Mood trackers
Useful data or organised self-deception?
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for some time, you’ll know I’m a fan of tracking. I track my time usage, my spending, my exercises—and gain immense pleasure from it.
A few years back, I was introduced to the Mood Meter app. I was fascinated by this newly-discovered concept of mood tracking and for some months failed miserably at consistently tracking my moods. (Though I found the exercise of naming the precise mood I was feeling at any given moment, quite a tricky thing if you’re new to it, extremely rewarding.)
It wasn’t until a few months back, when I was scrambling to find a replacement for my five-year diary which was coming to the end of its life, that I, again, came across mood tracking. I had the grand epiphany that I didn’t need to buy a physical multi-year diary that I then had to log around with me every time I went somewhere. I could simply start a digital diary and stick with that for the rest of my life.
There I was, researching diary apps, when a particular one caught my eye: Daylio. It’s a diary app that’s predominantly a mood tracker. All your journal entries are tied to a mood, and you can tag activities that led to you having that mood. It’s all quite nifty.
Useful data?
The app then aggregates all your mood/journal entries and gives you a nice monthly mood chart, a count of your moods (how many times you felt productive, moved, relaxed, etc. this month), and—this is the cool bit—each activity’s influence on your mood based on the activity tagging.
Let’s say I have work as an activity. The app tells me how I generally feel (great to horrible) when working as opposed to not working, and the different moods I’ve felt in the past when working (productive, proud, engaged, confused, anxious, etc.).
In theory, this is a great idea. If you record your mood regularly, then over a significant period of time you should have enough data to tell you which activities in your life are a source of joy, and which are the opposite. And based on that you would be able to root out the activities in your life that aren’t serving you. Cool, right?
Or an exercise in self-deception?
But, and this is a big but, it doesn’t quite work like that in practice. Some days into my new mood tracking habit, I realised one crucial thing: I choose which mood to associate with which activity.
I’m the one who decides, today at 11:03am work is giving me a headache and therefore I’m going to enter frustrated and tag work to this mood. Maybe by 1:45pm I’m feeling fine again and that work frustration has passed, but if I don’t record it, then the mood entry for work for that day would be frustrated.
I’m the one who decides, last night at the birthday party, I had fun. Though the party lasted hours and I maybe felt disengaged for most of it. Only certain bits were fun, but I choose to remember the fun.
Over the course of a day, I feel at least a dozen different moods. But I’m not going to record all dozen. I’m just going to record the ones that feel significant to me at the time or the morning after. And all the moods that don’t make it onto the app are simply lost to posterity.
Hardly a scientific data-gathering process to make life improvements.
What do you think?
To this day, I’m still using the app and doing my best to be true to my feelings (whatever that means) when recording entries. I’ve run out of pages in my five-year diary, so Daylio is where it’s at now. More because I don’t want to “lose” my memories, and less because I find the mood tracking particularly useful. You’ve seen my reason why. And now I turn the thinking hat over to you… let me know:
Are mood trackers useful? How should we use it?
Have you used one before? Would you be interested to try? Send a reply, leave a comment, share this with someone who’s ace at managing their moods.
Until next Friday… Stay thoughtful,
Val
Photo by Andrew Ridley on Unsplash
I think what you said and what Mark mentioned in his course, it's the way we create new associations with certain experiences.
The way I found worked was projecting this experience into writing and being more conscious. Then, I accompanied how I feel negative towards an event with how I felt positive in the past that is similar in concept. It helped to regulate my emotions and lowered the intensity of that association.
I became more self-aware and my reactions became more conscious. So, I put those emotions on the back burner so when I can, I go back and analyze it. I turned that emotional experience as a learning foundation.
Even better, my wife and I have regular reflection with one another so we can exchange perspectives and uses our recent experiences (usually recent movies or shows) and reference them in our talks. It's a pretty awesome and rare system to have in a relationship.
I'm building an app for it where you'll eventually include turning your emotions to some kind of Pokemon mechanics and storytelling. Hopefully my thoughts was any helpful :)
I'd be happy for you to check it out and maybe teach you how to use it. Here's the link if you're curious: https://www.selfrell.com/
So quality and frequency of data is a challenge, it seems. Tracking moods can raise awareness, which can be beneficial. Incomplete or inconsistent tracking makes it hard to draw meaningful conclusions from the data.