Last Monday, I decided to do a fun little experiment and track my mood for an entire week. For as long as I can remember, I’ve kept a journal as a way of making sense of my emotions and trying to understand them. I’d write pages and pages of prose, full of grand detail — and yes, a bit of dramatic detail during those teen years. But the idea of stripping it all away — all the excess words and descriptions and dramatic teenage-angst monologues — in favor of something more succinct was intriguing, so when I discovered MoodHacker, that little metaphorical light bulb went off over my head. Ah! I was in. That’s my rating, above, on the first day…

…and here are some of my activities I checked off during the week. I really liked how you could check off what you did each day, and those activities would be factor into your overall mood chart…

…my mood chart looked like this by the end of the week. It’s pretty much what I expected, and the rational scientist in me loves seeing a sort of mathematical representation of something as abstract as my emotions and feelings. It makes everything feel a bit more manageable.

So, friends, did you track your mood for the past week? What were your results like? Were they what you expected? Why or why not? Will you keep tracking your mood in the future? I just might keep mine going… xoxo

During my battle with depression a couple years ago, my therapist extolled the benefits of keeping a mood journal. Every day, you should write down how you’re feeling and rate your mood on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “I feel so depressed that I can’t even get out of bed” to 10 being “I feel great; what’s depression again?” In a time when it was hard to even understand my emotions from one day to the next, putting a number to my feelings really helped to put things in focus.

If only I’d known about MoodHacker back then. The free site lets you track your mood and offers mood-boosting tips and techniques. You can also see daily, weekly and monthly summaries to get the big picture. I thought it would be fun to track my mood over the course of a week. Want to join me? Here’s what I’m thinking: Simply sign up to get started tracking your mood. Then come back every day to rate your mood. I’ll be sharing my results next Monday, but for now, here’s how my day #1 is shaping up…

What do you think, friends? Are you game? This should be quite interesting… xoxo