About Mood Journaling

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There are many positive benefits to keeping a mood journal including:

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- To explore your emotions. Suppressing your emotions has been shown to be a cause of depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem. ​A 2013 study showed that journaling can have a positive effect on symptoms of depression.

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- To become aware of what your mood is at a given moment. So often we operate on autopilot, that we're not aware of our thoughts and feelings. We're just reacting sometimes with negative consequences. Checking in with yourself can help you gain this awareness, which has been shown to be helpful in improving mood.

           

- To look back in time at your mood to gain insights into events that may have affected your mood or periods of time like a specific day of the week in which your mood is consistently up or down.

 

- To understand the relationship between your mood and activities that may affect it like sleep and exercise, and practices like gratitude and mindfulness. For example, does keeping a gratitude journal or going to bed early improve your mood?

 

- Finally, if you're working with a therapist, you can share with them your mood data that occurs between appointments. Such data can help them help you.

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There are several ways to utilize mood journaling in Moodfit.

 

Recording Your Mood

When you make a mood journal entry you first select your current mood. Then you're able to provide comments on what you're thinking, doing and feeling.​

 

One useful piece of the Mood tool is the ability to create and use custom shortcuts for your entries. Moodfit comes with built in shortcuts like, "I'm thinking", "I'm doing", "angry" and "excited." You can create your own shortcuts to be literally anything, e.g. "Spent time with John" or "Ate chocolate ice cream." These are great to make it easy to enter items that occur frequently for you.

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You can also share your mood entries via SMS or email to let others know how you're doing.

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History of Your Entries​

One way to analyze your mood is to go to the History screen and search for your Mood entries. There you can search for particular keywords, e.g. "anxious" or "work stress."

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You can also share your history of mood entries via SMS or email, and you can save them to a CSV file.

           

Insights

Another way to analyze your mood in Moodfit is using the Insights screen. Here you get a visual representation of your mood. You can look at trends, the distribution of entries by value, your mood by day of week, and also by time of day.

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One interesting thing you can do is to click on a mood entry in a chart and see any comments associated with that entry. It's a great way to search for patterns.

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Finally, if you want to get a little fancy you can see a chart of your mood compared to another variable, e.g. sleep or the practice of gratitude.

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All of your charts can be shared by SMS and email.