Jane Eyre wasn’t just strong-willed — she also had a deep love for diaries. Whenever the going got tough, she’d tap into her feelings and emotions and pour them onto the pages. And that’s something we can all take inspiration from.
Whether you’re looking to overcome emotional numbness or learn to manage anger outbursts (or are simply looking for a safe space for self-reflection), having a diary might help. How exactly? Let’s find out.
What is a mood diary?
A mood diary is a digital or a good old pen-and-paper diary that one can use to track and analyze their mood patterns. Mood diaries often come as a basic part of digital tools for mental health, women’s health, apps for meditation, and more.
Pen-and-paper diaries are great as you don’t need a charger or an Internet connection to jot down things that make you happy or, on the contrary, mad. Meanwhile, digital mood diaries or mood trackers like liven.com are beneficial for your mental health as they generate emotion statistics and offer tips on how to manage a particular emotion. Some also offer exercises to help you with the latter.
Here is what you also can do with Liven:
- Get a personalized program on your mental health aspects that require a bit of work after going through a science-backed questionnaire;
- Engage in short courses on anxiety, depression, procrastination, and more;
- Add tasks depending on what you want to accomplish (whether it’s dealing with chores or expanding your dopamine menu ideas or other things like setting a morning routine, self-care time, and improving sleep — yes, Liven helps with all these things!)
- Talk to an AI assistant about your feelings.
Plus, you can go through mental health self-assessment. Sure, the DASS-21 tests that Liven offers don’t replace professional medical help. Still, they help you assess your state of mind and identify the warning signs on time.
#1: Find out your emotional patterns
Now that’s the most obvious thing that a mood diary does. You open the notebook, take a pen, and jot down the feeling. Or tap on your phone screen, open the app, and log in your emotions. Sounds easy, right?
Here is how a mood diary helps in understanding your emotions better:
- You can track your mood anytime and identify the feelings that cause the mood and factors related to them. You can even describe the entire situation in some apps instead of choosing pre-set options;
- Get mood statistics. A digital mood diary helps you see the prevailing emotion over a specific time period and what causes it. Perhaps, you’ve never liked crowded places, and each time you find yourself in a packed room, your anxiety spikes — the mood diary helps you discover the pattern;
- You can easily identify the triggers for each emotion. Simply put, you always know what causes a specific feeling and when.
#2: Assess stress, burnout, anxiety, and depression
It’s okay to feel blue once in a while, but if the feeling persists, then it might be a sign of something way more complicated like burnout or depression. Something that might require your undivided attention right at the moment.
Let’s say your mood diary shows that you’ve been experiencing anger twice more often than usual. All these times, you’ve been angry while at work. What does this information tell you? Well, perhaps, you’ve been working a lot, and your anger is trying to tell you it’s time to rest. Or perhaps your new colleague has been crossing your boundaries, and your anger is a sign that it’s time to reinforce them.
#3: Improve your self-awareness and self-regulation skills
Self-awareness is when you can register an emotion, let yourself feel it, and in the end, conclude why you’ve had that emotion in the first place. If suppressing emotions has been your coping mechanism for years, then you might not even feel the emotion in the moment, let alone name it.
In this case, a mood diary might be a reminder to ask yourself, ‘What am I feeling right now?’ Or, if you’ve been in therapy for some time, a mood diary will be a great add-on to your self-reflection practice.
Meanwhile, self-regulation is when you can calm yourself down. It’s when you can register and redirect particularly complex and overwhelming thoughts and feelings like disappointment, anger, etc.
#4: Develop coping strategies and resilience
A mood diary helps you identify your triggers and work on them. For instance, you might realize that crowded spaces in public transport trigger the feeling of anxiety. Next time you find yourself stuck in a packed bus or train and register your heart racing, you can apply a few grounding techniques that work, even if it’s simply listening to soothing lo-fi music.
And it also helps you become more emotionally resilient. Let’s say your diary shows you that work presentations leave you drained and anxious. Congrats! Now you know the pattern. Next time, you can prepare in advance: practice your speech, use relaxation techniques, or simply set realistic expectations for yourself.
#5: Improve your relationships with others
When you know what a particular emotion feels like and what causes it, you can communicate your feelings more clearly and set healthy boundaries.
A mood diary helps you recognize recurring emotional patterns in your interactions. Perhaps you dread conversations with a certain colleague or find some of your friends’ comments offensive. Once you identify the triggers, you can approach these situations with more awareness and find effective ways to address them.
Final thoughts
A mood diary isn’t a magic wand that solves your problems with a single wave. However, it’s a great tool for self-discovery and growth. It helps you track your emotions, identify patterns and triggers, and also learn to manage them with time.
Whether you prefer a traditional journal or a digital tracker like Liven, the key is consistency. Who knows? Perhaps, in a few months, you’ll just realize how far you’ve come and how many amazing things you’ve learnt about yourself.
You’ve got it!
