There are days where you feel super productive, motivated and full of energy. But then there’s other days where you can’t get yourself to exercise like you planned, find it hard to stay focused at work and barely crossed anything of your to-do list at the end of the day. Yet you don’t’ stop and wonder why you had a hard day, and maybe you even beat yourself up over not being productive.
Keeping a mood and energy tracker in your bullet journal can help you find out why some days or weeks feel harder. You can spot how your mood and energy changes over time and what might be influencing it. Tracking helps you see what’s actually going on rather than just blaming yourself for being lazy or inconsistent.
Here’s how to set one up, a few layout ideas to choose from, and what to actually do with the data once you have it.
Why Track Mood and Energy
It’s tempting to lump these together, but they’re driven by different things. Mood tends to respond to what’s happening around you, such as a fun conversation, a sunny day, a mean comment or bad news. Energy is more physical. Sleep, diet, hydration, physical activity, hormones, and stress all impact our energy levels.
When you track them side by side, you start noticing things like:
- Mondays are always low-energy
- Poor sleep leads to anxiety
- Exercise improves mood
- Social days drain or fill your energy tank
- Your menstrual cycle affects both, maybe at different times
- Certain foods make you sluggish
Those are the kind of patterns you can actually act on.
Layout ideas for your tracker
No need to be an artist for any of these. Pick whichever matches how your brain likes to process information.
The colour-coded tracker
Assign a different colour to each mood or energy level, then colour in one space each day. For a yearly overview, you can create a grid with the months along the top and the days down the side. This gives you a big-picture view of how your mood or energy changes throughout the year. For mood, you can either choose to colour-code types of moods (happy, sad, excited) or make a rating (from very low, to very positive mood).
For a monthly tracker, you can use the same idea on a smaller scale, and it doesn’t have to be a grid. Divide almost any design into 28–31 sections and colour in one section each day. Think circles, leaves, flowers, hearts, stars, cat paws, or anything else you feel like drawing. This is where you can get a little more creative with your bullet journal while still ending up with a useful overview of your month.
The fill-level tracker
Instead of using different colours, let the amount you fill in represent your energy level. Draw one shape for each day, then fill it from bottom to top depending on how much energy you had that day. A nearly empty shape means very low energy, while a completely filled shape means you were full of energy. Batteries are perfect for this, but you can use any shape that can gradually be filled.
Two-part shapes
Give every day one circle, heart, leaf, flower, etc., but split it in half. One half represents mood and the other energy. Colour each half according to its own key.
The dual-line graph.
Draw the days of the month along the bottom and use the vertical axis for your mood and energy score (for example, from 1–10). Each day, plot two points: one for your mood and one for your energy. Use a different colour for each, then connect the points from day to day to create two lines. This is a great option if you’re a visual person, since you can watch both lines rise and fall together (or apart) across the whole month.
Bar chart
Draw one small vertical bar for each day and fill it according to your energy or mood score. You could even draw two thin bars beside each other: one for mood and one for energy. At the end of the month, you’ll have a little skyline showing your highs and lows.
Faces or emoji tracker.
Assign a few simple symbols (a sun, cloud, rain, or smily or sad face emojis) to different mood and energy levels. The nice thing about this one is that you don’t need a dedicated mood tracker at all. Just add a tiny symbol to each day in your weekly or daily pages, or in a monthly calendar. It takes a few seconds, but still gives you something to look back on and spot patterns over time.
The word-based tracker
Skip colours and symbols altogether and just jot one word a day for mood and one for energy. “Foggy.” “Restless.” “Content.” Also low effort and this works well if you find single colours too limiting to capture how you actually feel.
If you’re not sure which to try, start with the colour-coded grid for a month. It’s the fastest to build and gives you a good feel for whether tracking is useful to you before you invest in anything fancier.
Want to skip drawing these from scratch?
I’ve turned several of these mood and energy tracker layouts into ready-to-use printables. My Mood & Energy Tracker Bundle includes different daily, weekly, monthly and yearly layouts, as well as reflection pages that you can print or use digitally. Check it out on Etsy, or download one of the reflection pages from the bundle for free below!
How to actually use the data
A tracker you never look back on is just decoration. Here’s what you can do after filling out your mood and energy trackers.
Do a weekly glance. Once a week, look back at the days you’ve filled in and ask: any patterns? Any day that stands out, good or bad? You can use the journaling prompts below to help you, or even include some of these prompts in your weekly review.
Do a monthly deep dive. At the end of the month, look at the whole grid or chart together. This is where the real patterns show up.
Cross-reference with your life. If you also track sleep, habits, or your cycle, lay them next to your mood and energy log. This can help you spot relationships. For example: you notice that your energy always dips the day after a poor night’s sleep, or that your mood lifts every time you get outside.
Take action on it. Once you spot a pattern, do something with it: protect the habits and moments that boost you, start trimming the things that reliably drain you, and go easier on yourself on the low-energy days instead of pushing through. If you notice a time of day or week when your energy tends to peak, save your most demanding tasks for then, and let the low points be for the lighter stuff.
Journaling Prompts
A tracker tells you what happened. Journaling helps you understand why. Here are some examples of questions you can ask yourself, you don’t need to answer all of these every time.
Weekly Reflection
- How did I feel most days this week?
- What was my highest-energy day this week, and what might have contributed to it?
- What drained my energy this week?
- Did anything consistently improve my mood?
- Was there a moment when my mood or energy changed noticeably? What happened?
- Did I get enough rest and recovery?
- What do I need more of next week?
- What do I need less of?
- What’s one small thing I could try next week based on what I noticed?
Monthly Reflection
- What patterns do I notice in my mood this month?
- What patterns do I notice in my energy?
- When did I tend to feel my best? What was happening around those days?
- When did I tend to feel my lowest or most drained? What seemed to drain my energy most consistently?
- Did my mood and energy match up most days, or did they often go in different directions?
- Were there any recurring situations, habits, or activities that seemed to affect my mood?
- What seemed to have the biggest positive effect on my energy?
- Did certain days of the week tend to feel better or worse than others?
- Were there any noticeable changes in my mood or energy throughout the month?
- What did I do on my good days that I might want to do more often?
- What was my body or mind asking for this month that I didn’t always listen to?
- What helped me recover after a difficult or low-energy day?
- Is there anything I want to change, protect, or prioritise next month?
Free Download
I created a free Mood & Energy Weekly Check-In worksheet to help you spot patterns, identify what boosts or drains your energy, and decide what you want to do differently next week. Click the button below and I’ll send it straight to you!
Final Thoughts
Start simple, track consistently for a few weeks, and then actually look back at what you’ve recorded. You’re not going to feel happy and full of energy every single day, and that’s not the goal of tracking. But over time, you’ll start to understand your own patterns a little better, and maybe make a few small adjustments to your day-to-day life because of it.
Further reading
- If you’re new to the whole system, the official Bullet Journal method is a good place to start before adding trackers like this one, or read my Bullet Journaling 101 post
Are you already tracking your mood? What about energy? What’s your favourite layout? I’d love to know!
