One of the pages within my bullet journal is a mood tracker. I know you can go through many moods in a day, but I take my average feeling of the day and mark it down.

For 2018, I had seven color-coded categories: great, good, okay, bad, sad, angry, and sick days. I used this tracker with my special memories pages to show that I had a lot of good things and days in life, even when I didn't feel like it. Looking back at the completed chart, I wanted to analyze to overall results and see what I learned.

I originally got this creative idea from Pinterest. There are many variations, but this is the one I chose:

My "A Year In Pixels" Chart Isabelle Bartolomeo

The Calculations

For all you nerds, including myself, I did the numbers and broke it down to see how much of my year I declared "great" and so on within my graph in percents. I also found the longest streak I had of good/great days. This is what I got:

Great: 6.8% Bad: 6.6%

Good: 38.4% Sad: 3%

Okay: 37.4% Angry: 1.9%

Sick: 5.5% Longest Good/Great Day Streak: 11

The majority of my year was either good or okay, with the next highest percentage being great. I'm pretty happy that those were my top three moods of the year, though it was pretty close with the rest. When filling out this graph, I'd see a lot of yellow squares representing okay days and realize I need to appreciate what's happening around me more. This was a good reflection tool in the short and long run.

At the end of the day, regardless of how I was feeling at that moment, I'd have to look back on the day and take it all in again. Because it wasn't just about how I was feeling at the moment, but overall. It made me appreciate my friends and family more, and the little things that made me smile.

I see that in the bigger picture now. You don't know how a small gesture could turn someone else's day around. I'm a pessimist, and you can probably see that from the number of yellow squares, but what surprised me was the amount of green. I tend to look at the negatives in life, and this project made me look at the positives too.

I revised my mood tracker for 2019 to only have six categories, getting rid of the angry day and making the dark blue sad and depressed feelings. I deal with depression, and when those days come, I didn't have an adequate way of showing my mood on my chart. There are other factors that can affect your mood too, like periods. That's why I also looked at my mood tracker next to my period tracker.

Relating to my period...

Overall I can see where some of the angry days came in to play, but my period did not affect my mood for the entire day when I was on it. I do get overemotional when on my period, but I can't seem to find a pattern like I was hoping to. It's wonderful: I still had good days and great days even when I was feeling my worst, and let me tell you, cramps are one pain in the butt. Girls, don't let that stop you from doing this for your sake. It might help you find out things you didn't know about yourself.

In conclusion:

I think this is a good way for everyone to reflect on their day and notice how they feel the majority of the time. You may notice that you feel the lowest in specific months or time periods, which can help you prepare for that. It's also such an interesting thing to look back on. You can be creative and make it your own too. I can't wait to see my improvement in this year's graph.