• I tracked my daily moods in journals for nearly 5 years. • It made me realize I was thinking about happiness wrong — sometimes a bit of tension is good. • Arthur C. Brooks, a happiness expert at Harvard, said journaling is one of the best ways to shift your experience of life.

For almost five years, I've been dutifully drawing little green dots at the top of my journal entries.

A small green dot means it was a generally good day, a slightly bigger one that it was pretty fantastic. A huge one represents one of the handful of no-notes, absolutely perfect days of the year. Orange dots equal stress, red denotes anger, and blue means feeling blue.

It's not exactly scientific, or as sophisticated as the many mood-tracking apps on the market. Still, the simplicity of doodling the dots ma

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