I've done mood tracking in the past, but only for a few weeks or months at a time when things were particularly bad. In mid-2020 I finally succeeded in making it a daily habit and have kept up on it since then. So 2021 is the first full year for which I have detailed daily mood data. The tracker app I use doesn't go into quite as much detail as I wanted, so I exported the numbers to CSV and made some charts in Excel.
Tracking can be really helpful for mood disorders. You can measure the effects of interventions to see what's worthwhile. Also, depression can cause memory impairment, so daily logging gives more reliable data than, say, a weekly or bi-weekly recap.
The following charts are based on my 01/01/2021-12/31/2021 data. Mood ranges from 1 to 5 (bad to good). First, Average Mood by Week Number and Average Mood by Month, both with linear and polynomial trendlines.
One pattern I can see here is that my average mood improved substantially when I began working from home in early July.
Work has a big influence on this next chart too—Average Mood by Day of Week:
I imagine those Day-of-Week numbers are a common pattern for folks that work Monday-Friday; gradual rise up to Friday and then much higher on the weekend.
This last one, Average Mood by Day of Month, is probably more specific to me. A lot of the work I do is very cyclical with a heavy load at the beginning of the month that usually starts to lessen around the 9th or 10th, then pretty steady till "crunch time" around the 25th or 26th. (Edit: The red dashed line is a 3-day moving average.)
There's also extra work following the end of each quarter. I don't think I have enough data for that effect to be discernible yet, but maybe in a couple more years. I'm also interested to see how these numbers might be affected by weather or temperature.
