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I tracked my moods every day for almost 5 years. One habit skyrocketed my happiness.

October 28, 2025

Rebecca Zisser/BI

  • I tracked my daily moods in journals for nearly 5 years.
  • It made me realize I was thinking about happiness wrong — sometimes a bit of tension is good.
  • Arthur C. Brooks, a happiness expert at Harvard, said journaling is one of the best ways to shift your experience of life.

For almost five years, I’ve been dutifully drawing little green dots at the top of my journal entries.

A small green dot means it was a generally good day, a slightly bigger one that it was pretty fantastic. A huge one represents one of the handful of no-notes, absolutely perfect days of the year. Orange dots equal stress, red denotes anger, and blue means feeling blue.

It’s not exactly scientific, or as sophisticated as the many mood-tracking apps on the market. Still, the simplicity of doodling the dots made it easier to keep up the habit, which as a result, slowly nudged me toward a happier life.

Journals
I’ve tracked my moods every day since the start of 2021.

Julia Pugachesvky

To better understand the science behind journaling (and why it’s so effective), I reached out to Arthur C. Brooks, a Harvard professor and happiness scientist. He told me that journaling is one of the best ways to achieve metacognition: observing your thoughts as impartially as possible.

“The act of writing down your thoughts moves your emotional experiences from the limbic system — the ‘reptilian’ part of your brain — to the prefrontal cortex, where you can rationally understand your feelings,” Brooks said.

In the long term, being aware of your emotions can give you more control over your life.

As a bit of a data enthusiast (I’ve previously also tracked my drinking habits), I wanted to spot any larger trends in my moods. Which habits made me the happiest? Were there any that tanked my joy? I logged every journal entry from January 2021 through September 2025.

Here’s how it looks, big-picture:

From tracking my moods for so long, I already had a sense that a lot of standard (read: boring) happiness advice is true: I recorded my best moods on days when I drank less, slept well, exercised, socialized, felt engaged at work, and did something nice for someone.

Zooming out, I also realized that much of what I assumed about happiness was not only wrong but contradictory. Fully experiencing “bad” emotions, such as annoyance or anger, was vital to my well-being in the long run. Documenting my vacations on Instagram led to steeper drops in life satisfaction, no matter how many enthusiastic responses I received.

It also taught me what I’m missing: how even the most optimized, data-tracked life doesn’t guarantee eternal happiness.

Mindset shaped my mood

For most of my life, I looked at effortlessly cheerful people and wondered what guidebook they were given to live that way. While other teens belted upbeat Taylor Swift songs and had boyfriends, my idea of fun was rewatching remakes of “Jane Eyre” alone.

Was I doomed to be like this forever?

According to Brooks, some people really are born peppier. He said researchers estimate that a whopping 50% of our happiness is genetic, and another 25% is circumstantial. “If your parents are genetically predisposed to be gloomy and you grow up in poverty, chances are you won’t be very happy,” he said.

Dots in a journal
Tracking my moods through little dots felt easier than logging them into an app.

Julia Pugachevsky

Fortunately, the other 25% of happiness is within our control and tied to our habits, such as setting goals and physical activity.

My least-happy years overall were 2021 and 2022. Those years, for me, were defined by the ongoing drag of the pandemic and the terror I felt for my family in Ukraine at the start of the war. Even still, the green line, which denotes my happiness, generally soars above the other emotions.

Gratitude gave me huge boosts. For example, I noted an uptick in happiness after I got vaccinated against COVID-19 in April 2021, which meant being able to freely travel without worrying about contracting the virus for the first time in over a year.

In the long term, Brooks said that knowing what makes me feel more grateful can encourage me to seek out healthier habits and stronger connections, potentially outweighing any genetic predisposition to be glum.

Not all stress is bad

My idea of heaven is to be perpetually burrito’d in bed while eating an actual burrito. In the real world, my most joyful moments often spring from shaking up my life and experiencing true milestones.

I experienced stress spikes when I first switched roles at work, brought a kitten home, and got engaged, all because I’m prone to catastrophizing. As the chart shows, my happiness jumped up after the initial jitters.

Brooks said happiness consists of three “macronutrients”: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. While you need all three, “You’ll notice that the second macronutrient — satisfaction — means something like the joy after a struggle.”

A hand with engagement ring petting cat
When I was excited about my engagement, cat, and job at the same time.

Julia Pugachevsky

He said humans are uniquely wired to appreciate struggle because it encourages hard work, which often leads to rewards.

In recent years, euphoria came from pushing my body to its limits — running the New York City Marathon, taking a public speaking workshop that made me sweat through my button-down, and hitting it off with strangers instead of staying in.

It’s a nice reminder that maximizing comfort doesn’t maximize happiness. Sometimes, “self-care” is just avoidance in a face mask.

Scheduled hangouts provide emotional supplements

Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot better at making friends. Most of that came from putting close relationships on — hear me out — autopilot.

These days, with fewer third spaces to hang out beyond your home, socializing isn’t always so easy. So I proactively looked for group activities. It felt awkward at first, but it helped me reap the benefits of in-person interaction without wasting time coordinating the exact two-hour period a friend and I could meet for drinks.

Now, every week, I have some combination of choir rehearsals, run club meets, or weightlifting classes where I’m guaranteed to either see one of my friends or someone who welcomes chatting.

It solves a problem Brooks said he sees often with very successful people: they say “that they just ‘don’t have time’ for friends.” He suggests penciling in social time the same way you would a client meeting.

Facing my anger curbed overthinking

Inside me, there are two wolves. There’s the meek Julia Pugachevsky most people know, who orders food like she’s apologizing. And there’s the other J.P.: Joe Pesci, or the famously outspoken, no-nonsense movie versions of him.

Joe Pesci in "My Cousin Vinny"
I aspire to be more like Joe Pesci’s protagonist in “My Cousin Vinny.”

Twentieth Century Fox

While I longed to unleash my inner Vinny Gambini from “My Cousin Vinny”, I defaulted to being a chronic people-pleaser. If someone walked all over me, I didn’t sass back or stick up for myself. I just ruminated over how I could do better, barely being honest with myself when I felt overlooked, insulted, or even just disinterested.

Brooks said part of the problem was how I framed emotions like irritation as “bad.” The best use of anger is to treat it “as nothing more than a signal that something is disrupting our environment.” This keeps you from either reacting rashly or burying frustrations, instead focusing on positive solutions.

Looking at the chart, I noticed that I marked down anger more frequently toward the end of 2023. It inched upward more consistently, but also didn’t spike as much as it did in the past.

Acknowledging what annoyed me helped me identify what I disliked: conversations where I’m the only one asking questions, wincing through horror movies, and any outing that starts at 9 p.m.

Ultimately, being honest with myself about my preferences lowered my anxiety and sadness, because I was no longer going through the motions of my own life. I was shaping it to be one I actively enjoyed.

I don’t miss social media at all

One night in 2024, I caught myself sending my friends yet another AI video of anthropomorphic cats reenacting tragic soap-opera scenarios to Sia covers where the lyrics are just “meow.” Then I looked through a tertiary acquaintance’s wedding photos, wasting about 20 minutes.

That’s when I decided to start my New Year’s resolution early and delete Instagram from my phone. Months later, I bought a gadget called a Brick to block the internet on my phone in the morning.

Using Brick app on smartphone
I use the Brick app to block the internet from my phone before I go to sleep.

Julia Pugachevsky

I didn’t expect that to trigger the most drastic improvement to my mental health out of nearly any other habit I adopted.

It’s no surprise: social media’s negative effects have been documented for years. A 2025 Pew Research survey found that 48% of teens said social media harmed their mental health.

After cutting down, I felt immediately better. Without other people’s vacation galleries or watered-down political infographics, my happiness crept upward.

Over time, being more offline helped me reconnect with who I was. I can better tell when I genuinely align with something, versus when I’m being nudged into sameness. I like myself more because I recognize my own point of view, sans algorithm.

This was not a shocker to Brooks. “When we fritter our time away on our phones, we cannot contemplate the bigger questions of our lives, such as why we’re alive or what we’re put on Earth to do,” he said.

I now live a more appstinent lifestyle. It’s the best change I’ve made, and I’ll shout from the rooftops — no reposts required.

I could use more hope

While I’ve successfully optimized my life toward greater happiness, there’s one piece missing: I don’t have much hope for the world.

I’m not sure if it’s due to a natural predisposition or an addiction to reading doom-and-gloom news headlines (likely both!). Statistically, I’m not alone in being somewhat pessimistic: over 18% of Americans feel depressed, according to a 2025 Gallup poll.

The antidote, it turns out, could be having more hope — something a recent study found is even more important to well-being than happiness.

Woman looking out at a lake and mountains
I could gaze out at something this peaceful and still fixate on whatever I just read in the news.

Brad Johnson

There are a few people in my life who seem unshakable in this sense, able to face objective hardship without falling into despair. Lately, I’ve asked them for their secrets. For some, it’s God. For others, optimism is just the logical way to be.

I asked Brooks, a Catholic who writes about the teachings of other religions and philosophies in his column in The Atlantic, for his take. He said he has spoken to many students whose families have experienced extreme adversity, such as war and poverty, and still found ways to enjoy life.

His advice for cultivating hope? “Focus on improving your relationships — with your loved ones, your colleagues, and the divine.”

I learned that happiness can be gamed, to an extent. You can log your habits and slowly build a life that suits you. But hope, the deep-in-your-bones belief that things will turn out OK, can’t be summoned as easily. For that, we need each other.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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