Mood tracking guides

Practical mood tracking — baselines, patterns, and what makes a chart useful.

• Baseline mood in bipolar disorder: how to find yours

  Your baseline mood is what your bipolar tracking data looks like when no episode is active. A simple 3-step method to find yours, and why it changes.

  3 min

• Bipolar mood diary: what to write each day

  A bipolar mood diary works when each entry is short and specific. What to record daily, good vs vague examples, paper vs app, and a weekly review habit.

  7 min

• Reading your mood chart: patterns worth looking for

  A mood chart is only useful if you know what you are looking at. Here are the recurring patterns worth spotting and what each one usually means.

  4 min

• Mood tracker vs journal: which is right for you?

  Journaling and structured mood tracking solve different problems. Here is how to choose between them — or use them together.

  3 min

• Bipolar mood chart: free printable PDF (and what a good one needs)

  A free printable bipolar mood chart PDF — one page per month with split depression/elevation scales, sleep, and meds columns. No email required.

  4 min

• Why most mood trackers fail people with bipolar

  Generic mood diaries collapse the things bipolar disorder moves on. Here are the four design choices that miss, and what to look for instead.

  2 min

• Year in Pixels: a complete guide to the one-page mood chart

  Where the Year in Pixels format came from, why one colored square per day works so well, and how to read episode shapes in your own grid.

  4 min