How to monitor mental health symptoms outside of session
Do you ever doubt how often you are actually experiencing a change in your mood, or increases in anxiety? Sometimes it can feel like symptoms are happening more often than not. Sometimes, it may seem like we are downplaying what we're going through.
Symptom tracking might help. Symptom tracking means regularly recording your symptoms each day. This helps you understand changes in your emotional and physical health over time.
With symptom tracking, you can track a whole range of things. Below are symptoms that people often track:
What Symptoms are Helpful to Track?
Mood/Emotions. These could be days when someone feels more depressed, sad, or anxious. Keeping track of mood changes can help identify mood disorders, seasonal affective disorder, and other mental health issues.
Rumination/Overthinking. Tracking days when someone overthinks can help find connections between overthinking and other aspects of their life. Patterns may emerge during major work events, college finals, or social gatherings for example.
Panic-Attacks. Keeping track of panic attacks can help identify what triggers anxiety. It can also be a helpful way to add calming activities during the most stressful times of the week.
Energy Levels. Looking for patterns in energy changes can help plan tasks and boost productivity. Fatigue is linked to depression and other mental health issues.
Suicidal Thoughts/Thoughts about self-harm. Monitoring thoughts about death, suicide, and self-harm is useful for evaluating safety changes.
Other Factors that are helpful to track…
Sleep. Not getting adequate sleep can significantly impact a person’s mental health.
Eating. Changes in appetite or eating behaviors can be symptoms of various mental health diagnoses. Eating habits can affect a person's mood, irritability, and energy.
Medication. Keeping track of when you take or miss your medication can help you understand its effectiveness and any changes in your symptoms.
Substance Use. Substance use can impact symptoms. Monitoring substance use and symptoms can improve understanding of the impact that substance has on your mental health.
Menstrual Cycle. If you have a menstrual cycle, tracking it and your symptoms can be important, especially for conditions like Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. It can also help to prepare coping strategies and self-care for the times when your symptoms are affected by your cycle.
Changes in physical health. Physical health can impact mental health, and vice versa. If you are someone who has a chronic health condition, or gets sick often, tracking changes in your physical health could be beneficial.
Benefits of Symptom Tracking
Representation of symptoms over time. Are symptoms getting worse? Have things been getting better? Symptom tracking can help provide data, rather than basing it on how you feel that specific day about symptom progression. It can also be helpful for your healthcare provider to know how long you have been experiencing a specific set of symptoms.
Identify patterns, making it easier to understand recurring symptoms. We often don't notice patterns until they are written or shown visually. Tracking symptoms can help reveal connections, like between caffeine use and increased anxiety or a person's menstrual cycle and mood changes.
Ruling out certain diagnoses. Many mental health issues share similar symptoms. Tracking symptoms can help your healthcare provider make a more accurate diagnosis. Some conditions require time to observe symptoms before an accurate diagnosis can be made.
Resources and Tools for Symptom Tracking
Below are some helpful resources that can assist you in effectively tracking your symptoms. These tools can provide valuable insights into your symptom presentation and help you monitor changes over time.
Paper and pencil method
Below are some PDF links for tracking symptoms. Many people also use bullet journaling for symptom tracking.
Digital Methods of Symptom Tracking
You can search within your app store on your phone for mood or symptom tracking apps. Below are a few options:
Apple Health App–Mental Wellbeing-State of Mind. If you are an iphone user, apple has a mood tracker within their health app.
Daylio Journal App
Sharing what you notice about your symptoms can help your healthcare provider give you better treatment.
