Four Numbers Before Noon
Anxiety rated 1-10. Depression rated 1-10. Sleep in hours. Drama — the environmental stress load of a given day — also 1-10, with a second Drama field for a written description of what actually happened. Four numbers and a description, timestamped, logged before the day's second major event occurs.
That is the entire intake. The log lives or dies on consistency, not complexity.
The timestamp matters more than most mood tracking apps acknowledge. Anxiety levels at 7am look different from the same person's anxiety level at 8pm. The cyclical patterns that matter for medication adjustments — breakthrough anxiety in the late afternoon, depressive dips in the first hours after waking — are only visible when the time-of-day variable is present in the data.
What "Drama" Is Actually Measuring
The Drama field is doing something specific that most mood logs don't address directly: it separates internal state from external stressor load. A person can have a low-drama day — nothing notable happened — and still score 8 on anxiety. Or they can have a high-drama day and score 3 on anxiety because they were fully activated and coped well. The relationship between Drama and Anxiety across thirty entries tells you whether your anxiety is predominantly reactive to external events or whether it's operating independent of them. Those are different clinical pictures.
The written Drama description field gives your therapist or psychiatrist the contextual narrative they need to interpret the numbers. "Work presentation" means something different from "family conflict" even at identical Drama scores.
What the Log Shows When the Medication Changes
Medication taken — drug name and dose — attached to each dated entry creates a before/after comparison that no prescriber can generate from appointment notes alone. When an SNRI is introduced on a specific date, the log shows whether the anxiety trend line changed in the weeks that followed. When a dose is adjusted, the sleep and depression scores from the week after the adjustment are directly comparable to the week before.
Coping Technique used is the variable that most clinical logs omit. It's the difference between a log that documents outcomes and a log that builds a personal evidence base. If breathing exercises consistently produce a two-point drop in anxiety scores while vigorous exercise produces a four-point drop, that is information that changes behaviour. Without the log, the effectiveness of each technique exists only as a subjective impression.
The data becomes useful at scale. Fifteen entries is noise. Sixty entries is signal. At ninety entries — three months of daily logging — the patterns that were invisible at the start of the process become unmistakable, and the next appointment with a prescriber has a structured history behind it rather than a verbal summary.