Anxiety trackers can help you manage your anxiety by noticing patterns. Your free printable mood tracker can help you identify anxiety triggers, the times of day, and other external factors that might cause your anxiety to worsen.
Your anxiety tracker is for personal use only and should not be considered a substitute for therapy or diagnosis from healthcare providers.
Instead, think of your anxiety tracker as a way to learn more about your mental state and how to increase the good days when your anxiety is at its lowest.
This post is all about your printable anxiety tracker.
PRINTABLE ANXIETY TRACKER:
Designing the Anxiety Tracker
At Knockoff Therapy, we know what it’s like to suffer from anxiety. So, we created this tracker with our needs in mind. It requires minimal daily effort, making it that much more likely you’ll keep up with it long enough to notice patterns in your anxiety.
We simplified the rating system from ten increments down to only five to refocus the goal of the tracker on noticing variations in anxiety rather than attempting to decide what differentiates an anxiety level of seven compared to a ten.
Lastly, the comment section is long enough to provide more than one detail if necessary without encouraging you to spend more than five minutes on this activity.
If you would like to delve more into your anxiety trigger, then it may be a good idea to spend ten minutes writing about it in your anxiety journal.
Anxiety is scary, but it’s also manageable. With a great tool like your anxiety tracker, you can develop a better understanding of your anxiety and feel more prepared for anxiety symptoms as they come up in the future.
Reminder: You’re Not Alone
Anxiety can often make you feel like you have no control. Your mind goes through a million thoughts a minute and, usually, they are the worst-case scenarios. When you constantly live like this, it feels impossible to keep track of your mood or improve your emotional state.
Instead, you feel stuck and hopeless. But, with this anxiety tracker, which can also double as a mood chart, you can get a handle on panic attacks and treat yourself to this small act of self care. On your bad days, write down how you’re feeling.
Note that you’re closer to a five on the rating scale and you’re dealing with a lot of anxious thoughts. On your good days, this anxiety tracker is a great way to remind you that you don’t only have bad days.
Why It Works
The anxiety tracker consists of two main features that, when combined, make it incredibly effective. The first is the rating system. You can use it in the way that makes the most sense to you.
However, at Knockoff Therapy, we like to think of the rating system as a rating of how much anxiety you are experiencing. So, when you have a final exam coming up and you’ve been too busy to study as thoroughly as you planned, you probably around a five.
But, a week later, when you get your grade back and it’s an A, your anxiety is probably closer to a one or two. You can opt for a different way of expressing your anxiety. Maybe you think it makes more sense to say that you’re feeling your best at a five.
You can use the daily mood tracker however you would like because its only purpose is to be used on a daily basis so that you can identify patterns in your anxiety. The second key feature of the anxiety tracker is the comments portion.
Inevitably, as you reflect on how much anxiety you’re feeling, you will want to explain why you’re feeling so much anxiety. Maybe your mom called and told you that she’s visiting soon, so your anxiety spiked after that and it’s worth mentioning.
Maybe you woke up super anxious and upset because of a weird dream you had. Both of these scenarios are completely different, which is the reason we think the “Comments” section is so important.
You may not always be able to identify the triggers behind your anxiety. But, when you can, you will be able to use that in the future to predict when you might get anxious and have your coping mechanisms at the ready.
How to Use It
1. Devise a schedule that will help you to use your anxiety every day
Choose the time of day or trigger that will remind you to track your anxiety level. This may look like doing it right before bed to reflect on how you felt during the day. Or maybe you’d rather do it the next day after the day has already ended. Perhaps you’ll choose to mark your anxiety level at the moment when you experience anxiety the most.
2. Use color coding to accentuate your tracker and fill in your ratings
So maybe you don’t have to use color. But it’s more fun that way. You can use a rainbow of colors to represent the five different levels of anxiety.
The benefit of using different colors that correspond to different levels is that, at a glance, you can tell roughly how much anxiety you have experienced throughout the month.
Regardless of how you fill them in, apply a rating system to your general level of anxiety per day. You can choose level one to represent your lowest level of anxiety, which is what we choose, or you can choose level five to be your lowest level of anxiety.
3. Add a brief description that explains your level of anxiety
Identify any events that led to an increase or decrease in your anxiety level. Note that in your “Comments” section. The key to making this a sustainable, useful practice is keeping your notes concise and clear.
For example, if you notice your anxiety increasing after your boss gives you constructive criticism at work, you might write something like “boss criticism.”
Over time, you may start to generalize your triggers into major categories. If you notice that you get anxious whenever anyone criticizes you, you may start writing “criticism” instead of specifying the source of your criticism.
How Tracking Your Anxiety Benefits You
You can manage your anxiety with coping mechanisms with or without this tracker. You will be able to respond to symptoms of anxiety as they arise. It will take practice, but you can respond in the moment if you have the tools to respond.
However, once you begin using anxiety worksheets and a monthly mood tracker among other printable templates, you will be able to manage mood changes before they happen. Instead of relying on coping skills to calm your anxiety, you can get proactive about your anxiety.
If you notice that you get anxious every time you have to give a major presentation at work, you can start using your coping mechanisms way in advance to manage your anxiety before it gets to an unbearable level. (Think level five anxiety on the tracker).
So, the longer you use the weekly tracker, the easier it may become to change a level five anxiety down to a level four anxiety until you can keep the majority of your days level three and below.
Implementing Daily Mood Tracking
It sounds like a lot. You have probably had more than one habit tracker or symptom tracker that you’ve used for all of one week before forgetting. Then, at a certain point, you start feeling guilty that you haven’t used it and you stop wanting to use it altogether.
We’re here to tell you that it’s okay. You can use this anxiety tracker as often or as infrequently as you want. The goal of this anxiety tracker is not create more anxiety for you when you don’t use it. So, permit yourself not to use it.
Tell yourself it’s okay to leave blank boxes and blank pages. Once you’ve taken the pressure away from filling out your anxiety tracker daily, you can start implementing a routine that reminds you to fill it out.
We all work differently, especially if you’re neurodivergent, so find a method that works best for you. You can opt to leave a sticky note somewhere as reminder or you can set up a notification on your phone.
Or you can leave a physical printout of your printable anxiety tracker near your bed to remind you to fill it out before you sleep.
The beauty of a PDF file is that you can use the instant download in different ways. You can add it to your digital planner, save it as a file to add to every day on your computer, or you can print it out to physically write on it.
We Want to Hear From You
At Knockoff Therapy, we have a lot of experience with anxiety. We know what it’s like and which weekly mood tracker template or annual mood tracker would benefit us the most. However, our experience is not your experience.
So, we would love to hear from you and have you reach out with feedback on how to improve our anxiety tracker. Plus, we’d love to hear how it benefits you. Let us know what ways you’ve noticed your anxiety decreasing based on the patterns you see on your anxiety tracker.
There’s no easy, foolproof way to stop experiencing so much anxiety. That’s why it’s so easy to feel like you’re drowning. But, the good news is that you have a community of other people who also experience anxiety.
People like the ones behind this anxiety tracker. It may feel intimidating to keep track of your emotions.
That’s when it’s more important than ever to note when your anxiety rises and the unique needs of your body and mind when you’re experiencing increased anxiety. You deserve to feel better and this mental health tracker will help you get there.
