Best Journals and Diaries for Perimenopause Symptom Tracking
Tracking perimenopause symptoms in a journal can reveal patterns, improve GP conversations, and give you a sense of agency. Here are the best options.
Why Tracking Your Symptoms Changes Everything
Perimenopause is unpredictable by nature. Symptoms shift from week to week and month to month. Without a record, it is easy to underestimate how much is happening or to misattribute symptoms to stress, ageing, or lifestyle factors. Keeping a symptom journal or diary transforms this blur into data. Over weeks and months, patterns emerge: you might notice that hot flashes cluster in the week before your period, that brain fog is worst after poor sleep, or that joint pain eases when you exercise consistently. These patterns are valuable for your own understanding and essential for productive conversations with a GP or gynaecologist. A good journal is also simply a form of self-compassion, an acknowledgement that what you are experiencing deserves attention and documentation.
Dedicated Perimenopause Symptom Journals
A handful of printed journals have been developed specifically for perimenopause symptom tracking, and they offer a more structured approach than a blank notebook. These typically include daily symptom rating scales for the most common perimenopause symptoms, space to record sleep quality, mood, energy, and cycle information, and prompts for noting potential triggers and lifestyle factors. The Perimenopause Journal by Dr Lara Briden offers structured tracking alongside educational content, which helps contextualise what you are recording. The Balance App Menopause Workbook, created alongside the Balance menopause app, uses a validated symptom scoring framework based on the Greene Climacteric Scale. These dedicated formats save time and ensure you are tracking the right variables.
Symptom Rating Scales Worth Using
Not all symptom tracking is equal. Using a validated scale rather than freeform notes produces more consistent and comparable data over time. The Greene Climacteric Scale is a widely used 21-item questionnaire that rates the severity of physical, vasomotor, psychological, and sexual symptoms. The Menopause Rating Scale (MRS) is another validated tool available as a downloadable PDF. Incorporating one of these into a weekly journalling habit, rather than trying to complete it daily, is realistic for most people and provides clinically meaningful data. Several women find that bringing a completed MRS to a GP appointment significantly improves the quality of the consultation compared with trying to describe symptoms verbally from memory.
Bullet Journalling for Perimenopause
The bullet journal method is highly adaptable and appeals to women who want a more personalised tracking system. A bullet journal approach to perimenopause tracking might include a monthly habit tracker with daily columns for sleep hours, symptom severity (rated 1 to 5), exercise, and mood. A cycle tracking spread can show the relationship between cycle phase and symptom intensity. A weekly log with space for reflection, notes on what helped, and any medical appointments or conversations adds qualitative depth alongside the quantitative data. The flexibility of the bullet journal format means you can easily add or remove tracking variables as you learn more about your own symptom patterns. Standard dot-grid notebooks from brands like Leuchtturm1917 or Archer and Olive are popular choices.
Digital Journals and Apps
Digital tracking has significant advantages over paper for perimenopause symptom management, particularly in terms of pattern recognition over time. Apps can visualise trends in ways that paper records cannot, making it easy to see whether symptoms are worsening, improving, or cycling. PeriPlan is designed specifically for this, allowing you to log symptoms and track patterns over time, log workouts, and see your workout progress over time. This kind of longitudinal data becomes particularly valuable when you have been tracking for several months and want to bring clear evidence to a healthcare appointment or assess whether a new supplement or lifestyle change is having an effect. Cloud backup means your records are not lost if a notebook is misplaced.
Menopause and Mood Diaries for Mental Health
For women whose most prominent perimenopause symptoms are psychological, a mood-focused diary format may be more useful than a general symptom journal. Mood diaries typically track emotional state at multiple points during the day, anxiety levels, sleep quality, and any identifiable triggers or relieving factors. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for menopause often incorporates a structured thought diary alongside mood tracking. The British Menopause Society has made CBT-based mood diary templates available for self-directed use. There is also value in tracking the relationship between physical symptoms and mood, as hot flash frequency, sleep quality, and pain levels all have documented effects on emotional wellbeing, and seeing these connections in writing can reduce the tendency to blame oneself for difficult emotions.
Getting the Most from Your Journal Practice
Consistency matters more than detail. A two-minute daily entry covering key symptoms, sleep, and mood is more useful than an elaborate weekly entry that often gets skipped. Setting a regular time, such as first thing in the morning or just before bed, helps make journalling a stable habit. Dating every entry is essential for retrospective analysis. Periodically reviewing the past month and noting any patterns is where the real value lies, so setting aside fifteen minutes monthly for this review is worthwhile. Sharing a summary of your journal with your GP, whether in paper form or as app screenshots, gives your clinician objective information rather than impressionistic recall, and tends to produce more focused and productive consultations about your perimenopause management.
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