The majority of us are raised in an environment without self-awareness of our emotions, their causes, and changes. However, today’s kids benefit from their schools’ socio-emotional learning curriculum.
What is a mood meter?
The mood meter is a simple XY plot, where X denotes your pleasantness level and Y denotes your energy level. But this definition is not sufficient to understand the concept of the origin of the mood meter.
So here is the answer:
Mood Meter is an app designed specifically to help users improve their understanding of moods. Research has confirmed that our moods not only influence our decision-making capability but also our behavior toward others. We can say that a mood meter is an app developed to recognize emotions in ourselves and others. It helps us make strategies to regulate our emotions and provides us with a language so we can talk about our feelings more openly.
Let’s understand how to use a mood meter
As we already know, a mood meter is an XY plot. It has four quadrants
Blue
It indicates low energy/low pleasantness
Green
It indicates low energy/high pleasantness
Red
It indicates high energy/low pleasantness
Yellow
It indicates high energy/high pleasantness
How does it work?
Depending on your energy and pleasantness level decide in which quadrant your emotion fits.
Before you do that, remember that no emotions are wrong, so don’t feel guilty about which quadrant your emotions fall into.
Once you are done finding out which quadrant your emotions fall into, try to figure out the cause behind them. For example, are you depressed because you still haven’t achieved the goal you targeted, or are you calm because you had a long and healthy conversation with your friend? Any more reasons could be there.
Now decide what to do next and do it. Think about the ways that can help you change your state of unpleasantness. For example:
Do exercise
Cook a delicious meal
Spend time with friends
Take a break from work
At that time, whatever you want to do
Once you have taken action, reassess whether your mood has changed. If yes, then well done! Alternatively, give yourself another chance, but be loyal to yourself at all times.
Benefits of a mood meter
We can say that the mood meter helps the user to better understand emotions in a better way.
Try using the mood meter with your family
Encourage your family members to write down their feelings several times throughout the day or week. Use the color code of the mood meter while discussing your feelings. If your child is in blue today and you want them to be in green, is there anything we can help with? Slowly, it would feel more communicable and comfortable while sharing emotions. And once you are used to identifying emotions with color try to give them a different word. It’s possible to describe your child’s emotions in other words, for example, if your child is in red and feeling angry. Then discuss strategies to shift to a different quadrant, which is more pleasant, and more energetic.
One last note:
By using a mood meter, a person can determine their mood at any given moment and adjust their mood accordingly.