Health and wellness
Mood Tracker & Journals
A month-at-a-glance mood tracker, a gratitude journal that asks for specifics, a reflection page, an anxiety log and an affirmations sheet you write yourself. Blank pages, kept by you, interpreting nothing.
Four steps
How to use a printable wellness journal
- 1
Pick the sheet
Mood, gratitude, reflection, anxiety or affirmations.
- 2
Write your own key first
On the mood tracker, decide what a mark means before you start.
- 3
Be specific
On the gratitude page, name the coffee rather than the family.
- 4
Fill it in the same day
What you expected is not recoverable afterwards.
- 5
Take it with you
A written record is useful at an appointment, if you have one.
What these are, and what they are not
They are blank pages. They record; they do not assess. Nothing here diagnoses anything, nothing scores you, and no sheet tells you what your answers mean, because none of that can be done by a piece of paper.
What they are good for is noticing patterns you cannot see from inside a week, and having something written to take to an appointment. If things are difficult, please speak to a doctor or a qualified professional.
Write the key yourself
The mood tracker deliberately arrives without a key. A supplied one decides in advance what is being measured, and that choice is most of what makes the month worth looking at afterwards. Energy, anxiety, sleep, how much you spoke to anyone: they produce very different pictures of the same thirty-one days.
Specific beats general
On the gratitude page, the coffee on the way to the station does something that my family does not. The first is a memory and can be returned to; the second is a category, and a list of categories reads the same every day until the practice stops.
Expected against actual
The last column of the anxiety log is the one worth the effort. Writing down what you expected to happen, and then what did, produces a comparison that is nearly impossible to reconstruct later: once an event has passed, the expectation quietly disappears and is replaced by what occurred. Over a few weeks that column is usually the most informative thing on the page.
The forms on this page
- Gratitude journal. Specific beats general by a distance. "The coffee on the way to the station" does something that "my family" does not, because it is a memory rather than a category.
- Reflection page. Four questions rather than a blank page. A blank page is where journalling stops for most people; a question is answerable on a bad evening.
- Mood tracker. A month seen at once shows shape that a daily note cannot: a bad fortnight looks different from a bad day, and only one of those is visible from inside it.
- Anxiety log. The last column is the point of the sheet: what you expected against what occurred. Over a few weeks the gap between those two is usually the most informative thing on the page.
- Affirmations. Written in your own words rather than supplied. A sentence somebody else wrote is easy to read past; one you wrote about your own week is harder to ignore.
Related printables
The habit tracker covers daily marking more generally, workout logs and food journals cover the physical side, and the planner holds the week these sit inside.
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