Two Years of Mood Tracking

Two years ago – July 19, 2022 – I launched my mood tracking tool. The idea is that every day I track my mood using a scale from 0-100. Over time, these values can be graphed and used as a visual representation of my emotional state.

This is what the graph looks like after two years:

As you can see the graph starts out very high, then takes a bit of a dive but then recovers around February 2023. There is sort of a gradual incline until around August 2023 and then it generally declines, with some peaks and valleys, until now – July 2024.

• These days, I try to track my mood when I get onto the computer each morning. I do this to try to create some consistency in the data – how do I feel in the beginning of the morning? This is so that individual details of the day don’t affect my reporting but rather an overall image of my state is represented.
• Each data point is derived from key things that are happening in my life – internal and external – which affect my mood.
• When I log my mood, I try to only think about exactly how I’m feeling in that moment, as opposed to how this will affect the graph, and what kind of story this will make the graph tell.
• Sometimes I log my mood and feel like it’s wrong. Of course, logging a mood from 0 – 100 is impossible. Your mood, how you feel, is impossible to map on 2 dimensions, or on any sort of linear scale.
• From August 2022 until January 2024 I tracked my mood using a sliding scale

• In January of 2024 I changed it so I know use a script that just writes a row to my mysql db table. This is a very different way of recording the data and has an effect on the number values. I think I’m more inclined to put lower numbers when I’m looking at a terminal vs. a face. Not sure which provides a more accurate result. Maybe when I was trying to figure out my mood and I was looking at the smiley face I was entering people pleasing mode with this smiley face that I created.

• I’m really excited about continuing to develop this project.
• Because this is all stored in mysql, I can use this data in conjunction with other data like frequency of uploads, frequency of particular tags, etc. In order to deliver insights into my emotional state, and find potential trends, as seen in my archives. For example: 2024
• This tool has resulted in people feeling some type of way. For example – while dating, I might go on a date and have a really nice time but then wake up depressed because of ongoing genocide and this will affect my mood. Then when I log my mood, the person I went on the date with sees the score and doesn’t think it’s high enough based on the date we had and says “wtf”
• These are the 10 longest gaps of time that I’ve gone without tracking my mood. For example – I didn’t log my mood from 3/13 – 3/24 because the website that I was using to track this was an old rails website that got completely bogged down by web crawlers and I wasn’t able to access the site. This was also during a dark period of time.

• The times that I stop tracking my mood are often when I’m going through hard times. Maybe I subconsciously don’t want to report to myself or the world that I’m going through it when I am.

Two years in, I’m proud of this tool and happy that I’ve been able to stay generally consistent with tracking my mood. I’m excited to continue to use this data to reveal insights about myself and act as a public (and private) diary.