Mood Tracking for 365 Days
I recently hit a goal of mine: to track my mood every day for a year. I’ve written about my experiences tracking my mood with apps and a DBT Diary Card, and I’ve been waiting to write this piece about what a year’s worth of data reveals about my mind and my behaviors. So, let’s dive into the data!
November 24, 2019 - November 24, 2020
November 2019
Notice the long, horizontal line? That was during my stay at Emory Wesley Woods Psychiatric Hospital. They didn’t let me have my phone, so my tracking goal got sidetracked until I was released and properly connected to the world like a good Millennial.
I’ll attribute the slight uptick in mood to the regular ECT sessions. It was too soon for things to be working, but Propofol is one hell of a drug and I enjoyed the regular rides into unconsciousness.
December 2019
A rather stable month due to stable living conditions. I was in a group home for almost the entire month while attending therapy sessions at Skyland Trail. Eating healthy meals, learning new self-therapy techniques, and connecting with fellow clients was a recipe for a generally good mood.
The downward trend at the end of the month I’ll attribute to Christmas and New Years. Nothing like holidays to remind you how far you’ve fallen in life compared to where you perceived you once were. Healthy mindset? No. Understandable? Yes.
January 2020
Whoa! Very unstable, and a dip into sad territory. What happened? I moved out of the group home, stayed at my parent’s for a week, and then moved into the apartment that I had leased back in October. Left unsupervised I did what you’d expect. Lots of junk food and Netflix.
It was a rough transition, but Skyland gave me a good amount of stability and things evened off for the remainder of the month. I was on a steady schedule of early rising, commute to campus, therapy, and returning home or visiting my parents.
February 2020
A mostly stable month, with a few dips and one significant depression. Those point to the days I realized I was going to graduate Skyland Trail, and re-enter the forbidding “real world.” I was worried about returning to work, my co-worker’s opinion of me, whether I’d be able to still do the work.
On top of those concerns, I was deeply anxious about leaving the security of Skyland Trail. It’s a way-station, not a destination. I was fast approaching the time when I’d lose the regular support of group therapy sessions and lunches with friends who were open about fighting their own battles.
March 2020
This is… not good. For you readers, any time my mood tracker dips into the orange, sad range my alarm bells go off, and I need to take corrective action. Repeated trips into that range almost always signify the onset of a severe depression.
Fortunately, I had a lot of skills that I could draw from and the support of my family and friends. That said, I was commuting back to my office and trying to fit back into a work culture that I hadn’t been in for almost six months. Considering I had only been at the company for six months prior to my hospitalization, I felt incredibly out of place despite all of my co-workers and my supervisor being incredibly gracious and caring.
April 2020
Like March, April started off rocky, yet my mood rose and stayed reasonably stable for the remainder of the month. COVID had already hit, I was working remote, and stuck in my apartment, so what gives?
I gave my notice and left my job. Wise to do in the middle of a pandemic? Probably not, but I had spent the past four months getting my brain to the healthiest point it had ever been, and I couldn’t justify sacrificing that mental peace for a paycheck of any amount.
May 2020
Aside from one dip, May was a really stable month. I even started approaching the ecstatic/rad, dark blue section! I was reading a ton, gaming plenty, and watching every episode of Lucifer. Aside from not having a paycheck, and what felt like the impending doom of the human race, I generally felt good.
Sadly, that was not going to last.
June 2020
You’ll notice this is the first instance where my mood dipped to the lowest level since before my November hospitalization. What happened?
Nothing, really. I was still at home. Looking for work, overeating and sleeping till noon. The novelty of the entire situation had worn off, and the reality that I had no income set in hard. The plus of this graph is that I bounded out of that hole within a week, and had fairly robust returns to an average/neutral mood for the rest of the month. Credit my family for supporting me through this rough patch of the summer.
July 2020
Woohoo! A stable month! Two days in the “rad” range! These are really positive signs, and, once again, nothing really changed. I was still at home, still overeating, still sleeping till noon, but I had a new goal — attend lineman school!
The summer was hard, and it gave me an opportunity to think about what I wanted to do career-wise. Office work was out of the question. I needed work that was similar to refereeing. Outside, small crews, and measurable progress. After consulting with several mentors in the industry, I put down a deposit at the ELITE Lineman Training Institute, and finally had something in the future I was excited about.
August 2020
A generally stable month with a few dips close to each other. Much of that was anxiety around my apartment. I had to decide if I was going to stick with my lease through March, or pay the additional rent and be out by September. I was going to be paying the money either way, but money was tight and I was already up to my eyeballs in medical debt.
Ultimately, I decided to move out sooner and shuttle a bunch of furniture over to my parents’ place. Once that decision had been made, my mood stabilized.
September 2020
Started off low because I was back at home. I love my parents and I love my childhood home, but damn if I’m not programmed by American society to see living with my parents as yet another identifier of a failed adult life. Still, I got over that noxious concept because it’s absurd, and my family supports one another.
The other dip was the week before I was scheduled to start lineman school. I was nervous, sleeping terribly, and worried that I wouldn’t fit in with a group of seventeen strangers. Perfectly understandable thought process, and I was glad that those feelings were short-lived.
October 2020
The most stable month of 2020! Also had repeated trips into the “rad” range of positive moods! What made this month so freaking excellent?
Friends, learning, and lots of exercise.
I bonded with the five guys I was sharing a house with in Rock Springs, GA, and connected deeply with the other guys attending school during the day. We were outside 80% of the day, working hard, and developing new skills. Easily some of the most fun I’ve had that wasn’t related to being on a lacrosse field.
November 2020
Now we come to the end of a year’s worth of daily mood tracking, and it’s again another stable month. A bit more fluctuation that October, but I count any continued stay above the average/neutral range to be a win for me. I’m guessing that the fluctuations were due to my body feeling the burden of all the manual labor. I’ve been smart about recuperating, but every couple of days I go to sleep too late and I pay for that decision in the morning.
The only significant dip was due to a panic attack. I expected far more panic attacks while at school (new environments, new people), but it took until the ninth week for one to hit. It just so happened that that was a morning where I didn’t sleep well the night before, drank a bunch of coffee, slammed back a 5-Hour Energy, and ate an entire Hershey bar with almonds. The caffeine and sugar spike screwed me, and I paid for those choices. Fortunately, an hour’s worth of deep-breathing exercises and guided meditations got me back into an okay mood, and I was able to go out and finish the day’s work with my crew.
What have I learned after a year of being intentional about recording my moods? A couple of things:
Mood is not static.
It is not realistic to expect to be happy or sad all of the time.
Clear data shows trends, and those trends can identify behaviors I can change or life situations I can mitigate.
If you’d like to track your mood like I do, here are the apps I have experience with: