Mood charting

Can anyone tell me what's so important about mood charting? I've read that I should do it and I've downloaded an app for it, but I don't do it. Anyone can shed a little light for me?

I am really interested in knowing the answer too

I started to do it. It can be helpful I guess to look back at your moods.
My Pdoc doesn't seem to think it's all that important though.

I do it so I can find patterns. It helped me discover my rapid cycling pattern of two to three weeks in any given mood state. Sometime it can help you identify triggers as well. For me, if I journal as well, it will also help me remember how bad each mood state was so that I'm not tempted to ditch meds. The app I use has a place for notes and if I look back on the notes I will read things that will remind me of paranoia or intrusive thoughts or just black ugly depression so I know I don't want to go there again.

It's not for everyone but it can be useful.

I find a mood / event / thought better because I can see what type of a day I had then I just mark week by week on a mood chart. The m/e/t chart helps my therapist and me know exactly what my week was like and the important things that happened. Where my psychiatrist gets the overview of how I'm feeling.

The m/e/t chart helps me know if I'm being a jerk. I journal as well. My chart also has a did I take my meds.

My pdoc loves when I mood chart. I made my own where morning and night I rate my mood with a number - 0 is baseline, -1 to -3 are levels of depression, and +1 to +3 are levels of mania. Then I rate anxiety and irritability from 1-10, write down how many hours of sleep I got, what meds I've taken, and then leave a big blank section for notes where I write down daily events that might contribute to my mood/anxiety.

It helps you and your doctor see a pattern in your moods. It helps you figure out what your triggers are. It helps you track things you might not necessarily remember to tell your doctor about. It really helps you manage your illness. I don't do it all the time, only when I'm having episodes, or feel at risk of an episode. I tend to end up manic every October, so I track that month for sure. If you can get ahead of the game and catch mania or depression early, it's easier to avoid a full blown episode.

My psychiatrist advocates and strongly recommends her patients (including myself) to keep a mood diary. There are a few reasons why it can be helpful to mood chart but I personally see a flaw in trying to get patients to actively record their mood when depressed or indeed manic because when you're in that state, do you really want to do that? Do you necessarily feel the need to do so?

I've found it quite helpful though. Keeping a mood diary is good for identifying the triggers of certain mood states and/or emotions as well as recording the pace of mood cycles and when/why that may be exacerbated.

Where am I going with this anyway?

It's easier than getting in a shower. Haha.

TheatreKid, your chart sounds quite a bit like mine. I chart pretty regularly, though there have been spans where it fell apart. In addition to things others have already mentioned …. Having a really bad sense of time, it helps in remembering things more accurately. (For instance, I could be hypo, and if someone were to ask for how long, my response might be something like, "Oh, dunno, maybe 3 days??" When in fact it's been a week and a half.) Also, I generally perceive things as not as bad/out of hand as they actually are, so the chart can be a good reality check. Heh. Had fallen out of charting, then had a bad patch a couple of months ago.
BF:"You should start charting again"
Me:"Yeah, it's been a little rough."
BF: "You have no idea."
Lol.