Why I Track My Moods on Paper

The short version: I was recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and I needed a simple way to track my moods. Apps bored me, and daily journaling never stuck. So I made a paper notebook where you shade a small moon each day and move on. It is called Blue Moon Bloom, and it comes out on October 10, 2026. Research suggests that tracking your moods over time may help you tell your feelings apart. It does not say that paper beats an app, and it does not promise that a notebook will fix anything. Below is what I found, the good and the complicated.

I could never get into bullet journals. I could never get into daily journaling or keeping a diary either. Instead, I would jot down whatever had been bothering me, if I could even remember it. Then I would bring those notes to my doctor or my therapist so we could unpack them.

Then a diagnosis changed what I needed from those notes. I was recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and my diagnosis has not been typed yet. Writing down my worries was no longer enough.

Typing means working out which form of bipolar disorder a person has, such as bipolar I or bipolar II. The forms differ mostly in how strong the high moods get and how long they last. That is only the simple version, and it takes a clinician to say which form fits.

So I needed to track my moods. But I did not want to download yet another app, because I knew I would get bored of it within a week. An app on my phone feels like an obligation. Choosing to carry a notebook made the choice stick. It is there when I need it, and I can see it, which helps me remember to use it.

My first try did not work, though. I started with a plain lined notebook, and it turned into a grocery list more than anything else.

What works for me now is a notebook with a little structure. I shade in my mood and move on. Later, if I have time, I can write about that mood, or I can leave it as it is. I never did that with the lined notebook, because it took extra steps, the way bullet journals do. My brain does not allow me to do that.

I also like that the notebook is undated, so I can start whenever I want. If I miss a few days, I can go back and fill them in to get the full picture. And when I need to talk about something in person, I remember it better if I wrote it on paper. It is also easier to pull out my notebook and read from the page.

That notebook is Blue Moon Bloom. I removed every barrier I could think of.

Still, a notebook that works for me is only a hunch about what might work for you. I am a graduate student in psychology, so I wanted to check that hunch against the research before asking anyone to trust it. Some of what I found backs me up. Some of it complicates the picture. I would rather show you both.

What the pen shows me

I will start with the pen, because handwriting is where a paper notebook differs most from a screen. When I flip back through my pages, I can see how I was doing by looking at my handwriting that day, or at the doodles I made. Some of what I see is simply nice. I like watching my cursive improve.

Other times my handwriting works as a warning. I can tell when something is off. Maybe I am misspelling words, or thinking faster than I can write. That can mean I have not slept enough, or that I have had too much coffee. Maybe my hands are shaky because I am anxious about what I am writing. None of the studies below tested this, so take it as one person's observation and not a finding.

The other thing I notice is memory. I remember something better in person when I wrote it out on paper first. Does research back that up? Only partly, and the question is still being worked out.

Van der Weel and Van der Meer (2024) recorded the brain activity of 36 university students. The students wrote words by hand and also typed them. Handwriting produced far more widespread connections between brain regions, in patterns that earlier research has tied to memory and learning. But Pinet and Longcamp (2025) point out two problems. Nobody in that study was asked to learn or remember anything. And the students typed with one finger, which is not how people really type.

A study closer to a notebook like mine comes from Umejima et al. (2021). They had 48 university students enter appointments into a monthly calendar on paper, on a tablet, or on a smartphone. An hour later, the students answered questions about those appointments inside a brain scanner. The paper group finished writing sooner and scored higher than the tablet group on the more straightforward questions. The paper group also showed stronger activity in brain areas tied to memory, language, and visual imagery.

Even so, each group had only 16 people, and overall accuracy did not differ between the groups. Two of the four authors also worked for a consulting company, and research with business ties deserves a closer look. So I hold that finding loosely.

There is one more reason to be careful. A review by Hoult et al. (2025), which I come back to below, saw no clear difference between typing and handwriting in studies of writing about positive topics. So I won't claim that the pen does the healing.

Whatever the pen is doing in the brain, it does not need to be a special pen. I write with whatever pen I have. I do have favorites that I pick up from booths at festivals. But I got rid of the strange barrier of buying fancy pens, which I usually hate anyway.

What naming a feeling does, and what it doesn't

The pen is only half of the notebook. The other half is what the pen puts down. Most journals expect a full entry every day, and I could never keep up with that. Now I do not have to journal every day or have something to say every day. I can log my mood quickly. Then I can come back to it later, or just go on about life.

Here is what that logging looks like. Every daily page in Blue Moon Bloom has a moon, which is a circle split into four bands with a small dot in the center. You shade the top band for an elevated day, the second for mixed, the third for balanced, and the bottom for low. If nothing fits, you shade the dot, which stands for not sure.

Shading a band is a small way of naming a feeling, and naming feelings has research behind it. The match is a loose one, though, because the studies below had people use words and not shading. Researchers call putting a feeling into words affect labeling. The newest studies on it are less tidy than the popular idea that naming a feeling tames it.

Lin et al. (2026) had 37 students label pictures as negative or neutral inside a brain scanner. The amygdala, the part of the brain that sounds the alarm, was more active during the labeling itself. But when the same negative pictures came back a little later, the labeled ones drew a weaker alarm response. The students also recognized them more accurately.

Those students were labeling pictures and not their own moods, so Ariely et al. (2026) matters here. Across two studies with 226 adults, people typed a word for what they felt while looking at upsetting images. They did not feel better in the moment. Their unpleasant feelings even ticked up slightly. A day or two later, the groups looked the same.

Together, that pair of studies leaves me with one lesson. Naming a feeling is not a quick fix, and it may sting a little at first.

If naming can sting, why keep doing it? Because the payoff seems to come from practice over time. Psychologists use the term emotional granularity for the skill of telling apart feelings that sit close together, like anger and sadness. Hoemann et al. (2021) asked whether that skill grows when people simply keep reporting how they feel.

In their study, fifty healthy adults answered prompts about their emotions during the day. Each evening they also rated a set of emotion words. They did this for about two weeks. Their granularity rose for both pleasant and unpleasant emotions, without any training.

There was a catch that matters for a notebook like mine. People who wrote longer descriptions of their days showed smaller gains for unpleasant emotions. The authors suggest that dwelling at length on negative experiences may undo some of the benefit. The study also had no comparison group, and its participants were paid and wore heart monitors. So I treat it as a promising sign and not a guarantee.

Still, a short daily mark fits that finding better than a long daily essay would. A short daily mark is all the moon asks for. The lines on each daily page are there for the days you want them, and nothing in the notebook asks you to fill them.

A short mark still depends on having a name for the feeling. So what if the names don't come easily? Then you have plenty of company. Trouble identifying and describing your own feelings is common enough to have a name, alexithymia. It is far more common for some people than for others. When Kinnaird et al. (2019) pooled earlier studies, they found it in about half of autistic participants, compared with about 5 percent of non-autistic participants.

I wanted the notebook to leave room for that. That is why it includes a feelings and body reference guide. The guide lists what each mood can feel like in the body, next to finer words for naming it, such as wired, foggy, or settled. It is also why the center dot counts as a real answer. Those finer words matter for a second reason. Four bands make a coarse scale, and telling feelings apart is a skill built on fine distinctions.

Words are not the only way onto the page, either. Some of the daily pages are lined and some are blank. This part comes from my own preference and not from a study. I like to doodle, so a notebook with both lined and blank pages gives me the best of both worlds. Maybe I need to draw bleh instead of writing that I feel bleh. I don't need a second book of blank pages for that. And I don't have to "ruin" a drawing by looking at it on lined paper.

Those blank pages have been useful to more than just me. My kids took it upon themselves to draw on some of them after I left the notebook within their reach. So even if a day only has my mood marked, the pages won't go to waste. The notebook doubles as a drawing book.

Why a little structure helps

Whether a page holds a drawing or only a shaded moon, one day does not say much by itself. The structure is there for what happens when the days add up.

So far, I can keep track of when I am elevated, which for me means hypomania. Hypomania, in plain terms, is a stretch of unusually high mood and energy that is milder than full mania. If I notice that a lot of my moons are shaded elevated, a crash is probably coming soon. Then I can bring that up in therapy and put my important people on notice. That pattern is mine, and it is not a rule for anyone else's moods. But I could never have seen it from a single page.

Flipping through the pages also tells me right away whether I am taking my mental health as seriously as I would like to. The filled pages and the skipped ones are both right there to see.

Blue Moon Bloom is built to make that flipping back easier. Each month opens with a mood calendar, where every day's moon sits together on one page. Each month closes with a moon count and a handful of questions under the heading "Before the next moon."

Looking back has a risk of its own, however. Going over the same worry again and again can keep you stuck on it. Cova et al. (2019) compared two research programs on when thinking about a painful experience helps and when it harms. Both programs agree on one point. Brooding, which is passive and self-critical, does harm.

One of those programs goes further. It holds that staying with the concrete details of how something happened helps more than asking abstract questions about why. A recent experiment backs that up. Leigh et al. (2025) trained young adolescents to think about sad events in either an abstract way or a concrete way. The abstract thinkers solved social problems less well and pictured more bad things in their future. Those participants were around 13 years old, so the result may not carry over to adults unchanged.

Even so, it fits the way the closing questions are worded, because they ask about concrete things. One asks when your mood shifted and what else shifted around then, such as your sleep, the people around you, or the days you skipped. Every daily page also has a line for hours slept, so the sleep part of that answer is already written down.

Hard days are not the only ones worth looking back on. Hoult et al. (2025), the review I mentioned earlier, gathered 51 experiments in which healthy adults wrote about positive topics, such as gratitude or their best possible future. Well-being and positive mood improved fairly consistently. Results for stress, anxiety, and physical health were mixed. The authors also rated every study as poor or fair in quality.

Lai et al. (2023) found something similar when they pooled 24 trials with 1,558 participants. In the general population, people who wrote about positive experiences ended up with more positive emotions and fewer negative ones than people who wrote about their most upsetting experiences. The two approaches did not differ on depression, anxiety, or stress.

I read both as a reason to give good days as much room on the page as hard ones. One of the closing questions does that by asking where you bloomed this month, however briefly.

So why paper and not an app?

A mood calendar and a set of closing questions are things an app can offer too. So it is fair to ask why I chose paper. I am not going to claim that paper beats an app, because the research does not say that. Schueller et al. (2021) reviewed earlier work and report that app and paper mood tracking have shown similar outcomes for people with mood disorders. Tracking seems to help in either form.

With the two that close, the question that mattered to me was which one I would keep using. I already knew I would get bored of an app within a week. It turns out I am far from alone.

Baumel et al. (2019) measured how people really use 93 popular free mental health apps on Android phones. Among the apps with return-visit data, the typical app had only about 3 percent of its users opening it 30 days after installing. Tracker apps did a little better, at around 6 percent. A notebook will not fix that by itself, since paper can sit in a drawer just as easily.

Sticking with it was only one of my reasons, though. I do a lot of my school work on my phone. My phone is also where social media lives, along with a lot of my business tools. So when I am venting, I want that to be obvious, and not look like I am just on my phone again. Being seen writing has lowered the stress of always appearing to be on my phone. That is an anxiety I could remove just by switching to paper.

The phone has one more habit that paper does not. It lets words go by without my ever looking at them again. With voice to text, my words evaporate into thin air the moment I speak them. I could go old school and start tape recording, but for now writing is my jam.

Typed notes can vanish the same way. Ask yourself how often you flip back through the notes on your phone. A note that never gets read again cannot show you much about yourself.

None of this means app users get nothing from tracking. Schueller et al. (2021) also interviewed 22 people who had used mood tracking apps. Seventeen of them valued the self-awareness and reflection that tracking gave them. Eight had used their tracking alongside a therapist or other professional. On the other hand, nine had trouble working out what their data meant, and six did not like to record or see their negative moods.

Blue Moon Bloom borrows the structure a mood tracking app adds, such as a set scale and a calendar. It tries to answer the first of those complaints with the moon count and the closing questions. As for the second, a notebook cannot make a low month pleasant to look at. The page of closing questions does end with a reminder that you can call or text 988 if the low days felt heavy.

What paper does offer is quiet. It doesn't send notifications. It works on the days you have put your phone away. And you can flip through months of your own handwriting in a minute.

Nobody is tracking your notebook

Quiet is one thing paper offers, and privacy is another. More and more apps and companies want your data, and mental health apps have not been an exception.

Huckvale et al. (2019) checked whether apps tell the truth about where data goes. They intercepted what 36 top-ranked apps for depression and quitting smoking actually sent. Twenty-nine of them sent data to Google or Facebook for advertising, marketing, or analytics. Only 17 of those 29 disclosed it in a privacy policy. What was sent was mostly tracking identifiers and not names or diary entries. But the authors point out that an identifier tied to a depression app can still say something about a person's mental health.

A later study looked deeper into the apps themselves. Iwaya et al. (2023) ran security and privacy tests on 27 top-ranked mental health apps for Android. An automated security scan rated 20 of the 27 as critical risk. The apps they could watch in action contacted about 12 servers each on average, and outside companies owned most of those servers. Most of the privacy policies required a college reading level. Both studies are a few years old now, and individual apps may well have improved since.

A paper notebook, by comparison, has no account to hack and no company holding a copy. Nobody is tracking how you use it, and a data breach can't reach it. You have complete control over what goes inside. If you ever want it gone, you can tear out a page, shred it, or burn the whole book for all anyone cares.

Paper does have limits of its own. Anyone who picks the book up can read it, and my kids finding the blank pages shows how easily that happens. Paper also has no backup, so a lost or soaked notebook is gone for good. Where it lives is your call.

What I hope it does for you

What the notebook does for you is your call as well, but I can tell you what I hope for.

The research stops short of promising that a notebook will lower your stress. It also warns that naming a feeling will not make it vanish on the spot. What it does suggest is that tracking how you feel over weeks can sharpen the skill of telling feelings apart, and that staying concrete serves you better than brooding. My own pages have taught me that looking back is where a tracker earns its keep. Blue Moon Bloom is my attempt to put all three in one place.

If the patterns you find point toward needing more support, those pages can help you show a doctor or therapist what has been going on. That is how I use mine, and it is how some of the app users in the interview study used their tracking (Schueller et al., 2021).

The same goes if you have not been evaluated yet and you are trying to explain what you are going through to a parent or a doctor. A month of shaded moons gives you something to point to, which can be easier than finding the right words on the spot. A notebook cannot diagnose anything, but it can help you start that conversation.

I named my diagnosis at the start of this post on purpose. I don't want to keep hiding it or feel ashamed. Part of why I started this business is to destigmatize mental health. I can't do that if I expect people to buy my products for their mental health while I am not honest about my own.

Blue Moon Bloom will be available on October 10, 2026. If you would like to know the moment it is ready, click the button below to be notified.

Email me when it launches

Live gently. Resist deeply.

Blue Moon Bloom is not therapy, and it does not replace professional care. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Wren Dunbar is the founder of Soft Resistance and a graduate student in psychology. This post shares research for general education and is not medical advice.

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