This is a thread to discuss our challenges and practices around mood tracking, based on some recent discussion in our weekly open Self-Research calls organized in the Open Humans community.
How do you track your mood? What key lessons have you learned about scales, frequency, text tracking, and other issues?
I’m a fan of the circumplex model for tracking mood, which maps arousal + valence onto a range of moods. It’s not perfect and is missing some edge cases, but it’s the simplest model which gets me 90% of the way there.
Short-term, I’m using an app which pings me to ask me for my mood throughout the day.
Long-term, I’m playing around with using the Muse headband to map EEG waves onto mood in order to get 24/7 mood tracking. There are studies showing this is possible with decent accuracy, 70-90% depending on the methodology. I’m not whether this will work or not 
Curious to hear other strategies!
I’ve been away so just catching up on these discussion. I like the circumplex model, too. Right now I’m using the EMA app imoodjournal but it only tracks valence. Alexey do you know a good app that tracks both valence and arousal?
Perhaps you can use something like the everday app? You can assign your own variables to track (in this case valence + arousal) and control how often the app annoys you to record these values.