Mood calendar

We track pretty much everything in life nowadays. Our meetings, friend’s birthdays, reminders, our steps and even the weather. But we often forget one of the most important measurements of all, our mood.

And why is that important, you may ask? You know how you’re feeling already, why do you have to track it as well? And the answer is, you might know how you feel at a certain exact moment, but the chances are that you’ll promptly forget about it the next day, or at least not remember it properly.

Our memory is very faulted. And there are a lot of bias that play a part when we try to recollect a point in time. One mechanism that our brain normally does is to condense everything that is ordinary into one layer, and remember more vividly the events that sticked out. For example, if you and your partner have a big fight every once in a while, but most of the time you have a very please, but uneventful routine, you’re more likely to think your relationship is not as good. The opposite is also true, maybe you’re constantly arguing non-stop all week long, but go on adventure every weekend. In this case, when you think about the relationship, you’re inclined to think it’s a good , fun one, event hough most of the time you’re driving each other crazy.

But the benefitting of tracking your mood goes way beyond measuring your relationship. It gives a very quick and visual glimpse into your mental health. Specially doing quarantine, we’ve been exposed to a lot of circumstances we have not prepared ourselves to (no physical socializing, working from home, you name it) and it’s been the new normal to have mood fluctuations. All good with that, but tracking will help you mood trends and if not help you prevent the downs, it’ll certainly help you prepare for it.

Lastly, the more you collect your mood, the more you can go back and try to spot very happy phases of your life, and help you understand what truly matters to you.

So how does it work, exactly? Just fill it out like any other open calendar (month on top and add the days on the grey box). But below each date, you add your mood. You can either color code it or, if you’re more a minimalist, or just don’t have enough colors, you can draw the faces. Either one works.

Here is the template, and you can download the vector file below.