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Written By: DiveThru Team

Reviewed By: Dr. Justin Puder B.A, M.A, Ph.D.

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5 Benefits of Labelling Your Feelings & Using a Mood Tracker

PUBLISHED Oct 15th, 2021 & UPDATED ON Jan 13th, 2023

How are you feeling today? Sometimes the answer is simple, but most of the time, it’s a whooole bunch of feelings throughout the day that add up to a big, emotional soup. That can be difficult to put into words. And how do you work through your feelings if you can’t even describe them? That’s where feeling tracking or a mood tracker comes in!

It’s a tool that allows you to sit down with yourself, figure out how you’re feeling, and why you’re feeling that way. The DiveThru app helps you track your mood as soon as you open it by asking you how you feel and why. With enough time, you’ll be able to identify, work through, and self-regulate all of your emotions!

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s get into the many wonderful ways mood tracking can help you understand yourself and your emotions to make a better, emotionally balanced you!

1. It Validates Your Emotions

We have a whole other article about the feelings wheel because we kinda love it. It’s a way to figure out how you feel, put a word to it, and validate that feeling. And validating your emotions is so important! It’s okay to feel how you feel, and you should know that.

Self-validating your emotions can help you put words to your feelings and give yourself permission to feel them. Maybe you got mad at work and you don’t know why. Then you check out the feelings wheel, and you realize that you were actually frustrated from a pileup of work that feels impossible to catch up on. Now that you know how you feel and you have the language to describe it, you can let yourself feel that way and not try to change or bury the emotion.

2. When You Know How You Feel, You Can Find Triggers

Now that you can properly label your emotions, knowing what triggers them is a great step towards being able to see your emotions coming and understand why you’re feeling that way. Knowing your triggers can help you avoid situations that trigger you or, if they aren’t avoidable, plan how to deal with them when they come up. 

Just look at Nick Miller. He was a big, angry mess a lot of the time because he had so many feelings and no idea how to deal with them. We’re here to help you get that under control before you start yelling at inanimate objects.

3. Letting Others Know How You’re Really Feeling

You’ve got a lot going on today, and when you come home, you’re slamming cupboard doors, mumbling under your breath, and cooking dinner with a level of aggression usually reserved for Hell’s Kitchen. Then someone you live with — a partner, or roommate, or your child — asks you what’s going on. Are you able to explain why you feel the way you feel?

This is how mood tracking can help. When we do all the things we learned above, like using the feelings wheel and recognizing our triggers, we can communicate how we’re feeling and why we’re feeling it. This lets other people understand your feelings a little better, which improves our connections to others, since people are drawn to authenticity. They understand you, you feel understood, everyone is having a much better time. 

But we’re not done yet. We want you to be able to avoid the cupboard slamming, aggressive cooking part. The next step is emotional self-regulation.

4. Finding Tools for Your Feelings

It’s one thing to understand your emotions and their triggers, but it’s a whole other thing to manage them. We get it! It’s all easy peasy on paper until you have the longest day of work ever and you come home to a messy house, again. Uuuuggghh! But there’s some great tools to help you work through those emotions without a total blowout. 

Emotional self-regulation can be suuuper helpful in learning how to handle your emotions. We have a free DiveThru course in our app all about it! “Self-Regulating Your Emotions” is led by therapist Simone Saunders. She’ll walk you through the ideas behind emotional self-regulation, how to manage your emotions while still feeling them, and some great tools for self-regulation. Take this course to turn your big, overwhelming feelings into something more manageable. 

5. Practise Makes (Almost) Perfect

By using a feelings tracker, validating how you feel, finding your triggers, communicating, and emotionally self-regulating, you’re on your way to becoming an emotions expert. When we know how we feel, we know which path to follow in life. Getting to know your true emotions can help you figure out your career, school, who you should date, or who you become friends with! But it won’t happen overnight. Practice makes perfect!

Using a daily mood journal, like the one in our app, will help you check in with yourself every day, figure out how you feel, and use the steps you’ve learned to manage those emotions. Will you be perfect? Probably not. Will you occasionally yell at someone in traffic? Maybe. 

But instead of letting that anger ruin your day, you’ll feel it, understand the trigger, talk about (or journal) why you felt that way, and be able to move on. All that adds up to a much better time in your day-to-day life. So bust out that mood tracker, sort through those feelings, and let’s self-regulate!

Read More: Online Therapy 101, How to Get the Most Value From Your Therapy Appointments,

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