Mood Charting

First of all what is mood charting? A mood chart is a (usually daily) record of your mood and things that might have affected it, like sleep, medications, etc. It can show patterns of variables that affect your moods that you might not realize otherwise. It is a good way of keeping track of new medications and their effects. It can also make your visits with a therapist or psychiatrist more efficient. If you have a once a month psychiatrist appointment you may forget about that bad weekend you had 2 weeks ago or something else important when you actually get into the office.

What types of disorders can be helped by keeping a mood chart? Mood charting is most often recommended for people with depression or bipolar disorder. However, I believe that anyone with some type of mental illness should be keeping some kind of daily record of their condition and symptoms, especially while taking medication.
At the very least a good mood chart should track:

• Medications (Did you take them today?)
• Mood (The simplest way is to figure out a single average mood for the day. But in my experience, unless your moods cycle very slowly, you’ll have more than one mood rating at different points in the day. I prefer to mark off the the highest and lowest moods I had for the day. For example, I might write down that my mood ranged from slightly manic to moderately depressed.)
• Hours slept.
• Menstrual cycle (just for the ladies!)

Other things you might want to chart:

• Suicidal thoughts or psychotic symptoms over the course of the day.
• Feelings of anxiety or irritability.
• Level of social interaction.
• A therapy session.
• Consumption of alcohol, caffiene, or other drugs.
• A short note about significant events of the day.
• The time you went to bed and the time you woke up.
• Eating habits, for example, binging or restricting food.
• Self-injurious behavior.
• Your weight (documented about once a month.)
• Meditation or exercise.

Customize your chart. There are more things you can include and you can change your mood chart as you go along. For example, at one point I was charting the number of cigarettes I had in a day. After 2 months or so I found almost no relationship between nicotine consumption and my mood so I stopped including it in my chart.

Learn to spot problems ahead of time. Your mood chart can help you predict manic or depressive episodes in their early stages and let you know what kind of behavior will bring you back to normal. I’ve learned that when I sleep more than 8 hours a day I’m on my way to getting really depressed. If I pick up on this early enough I can change my sleep patterns and usually avoid depression.

Start charting! The most flexible form of mood charting is working from a chart you made yourself. It is likely that if you’ve never done mood charting before creating your own chart is a little overwhelming. There are a number of printable mood charts availible online. Two examples are:

• A chart found on the Massachusetts General Hospital site. I used a slightly adapted version of this chart. The site also provides instructions and examples of a completed chart.
• A chart from HealthyPlace.com.

An online mood chart that exists is MoodTracker.com. It creates all kinds of cool graphs for you.

Some tips:

• Keep a routine: Try to fill out your chart at the same time every day. In the beginning you might consider setting an alarm or writing a note to remind yourself.
• Make it easy to read: Its hard to get information quickly from rows and rows of numbers. I’ve found that by color-coding my charts I’m able to just glance over a week and figure out roughly what was going on in a couple of seconds.
• Don’t give up: Mood charting falls into the category of “self-care” which we all know can become neglected when we’re at our worst. If skip charting for days, weeks, or even months restart once you’re feeling better. Even poorly kept records are better than no records at all.