5 Years of Mood-Tracking And What Do You Get?

PLUS: A very, very exciting new book announcement!

A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day

Dear Friend,

When I downloaded the Daylio app, I thought I’d fastidiously keep a mood log for one calendar year. My goal was to gather data. I wasn’t believing my own stories about myself, which is a convoluted way of saying that I felt like maybe I was crazy. “How long have you been feeling down?” my therapist would ask, and I wouldn’t be sure. It seemed like forever. But was that true? I wanted to have a record, so that I could point to it when making statements about my emotional well-being. I imagined myself saying things like, “I was depressed for all of November, and I have the numbers to back it up.” I thought a year’s worth of data would be plenty, and then I’d have it, and I could move on.

After my first year of mood tracking, I made a long comic about it. These are the first two pages, you can read the whole thing here.

But the first year ended up being atypical. It was the year my best friend dumped me, and I felt like surely I was sadder than normal. This wouldn’t be a good baseline year because the year had been weird.

You can see where she broke up with me, in early August, where that valley starts and then extends almost all the way through September. 

Since I have now shown you this chart, I’ll stop and explain how this app works, because it’s confusing. Daylio’s default setting is to prompt you three times a day — morning, afternoon, and night — to enter a mood. You get to have as many mood names as you want (calm, anxious, happy, excited, scared, sad, lonely, etc.), but you must designate each of them on a 1-5 scale, where 1 (green) is the worst you can feel and 5 (purple) is the best you can feel. Then, you can add more data points: you can tell it what activities you’ve been doing, so it can create more detailed data sets that suggest which activities bring you the most joy. You can do other things with this app, too: you can use it to set and track goals, to keep a short diary, and to log pictures. At first, I used all the features, which is my wont. I tend to be all-in on most things I try for six weeks. After that, I get distracted. 

Now, five years later, I log just one mood every day, at the end of the day. “This day was mostly fine,” I will think, and log a 3. You can see that my average mood for the latter part of 2019, when I started using the app, was on the upper edge of middling. I was usually a little better than fine. The data on that year’s chart, though, is cobbled together from three-moods-per-day, which means that it’s more likely to tend toward the middle anyway. 

Back to my experiment. The year 2020 also didn’t seem like a good baseline year, because, you know: The Global Pandemic and worldwide quarantine of it all.

I acknowledge that I did have a fairly good pandemic year. I loved canceling plans, and I lived with one of my best friends, so I felt like I had all the social interactions I needed. The dips into sad-mood-territory are pretty much all times I had gotten my period after trying to get pregnant. On those days, I usually cried for the whole day (it is UNFAIR that you have to get terrible news on the exact day in your hormonal cycle that you are MOST VOLATILE), and logged a 1 mood. That brings the overall score down, and so there we are. 

The year 2021 also didn’t seem like a good baseline year, because in January of that year I had my appendix taken out and then immediately after that did get pregnant. You can see the near-month of straight-up misery that I had lying in a hospital bed that no one was allowed to visit (see: global pandemic). On November 5, I logged both a 5 (ecstatic) and a 1 (heartbroken). That was the day my daughter was born. I felt everything. The data has each of these extremes cancel each other out, and presents these moods as a wash — as though I felt nothing. 

I had to keep logging moods, because the baseline had not been established. In 2022, I felt the statistics were skewed once again, because it was my first year as a parent. Every day was a brand new thing. Every day, a version of my daughter died and a new version was born. There were avalanches of firsts and lasts: the first time she sat up, the last time she slept on her play mat, the first time she smiled, the last time she ate avocado (which was also the first time she ate avocado). These were extreme moments in time.

Which brings us to 2023, a year when I thought it was possible a baseline might be established. But, in fact, it was a weird year. In June, I took a job. (In the sacred month of June?! Was I out of my mind?! And in fact, I was, quite literally, out of my mind.) The job taught me that I had PTSD: Classic Variety! Like, one minute you’re in your classroom in Evanston, and the next you are in another classroom in New Orleans, ten years ago, and there’s blood on the floor because a student stabbed another student in the eye with scissors. Whole hours of the day vanished. How did I get outside? Where were my shoes? My therapist said this was all textbook, and she said she felt bad that she had been on vacation for most of June. I didn’t know I had PTSD! I was understandably alarmed! Annnnyway, you’ll see that June sucked that year. So 2023 couldn’t be the baseline. 

Which brings us to 2024, of which we are still in the midst. I hate to say it, but 2024 was also kind of weird. We got some unexpected news that has taken the whole year to wrap our minds around. I apologize for being opaque there; I’m choosing to keep this particular information private for the time being, and maybe I’ll change my mind later. Like with the PTSD thing. I couldn’t write about it at the time. I’ve learned as a writer that I am most likely to experience regret if I publish work about something big while I am still inside of the big thing. Another thing I’ve learned: after the big thing seems like it’s over, there are usually several months where I’m still inside it. 

You might have figured this out before I did but here’s the twist: there is no such thing as a baseline year. Certainly there are patterns that we experience year-to-year. My mood is generally worse when daylight is decreasing and demands on my time are increasing. September and October tend to be challenging months. June is, truly, sacred; so is January. These are the two months where I can work on my writing every day because school is not in session. May is stressful, but lots of fun. The mood logs reflect a few of these patterns, but the main parallel I can draw among all the years is that there isn’t one. 

The yearly mood logs look like maps of a heartbeat, rhythmically thrumming up and down, predictably changing, never steadying for too long. And if I’m looking for a lesson, there it is: nothing stays the same for too long. This can be equally hard to believe when I’m going through an epic sad streak as it is to believe when I’m going through a particularly happy one. In these times, I wonder how the feeling could possibly change. How will I ever feel good again? How can I be sure of anything? Or: I think I have my life together now, and it’s smooth sailing. I won’t let myself fall off the edge. Goodbye, cry-snot on the bathroom floor! Inevitably, it’s days, not weeks, before things feel different. Even in long sad seasons, like when my friend broke up with me, there are days that feel bright and hopeful, lending their chirpy staccatos to the seemingly un-breaking gloom. 

Maybe it seems like it would be nice for things to stay the same for longer; for days to be more predictable; to be able to show up to your life, at least some of the time, with a script. But life is supposed to have texture. Whatever thing you’re feeling now isn’t long for this world. Whether it’s grief or joy: treasure it. Someday you won’t remember how this feels. It will be like a story that someone else is telling.

Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.

Love,

Sophie

Housekeeping

• We are building something. A mighty few paid subscribers have been creating a YADAGEJ community for years now, and I think it’s one of the most valuable places on the internet. But don’t take my word for it — try it on for free for a month. (I’ve never done this before. It’s an experiment.) Just click this link to get a 30 day paid subscription for free. Find out if this community might be of value to you, too. Paid subscribers get:

  • 7 extra “things” in my 10 things emails

  • access to a vibrant gentleness community with weekly check-ins

  • a book club

  • a music league

  • occasional bonus emails and PDFs

• Sammi and I have a cartoon in this week’s New Yorker. This is another sort of old one — you can tell because I used to use solid black fill for my designs and have moved into something sketchier over the past few years. Sammi wrote this particular joke and boy does it ever resonate.

• Huge news! I’ve been teasing a second book that I’m working on, and Publisher’s Marketplace announced it last week! I’m illustrating a book for Hannah Shaw — the cat rescuer known internet-wide as Kitten Lady. I’ve never drawn so many cats, and look forward to being able to show you some of the outtakes.

Loose Thoughts:

• OK, I know this is a no-brainer but I sat down in my office just now to finish this newsletter and immediately got a bunch of mosquito bites THROUGH MY SOCKS, in this room which strikes me as being BASICALLY FREEZING. Like, I sat down in here and ordered hand-warmers because I can’t type when my fingers are this cold. THIS. CANNOT. BE. ALLOWED. You can’t both BE A MOSQUITO and live somewhere cold. IMO, the only acceptable thing about the fall / winter is that there are no mosquitos. That’s it. This period of time where there is some overlap is a thing I simply cannot abide. And yet, I must.

• Also, I really do feel like the foot is the worst mosquito bite location.

• Alright, I’ve gone to get the Thermacell to put it under my desk so I don’t panic about this anymore. It’s truly all I can think about.

• There are mosquitoes all over my fly paper, by the way. Like, for some reason, this room bred mosquitoes. I don’t have ANY standing water in here, I SWEAR.

• OK, after I sprayed my feet with the Picaridin, at least one mosquito moved out from under my desk and flew in front of my lamp, which allowed me to kill her by clapping her.

• My daughter sees me doing this with mosquitoes — clapping them — and she imitates it sometimes when she sees something flying around inside. She obviously never catches anything, but she’ll look in her hands as though she DID catch something and say “Phewf!” I have been trying to teach her that “Phewf” is a real word, and indeed, the only word you say when you’re relieved (

  Henley Cox
  , are you reading this?) as an ode to Too Scary Didn’t Watch. A daughter as an ode.

• Please sound off in the comments with your favorite soups, since the season is upon us. I love a simple red lentil with lemon, but I want to diversify.