-rated mania, with limited evidence either way about whether monitoring improves outcomes. That is a specific population using apps and devices, so read it as support for the general idea of keeping a record rather than as validation of this particular chart.

A common mistake is only logging on hard days and skipping entries when things feel steady. Gaps skew the two weeks toward low points and make real patterns harder to see. Rating every day, even an unremarkable 6 out of 10, is what makes the record useful.

If your mood stays low for more than two weeks, if you notice swings between very high and very low energy, or if filling in the tracker itself starts to feel overwhelming, it can help to bring what you have logged to a licensed therapist or your doctor rather than waiting to see if it passes. You can search the Psychology.com therapist directory to find one.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the tracked fields for clinical usefulness.

References

1. Faurholt-Jepsen M, Munkholm K, Frost M, Bardram JE, Kessing LV. Electronic self-monitoring of mood using IT platforms in adult patients with bipolar disorder: A systematic review of the validity and evidence. BMC Psychiatry. 2016;16:7. doi:10.1186/s12888-016-0713-0
2. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th ed., text rev. APA Publishing; 2022.
3. Hantsoo L, Epperson CN. Premenstrual dysphoric disorder: epidemiology and treatment. Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2015;17(11):87. doi:10.1007/s11920-015-0628-3

Mood Tracker FAQ