Monitoring our mental health is an essential part of self-care, especially for those of us navigating conditions like bipolar disorder. Keeping a close eye on daily mood fluctuations and being attentive to the signs of potential shifts—whether it’s a slide into depression or an ascent into hypomania—can significantly impact our overall well-being. Additionally, keeping track of things is invaluable for our care team.
Daily Mood Journal
Keep track of your daily moods – are you stable? Are you delving into depression? Are you going up into hypomania? Keep track of your moods. You can use a spreadsheet, an app, a journal – whatever works for you.
Personally, I use Daylio to keep track of my moods. I have 6 categories: Stable/Euthymic, Hypomanic, Manic, Depressed, Severely Depressed and Mixed. I also track my medications (whether I took them or not), how much I slept, and my symptoms using Daylio’s premium features.
My favorite feature of Daylio is that you are able to see a graph that shows your mood spikes. Mine is incredibly useful in showing how effective my medication has been.
However, you can easily do the same thing in Google Sheets. Simply assign a numeric value to different moods (ex. Euthymic= 0, Hypomanic=1, Depressed=-1) and keep track of them daily. You can then use the free feature of Google Sheets to create a graph of your moods.
Episode Journal
I keep both a daily mood tracker and an episode “journal”. The difference is that a daily mood journal tracks all my days, including days with euthymic mood, at a very basic level and an episode journal keeps a detailed account of my symptoms when I’m experiencing an episode.
My episode journal is simply a free Google Doc which I’m easily able to share with anyone in my care team. I would recommend something in the following format, although whatever works for you is best. You can literally copy and paste the below table into a Google Doc and use it for your own purposes.
| Dates | Episode | Notes/Symptoms |
| Ex. 11/1/2023 through01/14/2023 | Ex. Depressed | Ex:Lethargic (Hard to get out of bed, moving as little as possible) Loss of interest in activities (no longer wanted to work on any of my projects, everything sounded like too much work) Feelings of emptiness Crying spells (lasted 5-15 minutes about every 2-3 hours) Difficulty concentrating Less productive than usual Ended when medication dosage increased |
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I would recommend being as detailed as you can in these entries. You can always go back and remove extraneous details, but it’s quite difficult to add in details months down the line.
Crisis Plan
I think of a crisis plan in two parts: a plan for what to do and information for people if you are unable to provide it. Sometimes with bipolar, we’re so out of it or combative that we can not communicate effectively. There are pieces of information about medications, hospitalizations, and diagnosis, that are important to convey; especially in moments when we can’t convey them. The crisis plan can act as your mouthpiece when you’re out of it. Share your crisis plan with your care team and print it off. Hopefully, you’ll have enough wherewithal that if an ER visit is necessary you can bring your crisis plan.
I actually have an entire blog post on making a crisis plan which you can check out here. The post includes a template for a crisis plan, which you can download below.
You can edit it in Word or upload it to Google Docs.
The Importance of Keeping Documents for Bipolar
Bipolar disorder is a complex and confusing illness that requires daily management for stability. Keeping documents such as a daily mood journal, an episode journal, and a crisis plan will provide invaluable information to your care team, and empower you to be in control of your own experience.
Personally, I’ve found that my care team takes me more seriously when I bring up issues if I’m able to back up my anecdotes with evidence from my daily mood logs and episode journals. Additionally, having a crisis plan means that if something were to go bad, my care team knows what steps to take and what I would like to hav