Using Notion to track PMDD symptoms and moods for mental health

PMDD encompasses the mental health symptoms related to PMS. It’s horribly named—pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder—back when women were witches that you burned at the stake if you caught them reading a nonfiction book to further their knowledge.

Why to make a mental health mood tracker

If you’ve been diagnosed with PMDD or suspect you have mental health symptoms based on fluctuating hormones, tracking your mood can help you make better predictions for when you’ll feel on or off—like when you might need to make a note to self to cancel your dark and twisty thoughts for a few days.

If you track input (like, “I had a pint of ice cream last night”) as well as output (like, “and the next day I caused my spouse to spontaneously combust with my glare”), this can also help you pinpoint what diet and lifestyle factors contribute to your mood stability or lack thereof.

How to create a basic mental health mood tracker template in Notability for free

Simple as pie. It’s really just one database viewed in two different ways on the same page.

Step 1: Create your Notion page

I called this something less dire like “I’m cranky and I know it” and named it “Mental health tracker.” Added nice, calming plants and cover image to help me calm TF down.

Step 2: Create a Notion database to track your moods

The database is simple-ish and has these properties:

• Title (I use this as a pithy overview of the day, as if I had to describe it to an acquaintance)

• Date

• Overall mood (single-select dropdown for good, neutral, and bad)

• Moods (multi-select dropdown with a few dozen moods I want to track across the spectrum of moods)

• Cycle (a number property with the circle tracker out of 28)

• Symptoms (to track traditional, physical PMS symptoms)

• Countdown (a simple calculation to subtract Cycle from 28)

• Status (a more complex calculation to show whether it’s my doomsday days 👿, my period days 🩸, or any other normal day 👍. These are predictions based on my experiences in the past and can be edited in the future if I find that my “overall mood” and “status” don’t match up often).

Here are the calculations I used:

Countdown

subtract(28, prop("cycle"))

Status

In plain language, this one says:

• If my cycle days are between 18 through 20 days (which means I’m 10 to 8 days from the start of my period), it’s the danger zone 👿

• If my cycle is on days 1 through 5, I’m probably on my period 🩸

• If it’s any other day, I’m a-ok 👍

if(
  prop("cycle") >= 18 
  and prop("cycle") <= 20, 
    "👿", 
  if(prop("cycle") <= 5, 
    "🩸", 
    "👍")
)

Step 3: Set up your Notion database views to optimize your mood tracker

Within the page, I created one list database view and one calendar database view, and showed different properties per view:

List view:

• Title

• Mood

• Cycle

• Date

Calendar view:

• Title

• Cycle

• Overall (my direct input)

• Status (my mood via an equation based on history)

I can use this template as a future-forward thing if I wanted to, but for now I will just use it to track moods day by day.

I also weirdly had the time and energy to create a (very casual and low-production value) YouTube video to help walk you through this.

Hope you find this helpful! Please PLEASE share it with anyone you know that struggles with PMDD and/or loves Notion.