Sometimes it can be hard to notice when you’re slipping into a negative spiral with mental health issues. Even if you’ve been down this road before, the signs can be subtle and easy to miss, especially when they come on gradually. It’s often in the small details — you’re eating more, sleeping less (or vice versa) and skipping your usual activities. The progression happens so slowly that you barely even notice until you’re too far in the hole to pull yourself out.
Fortunately, there are a lot of different ways to keep an eye on your moods and habits before they start to get serious. You don’t necessarily need to be particularly self-aware, dedicated, or good at keeping up with a tracking habit. All you need is the willingness to pay attention, take a good long look at your behaviors, and trust the evidence. Here are some hacks to stay on top of your mental health, notice red flags, and get ahead of them before things get serious.
There’s an App for That
The easy part about directly tracking moods and mental health symptoms is that it leaves little room for interpretation. If you’re writing down how you feel every day, it’s easy to spot when a few days of sadness turn into weeks or months. Keeping a standard journal where you record your emotions, triggers, quality of sleep and other metrics can also serve a second purpose. Journaling your thoughts and feelings can help you process them and improve symptoms.
For the less analog-inclined, there are about a million different apps designed to help track specific triggers and symptoms. Some can help you discover relationships between habits (like drinking or poor sleep quality) and your feelings. Many of these apps can even notify you when it’s time to check in, or when things are looking off, or offer AI advice. Just remember, they’re no substitute for professional support, like a therapist or anxiety and depression treatment center.
Ask Friends, Family, and Loved Ones
If you’re not the logging or journaling type, you still have plenty of options for tracking and making sense of mental health symptoms. With a little ingenuity, you don’t even need to know how to identify your own emotions in order to effectively track them. The rest of this article will share ways to keep on top of your symptoms using tools and systems you already have. The first one of these is your support network: the family, friends, and other people around you.
One of the quickest, easiest ways to take the temperature on your symptoms is to ask around with people close to you. You can ask a close friend or family member if you seem more down than usual, more reserved, or less like yourself. If this feels too vulnerable, that’s OK — you don’t need to do anything that makes you uncomfortable. Instead, review your call and text history. If you’ve been reaching out a lot less (or complaining a lot more) than usual, it could be a red flag.
Check Your Receipts and Your Bank Balance
Another way to get a good sense of your symptoms is to review your purchase history and look for any significant habit changes. This can be less painful than looking at old conversations, but still yield important insights. Look at your grocery receipts: have you been buying a lot fewer fruits and vegetables and spending a lot more on junk food? Have you skipped the supermarket entirely, in favor of ordering delivery, getting fast food for weeks on end, or missing meals?
What about convenience or liquor store purchases? If you’re buying more alcohol, cigarettes, or vape cartridges than usual, that’s usually an indicator of stress — or worse. If you overspend on online gambling, lottery tickets, and the like, that can also be a big sign. It doesn’t even necessarily matter what you spend on; what you’re looking for is any major change. Excessive spending of any kind can be a symptom of mania, or a coping mechanism for something else.
Review Your Watch and Listening Histories
Just as with purchasing habits, your watching and listening habits can also tell you a lot about where your mental health is headed. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with binging your favorite comfort shows or listening to tons of Radiohead, sometimes the devil is in the details. When evaluating the types and quantities of media you’re consuming, the most important thing is to think about your baseline. You’re the only one who knows what is or isn’t normal for you.
With that said, there are some key red flags to look out for if you’re worried about your mental health declining. The biggest one to look for is anything that feels really excessive. If you’re binging so much Buffy that you’re missing work, school, activities, or friend dates, that could mean a problem. Another sign is a drastic shift in tone that doesn’t feel like “you.” If you can’t bear to listen to your dance playlist or watch your favorite comedy, you could be depressed.
You Know Yourself Best
Everyone has different habits and schedules, so there are a lot of possible ways to dig for information. Your calendar could provide insights into missed activities or social engagements, increases in doctors appointments for unexplained complaints. Your e-reader, activity tracker, or even your dishwasher could hold hidden clues to the state of your mental health. Remember, you know yourself better than anyone, so look for any deviation from your brand of normal.
