Journaling for mental wellness is a great way to be mindful and get in touch with your emotions. If you are working to manage depression or another mood disorder, it can be very beneficial to keep a mood journal.
What is a mood journal?
Anything you can use to track your moods and jot down your feelings. For some people, they prefer a classic paper journal and a handful of colorful pens. This type of mood journaling usually involves creating a color-coded system with different colors for different emotions. You would then color in a box for every day of the month with the color corresponding to how you felt that day. Other find online platforms like MoodPanda are also useful for tracking moods. However you decide to track your moods, all that matters is that your method works the best for you!
How can a mood journal be beneficial?
Tracking your moods day to day can be a great way to also keep track of warnings and triggers. By having a record of your moods, you can more easily tell when your depression begins to get worse. This way, you can be more proactive about managing it. It can also help you track triggers by identifying what kinds of things make your mood better or worse. As a general wellness strategy, mood journals are a great way to help understand what mindsets and strategies improve your mood. For example, if you decide to try something new for a few weeks and look back on that time to see that your moods weren’t very positive, you would know that the new strategy didn’t work well for you. Tracking your moods is also a great way to be an active participant. With some mental health conditions, we don’t always have control over what and how we feel. But by tracking your moods, you can take ownership of what you feel and empower yourself to understand it. Additionally, if you see a mental health professional, providing them with data can be very helpful in devising a treatment plan or developing coping strategies.
Get started with these free mood tracking printables!
Click each image to download a PDF for printing.
