Have your moods rapidly changed, or you felt such emotion but had a hard time describing what feeling you experienced? Do you want to describe your emotions to yourself but have no idea where to start?
Understanding our emotions and changes in our feelings is many times a tough nut to crack. On the other side, trying to understand our emotions is the first step towards managing them. A great way to make progress on how to know your feelings better is by tracking them. In this blog, we will give you an idea of how to set up your moods and what are the best practices of emotion tracking.
For the beginning, the simpler, the easier. If you decide to make it complicated from the scratch, you can feel overwhelmed very quickly. Many factors affect our feelings and influence our well-being. Identifying emotions can be complicated and often an enormous challenge that can make many people confused. However, there is no reason to be unsure or hesitant to start working on it.
Recognizing moods that are caused by our triggers gives us control of our mental well-being and helps us to understand that we’re not going to feel like this forever. By tracking your moods, you can better comprehend, what makes you feel great or what takes your energy away from you. Let’s have a look at some popular options which can bring to you more light on the topic.
Grouping emotions into a 5-point moods scale is an optimal way to go. This scale works based on positivity and negativity levels. In other words, from feeling great to feeling awful. Even though emotions offer a wide variety of feelings, the 5-point scale can represent them all or at least the vast majority. By tracking your moods this way you can monitor all of your emotions and also have an overview that helps you to keep potential emotional chaos in order.
For people who may want more options, there is a possibility of adding an alternative sub emotion to each of the five moods. By doing so, you can have a 10-point mood scale.
In case you think there are still not enough moods, you can scale up each of the five moods by high energy and low energy emoji. This way provides you with analyzing your level of energy in detail.
If you struggle with picking emotions that should be on your mood scale, you can have a look at the Emotion Wheel, created by Robert Plutchik. To explain the Emotion Wheel in plain English, it can serve you as a template for creating your scale. The emotion wheel describes eight basic emotions which help you to identify your emotions and become more self-aware and self-compassionate.
Honesty is the key to being true to your emotions and yourself. Do not be afraid of having your feelings diverse. To use the whole mood scale, choose your benchmark for each of the moods. For example, if you feel great that you worked out or went for a coffee with your friend, feel free to mark your mood as the most positive instead of just using the usual positive one.
Avoid being in the situation when you keep a narrow range of feelings, that consist of few moods. It can deprive you of the fortune of becoming more self-aware.
After I decided to pay attention to my emotions and their causes, I have felt much more self-confident and self-aware.
The biggest breakpoint that happened on my journey was when I started to use Daylio. It provides great possibilities for mood customization and editing emojis. Moreover, you can find there a super useful mood scale template with space for notes and adding pictures. Daylio has helped me to understand my emotions more and has given me a lot of insights into my feelings and behavior and it can do the same for you.
It's free so why don’t you give it a shot. Download and Start Using Daylio Today!
