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

A bipolar mood chart is a one-page grid. Each day gets one row, with a column each for depression, elevation, anxiety, sleep, and meds. Fill it in each evening, and "how have you been?" at your next visit becomes a question you can answer. Here is ours — free, one page, no email required.

Why the chart has these columns

Most printable mood charts get the first three right and skip the fourth. Each column earns its place:

1. One row per day. A month fits on a page. Weekly rows hide too much; hourly rows never survive a busy week.
2. Depression and elevation as separate scales. A single "mood out of 10" cannot hold both poles — a mixed week averages out to a misleading "fine." Each pole gets its own 0–3 column: 0 none, 1 mild, 2 moderate, 3 severe. Anxiety gets a third column because it moves independently of both.
3. A sleep column. Rough hours are enough. Sleep disruption is one of the most consistent early signals in bipolar disorder2008, and a mood chart without a sleep column cannot show the connection.
4. A meds column. A simple Y or N — taken as prescribed, or not. Weeks later, this column is often the one your clinician looks at first.

There is also a small design detail worth knowing: every seventh row has a heavier line. When you review a filled month, week boundaries are where patterns live — a stretch of short sleep in one week, a mood shift in the next. The guide to reading your mood chart covers what those patterns look like.

How to use it

Thirty seconds a day is the entire commitment.

• Fill one row each evening, at roughly the same time. Before bed works because sleep from the night before is still easy to recall.
• Rate the day as a whole, not the worst moment. If you genuinely cannot pick, note both in the margin.
• Keep notes to a few words. "Argument at work" or "started new dose" is plenty. The grid is the record; the essay kills the habit.
• Start a fresh page on the first of the month and bring the filled ones to your appointments.

No printer? Any notebook works

The PDF is a convenience, not a requirement. Rule six columns and thirty-one rows on any page and you have the same chart:

Date	Depr (0–3)	Elev (0–3)	Anx (0–3)	Sleep (hrs)	Meds (Y/N)	Notes
1
2
...

Paper genuinely wins in some situations: a nightstand notebook when the phone stays out of the bedroom, a clinic that hands out charts and expects them back, hospital stays, or simply a habit that holds better in ink.

Where paper breaks down

Be honest with yourself about the limits, because they arrive quickly.

Correlations are on you. The whole point of logging sleep next to mood is spotting how they move together. On paper, that means eyeballing columns across pages — a month of low-sleep days preceding a rough week is easy to miss when March is on a different sheet than February.

There is no backfill. Miss four days and those rows stay blank forever. An app that pulls sleep from your phone's health data can fill the gap; the notebook cannot.

Sharing means photocopying. One chart exists in one place. If your psychiatrist and your therapist both want it, or you simply lose the notebook, the record is gone or forked.

The app-native alternative

If the reason you wanted a printable was the output — something clean to hand your clinician — consider logging in the app and printing the report instead. MoodSync's visit prep view generates a clinician PDF from your logged entries: mood, sleep, and meds on one timeline, formatted for the person reading it. CSV export of the raw data is free for everyone, so the numbers are never locked in.

A reasonable setup: log in the app daily, print the report before each visit, and keep the paper chart for the contexts where paper genuinely wins. Whichever medium you choose, the guide to preparing for a psychiatry appointment covers what to do with the chart once it is full — because a filled chart, on any material, is the thing that makes the visit better.