Why Rate Your Mood, Energy, and Stress Every Day?

When you look back on a week, your memory of how you felt is shaped by the last few days, the most intense moments, and how you feel now. A quick rating made at the time avoids most of that. Rated daily on a simple scale, mood, energy, and stress become a record you can line up against your sleep, exercise, and diet, and patterns often appear that you’d never have recalled.

This article is general information, not medical advice. If low mood lasts more than two weeks, or you have thoughts of harming yourself, contact a health professional or a crisis line.

Why in the Moment Beats Looking Back

Researchers call repeated ratings of how you feel, made in daily life, ecological momentary assessment (EMA). In his review of the method, Shiffman and colleagues explain that it aims to reduce recall bias, the distortion that creeps into reports made later, and to capture how feelings change over time and with circumstances. Studies comparing the two often find that people’s summaries of how they felt differ from the average of what they reported at the time.

A daily rating is a light version of the same idea: one data point a day, made close to the experience.

Keeping Ratings Useful

• Rate at the same time each day, such as in the evening, rating the day as a whole. Or rate right now, but always at the same time, since mood and energy vary over a day.
• Use the whole scale. A 1 to 5 scale is only informative if 3 is your ordinary day and 1 and 5 really are your worst and best.
• Be quick and honest. The first number that comes to mind is usually the right one.
• Keep three apart. Mood (how good or bad you feel), energy (how alert and able), and stress (how pressured) often move separately: a busy, exciting day can be high in energy, good in mood, and high in stress.
• Add a note on unusual days.

Seeing What Your Days Have in Common

After a month or two, compare your ratings with other things you track: your sleep the night before, exercise, alcohol, time outdoors, or how much of your day was in meetings. Correlation isn’t causation, and many things change together, but a consistent pattern, such as lower mood after short nights, is worth testing by changing one thing and seeing whether the ratings follow.

Following It in Kaizora

Mood, Energy Level, and Stress Level are each rated from 1 to 5 on the Wellbeing page with Log. A habit such as “at least once a day” on mood keeps the record going, with its streak on Home; see Habits. On Correlations, put mood beside Total Sleep Time, Exercise Time, or Calendar Event Time by day, and Discover (Plus) ranks every pair of your metrics by how strongly they move together, including a lag of a few days. For a monthly view of stress, see What Is the Perceived Stress Scale?

The Short Version

• Ratings made at the time avoid the distortions of memory.
• Rate mood, energy, and stress separately, at the same time each day, using the whole scale.
• After a month or two, look for patterns with sleep, exercise, and your schedule.

Sources

• Shiffman S, Stone AA, Hufford MR, “Ecological momentary assessment,” Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 4 (2008): 1–32. doi:10.1146/annurev.clinpsy.3.022806.091415