 Hello and welcome back. It's another super practical one today and I'm going to talk to you about mood journaling so first of all What is mood journaling? So it's very simple. It's basically about keeping a track of your mood several times a day over several days or weeks in order to get a better understanding of the changes in your mood and What is triggering those changes? So it helps us to recognize where we have difficulties It helps us to recognize triggers and it also helps us to recognize what supports us in feeling better Who is it for? It's for anyone who is experiencing any kind of emotional distress Who wants to take some control over that and to feel better? So it might be that you're struggling with anger or anxiety for example And that you want to understand what's triggering those feelings and how can you begin to take a bit more control over that and Regulate your emotions you can do it yourself or you might be supporting someone who is struggling and you might use it Then you can use it with anyone of any age. You might just adapt the language somewhat How do you do it? Keeping a mood journal is really simple and you might try and motivate yourself or the person you're supporting by buying A pretty journal that can really help but equally you can just do it on a piece of paper It can be really as simple as you want it to be Now you think about how regularly you want to check in and check your mood And it can be useful to do that quite frequently at first You might do it as often as every hour for example and you can either just take a note of how your mood is I find doing that on a scale of one to ten really helpful So it might be where nor represents completely calm and ten is very very anxious Or it might be that you're thinking about a different feeling so it might be anger Whatever is the different emotion that you're struggling with you would chart that on a scale of one to ten With young children you might use something like emojis or different animals or colors You can use anything you like to make this feel accessible Now it's useful if you can also note what's happening at that time what you've just been doing or what you're about to do And then also any other notes that feel relevant about how you're feeling and what's caused you to feel that way You're feeling whether that is something that's made you feel kind of anxious or very very low for example Or whether it's something that's helped you to feel calm or happy So we want to take notes of the positives and the negatives now you do this over a period of a week or so And then you can as I say just do it in a journal You don't a piece of paper or you can create a form So here's an example of one that I did recently so this was for attendance matters magazine And we created a mood journal for young people who were struggling to come to school So they were struggling with school refusal and you can see here that we made notes We made space for them to know the time where they were who they were with what was happening Then they ranked their current mood on scale of one to ten and then they put any extra notes needed But you can create your own you don't have to have it in a formalized way. It's completely up to you What next okay? So you've kept your mood journal for a series of days Maybe a week maybe more what you need to do then is take time to reflect now It might just be you reflecting or it might be that you're supporting someone Either way have a look back over what's happened in the last few days and the last week and take a note of the highs and the low So if you're using a scale you're looking at where they were up towards the top But then also when they were down towards the bottom now You want to be able to try and understand if there are any patterns here are there certain times of day certain places certain people Certain activities which are making your mood either easier to manage or harder to manage What was tipping you into anxiety or anger or sadness or whatever it might be and but also what was helping you to feel Calm at other times look for the highs and lows and use that to help you to make a plan for how to manage next week So it might be that you recognize that a certain time of day is always very difficult Perhaps you find that lunchtime is really tricky because you have issues around food or perhaps you find that you have social anxiety Around time and you need to be around other people perhaps you find the lack of structure at lunchtime hard There's lots of different reasons But if you recognize that lunchtime is always a difficult time and you see that in your mood journal that each day That's a significantly difficult time then you would think about okay How can I take some steps to manage lunchtime in the next week? And you might get some inspiration of how to do that by looking at your mood journal and noticing that oh Do you know what? I'm usually much calmer at about two o'clock say or when I'm with a certain person or when I'm doing a certain thing and You might try and recreate that feeling at those difficult times So it basically helps you to get a better understanding of what's happening with your mood What's causing that and how you can begin to manage it a bit better? I hope you found this helpful if you did please leave a comment below and let me know how you're using it If you've got any ideas to add please share those two always great to hear about how you're pushing this into practice Good luck and happy mood journaling. Bye