Overview

A mood diary is designed to help you trace and monitor your feelings - and if you stick to it and use it regularly, you can begin to get a deeper understanding of yourself. This may not feel good at first, but the benefit is that after a few weeks you become more aware of your feelings and the things that upset you - one of the first steps in improving your mental health.

Daily use

When you notice a shift in your mood or maybe at a certain time of the day, post a mood update in the app, logging how you feel (such as changing from neutral to sad) and rate it from 0-10 in terms of how happy you feel. Think about external circumstances that may be involved (what you were doing, where etc), and the internal feelings (what you were thinking about, daydreaming or remembering), and add these as the reasons for your mood.

Outcomes you can work towards

Try to review the mood diary each day - see what patterns you begin to notice. If this routine helps you understand your feelings and listen to them you've already made great strides in improving your mental health.

MoodPanda goes beyond most Mood Diaries, as it provides graphical analysis of your posts over time, helping to find and identify patterns and to help you focus on what matters.

MoodPanda is also a loving community of people who can comment on your posts, if you let them, in order to support you

Tips:

• Be honest. While it may be tempting to gloss over negative feelings and only record the positive ones, it is important to be as honest with yourself as possible.
• Track happy moods as well as bad moods. Sometimes it's easier to remember to track your moods when you're feeling low and ignore your mood tracker when you’re feeling better. But it’s important to get an overall look at your mood patterns, both good and bad. So make a conscious effort to track moods at different times so you fully capture your entire range of moods.
• Check at regular intervals. One way to ensure you’re capturing mood patterns is to make a note of your mood at regular periods of time throughout the day. For example, you might record your moods in the morning, mid-day, and evening. This can be useful for seeing how your feelings fluctuate over time. If multiple updates per day are too much, a simple daily check-in might be more useful.