Reading Your Mood Chart

A chart of five days is a mood, not a pattern. Roughly:

• 1–2 weeks: your baseline and how much you vary — nothing about causes.
• 3–6 weeks: weekly rhythms, and strong single factors — sleep is usually first.
• 2–3 months: monthly and hormonal cycles, and slow drifts.
• 6–12 months: seasonal shape, and an honest answer to "am I better than last year?"

Gaps are fine — a blank week is honest. A week reconstructed from memory rewrites the chart toward the story you already believe.

Your baseline is where your mood sits on an ordinary day — the band the line keeps returning to. On a 5-point scale, most people live between 3 and 4.

It's the most useful number here: a 3 means something different for someone who lives at 4 than at 2, and it moves slowly, so a drift means more than one bad Tuesday. A baseline sliding from 4 to 3 over two months outweighs any single low point — the change that's invisible from the inside.

Cover the extremes with your thumb, see where the bulk of the line sits, and compare this month to last.

Range is how far your mood travels around that baseline. Two people share a 3.5 baseline: one moves between 3 and 4, the other bounces between 1 and 5. Three questions:

• How wide is a typical week? One point is ordinary; three or four, repeatedly, is worth attention.
• How fast are the transitions? A slow two-week slope and a same-day 5-to-1 drop are different phenomena.
• How long does a low last? A day-long dip differs from two weeks at the bottom.

If the swings are the main story, the mood swings guide covers drivers and when to see a professional.

Cycles turn "randomly bad sometimes" into something you can plan around. Four to check:

• Daily. Needs more than one log a day — heavier mornings, or a late-evening dip.
• Weekly. The most common finding: Sunday evenings, a Wednesday trough, a genuine Friday lift.
• Monthly. Hormonal cycles are among the clearest patterns in mood data; give them two or three months.
• Seasonal. Slow, and easy to blame on whatever else was going on — see seasonal mood changes.

Cycles appear in any long record, real or not — trust one that repeats three times with a plausible mechanism.

Here the chart stops describing and starts explaining — and fooling yourself gets easy. Two weeks of entries:

What this supports: a baseline around 3, a range of 2 to 5, a repeated Sunday dip, and a strong link between nights under six hours and mood at 2.

What it doesn't prove: that short sleep caused the low mood. Both weeks had deadlines, which shorten sleep and flatten mood independently; low mood also disrupts sleep, so the arrow may run backwards. And the Sunday dip isn't sleep — Sunday sleep was fine both weeks.

To trust a correlation: count the exceptions (a factor that holds half the time is a coincidence with good PR), check the lag (sleep and alcohol land the next day), look for a third thing driving both — deadlines, illness, travel — and test one change at a time.

Graph paper works, and a spreadsheet can sort by weekday. What both cost is follow-through — nobody re-sorts a spreadsheet by factor every month. The app side of the trade:

• Charts drawn as you log, over any period — the trend is always current.
• Mood broken down by factor — the comparisons above, without arithmetic.
• Every point attached to its note or photo — a dip is one tap from its reason.
• Apple Health sync — sleep arrives on its own.
• Export to PDF, XLSX, CSV or JSON — for appointments or your own analysis.
• AI insights over your own history, free with optional premium — a second read, not advice.

Whatever draws the chart, the interpretation stays yours — this is a self-tracking tool, not a diagnostic one. If something worries you, bring the chart to a doctor or therapist — far more concrete than memory.