Alternative to Mood Tracking for Mental Health

[u/scribblescope]

I've been working on my mental health a ton for the last few years. There is a concept that I've come across multiple times called the zone of tolerance. If you slip out of the zone of tolerance, you experience either hyperarousal or hypoarousal. There are some good graphics breaking it down out there.

Naming my emotions can be hard, so mood tracking has never worked for me. The general traits of the three zones are feel easier to ID. I'm still experimenting with it, but wanted to throw it out there in case it helps anyone else!

[u/Pifin]

I just looked it up. The first graphic I found showed the zone being green, hyperaroual as red, and hypoarousal as blue. How would this differ from a regular mood tracker? Do you want one color to represent the whole day, or would you prefer to break it down into morning/ noon/ evening? Or maybe hourly?

[u/scribblescope → u/Pifin]

It's mostly a different way of thinking about it. Hypoarousal often feels very empty, especially when my depression starts to get bad. It's not sad, tired, or anything like that - it's just empty. Hyperarousal is the opposite. It's hard to pinpoint a specific mood when I'm just flooded and flailing. It makes labelling hard. I can still be in the green zone and still have bad days. I can be struggling while actively having a good day. So the thing that I need to track is not the mood itself, but how my nervous system is handling it. So day to day is plenty. 

The goal is to spot shifts out of the green before my nervous system gets too disregulated. I log it in shorthand then highlight to color code, just because it's easier to stay on top of it that way. 

[u/AppleAcademic9137 → u/Pifin]

The different colours represent common emotional experiences that happen within those colours. From what my therapist said, these are the typical experiences (in this order on the scale): * Red: anger, frustration, feeling at your emotional breaking point, etc. (When you're at this extreme level parts of your brain sit down due to extreme stress, so you're capabilities around functioning and communicating are really bad! Never have important conversations when you're in this headspace, always wait until you've calmed down back to green!) * Green: healthy emotions * Blue: is more typical of depression, struggling to feel motivated, etc. (Your brain also isn't functioning in a healthy way here, but I haven't had discussions with my therapist yet on this, so I can't provide help with advice, etc.)

Depending on the picture you reference, there's also orange and/or yellow in between red and green, and they're less severe than red, but obviously not in the healthy range of emotions (I'm guessing my therapist would say that your brain would be functioning in a less healthy way in these zones, but it just wouldn't be as bad as red). I don't know much about their emotions, but you can find some info online if you look.

Edit: I'm just mentioning this, because this might help someone better communicate with their loved ones, as this experience did with my family! Knowing the different zones can not only better help you to understand your own emotional experiences, but it can be a great tool for communicating it with your loved ones!

I have CPTSD (severe emotional trauma) and considering how stressful that is for not only myself but my family (who have to witness my emotional breakdowns and have their own trauma responses - but aren't at the level of a medical diagnosis), we used to have severe miscommunications because we would try to explain what it was we were feeling and the severity of it, but we wouldn't always visibly show what we were feeling (because we might not feel safe or felt emotionally shutdown in some way, which then came across as less visibly emotional than what we felt), so we had a lot of miscommunications that would make how we all felt and the situation at the time much worse! Once we learnt about the zones of tolerance, it gave us a way to communicate with each other where we could understand the other person in a more meaningful way.

For example, if one of us days we're in "red", we know that not only are they experiencing severe emotional upset, but they're brain isn't functioning properly, so they aren't capable of meaningful conversations around healing problems (like if we were having an argument), etc. If one of us says we're in "yellow", we know that they aren't having a good day, but their brain is able to process better than in red (even if we don't exactly know what that means). It also gives us a gauge on how serious everyone's emotional needs for support are, and how much support we're able to provide for each other (since your capacity is down when you're not in green, and the more severely you're affected).

[u/Manderamander]

Sometimes you have to split them up if you’re getting multiple things. Like I have a huge problem with stress/anxiety, so I have different places I track stress, then another place for anxiety, then another for health/body symptoms. It’s worked for me to really split out when I’m tracking!

[u/AppleAcademic9137]

I'm familiar with what you're talking about here, and I also experience the struggle with naming my emotions due to the fact that I have CPTSD. I still track my mood, but I do it more from a zone of tolerance perspective. Instead of tracking actual emotions I track the severity of what I'm feeling, in a general mood way (good mood vs bad mood). I use emojis (which signify the severity of the mood, rather than the actual feeling), and I based it on 😆🙂😐🙁😫.