PMDD Tracker: How to Track Mood Across Your Cycle So a Doctor Can Diagnose It

A PMDD tracker is a daily record of your mood and physical symptoms, lined up against your cycle. It matters more than most health logs because, for premenstrual dysphoric disorder, the record is the diagnosis. The DSM-5 criteria state that the symptom pattern should be confirmed by prospective daily ratings across at least two symptomatic cycles. Prospective means logged on the day, not remembered afterwards; a provisional diagnosis can be made before the ratings are in, but confirmation waits for them.

Memory is bad at this. Asked in a clinic how the last month felt, most people compress it; asked in the week before a period, they colour the whole month with how they feel now. Daily ratings show what recall cannot: whether low mood, anger or anxiety appear after ovulation, peak in the days before bleeding, then — in the DSM-5's words — start to improve within a few days after the period starts and become minimal or absent in the week after it, and whether the follicular weeks are genuinely clear. That contrast between the two halves of the cycle is what separates PMDD from depression or anxiety that happens to worsen premenstrually.

The standard research instrument is the Daily Record of Severity of Problems (DRSP), a one-page form rated every evening. A phone tracker that logs the same things daily, and can show or export them by cycle phase, does the same job with less friction.

Track the same things every day, whether or not you feel premenstrual, so the quiet days are in the record too. The DSM-5 list for PMDD has eleven symptoms; a diagnosis needs five, at least one of them from the four core mood items: marked mood swings or sudden sadness, marked irritability or anger, depressed mood or hopelessness, and marked anxiety or tension. The others are loss of interest, trouble concentrating, fatigue, appetite change or cravings, sleep change, feeling overwhelmed, and physical symptoms such as breast tenderness, bloating or joint pain.

So log, at minimum, a mood rating, irritability, anxiety, energy, sleep and your physical symptoms. The research forms rate each one for severity; a tracker that only records whether a symptom was there still works, as long as you log every day, the quiet days included. Add one line on impact: did it cost you work, plans or an interaction with someone you love that day. Impairment is what tips PMS into PMDD; the symptom list alone does not.

Then look at the shape across the cycle. PMS is mild to moderate and does not stop your life. PMDD is severe and confined to the luteal phase: the DSM-5 wording is that symptoms start to improve within a few days after the period begins and become minimal or absent in the week after it — an improvement with a shape, not an off-switch on day one. Symptoms present all month with a premenstrual peak point to premenstrual exacerbation of another condition, which is treated differently. Our PMS or PMDD guide, linked below, walks through the criteria in detail.

Two symptomatic cycles is the diagnostic minimum, and it is worth knowing why the word symptomatic is there: a cycle in which you happened to feel fine does not count towards the two, so budget for three to be safe. In calendar terms that is usually two to three months of daily entries before a diagnosis can be confirmed.

Do not wait to book. Many clinicians will see you now, take a history, check for thyroid and other causes, make a provisional diagnosis and ask you to keep rating while you wait for the follow-up. Bringing even three weeks of daily data to a first appointment makes that conversation better, and some doctors will start treatment on a provisional basis while the confirming cycles come in.

What to bring: your daily ratings by cycle day, a marker for each period start, and one page on what the worst days cost you. If the tracker exports a report, print or share it; a chart of mood against cycle day says in a glance what takes ten minutes to explain. Keep logging after diagnosis: the same record is how you and your doctor tell whether a treatment is working or a dose needs changing.

Whatever you use, four properties matter more than the brand.

Daily, with a reminder. The DSM-5 asks for prospective ratings; a log filled in every third day from memory is a retrospective log with extra steps.

More than one rating. PMDD is diagnosed on irritability and anxiety as much as on sadness, and a single happy-to-sad score cannot separate an anxious, wired day from a flat, exhausted one. Rate mood and energy, record irritability and anxiety as well, and log physical symptoms separately.

Phase alignment. The record has to line each day up with its cycle day and phase, and let you compare the luteal half against the follicular half. A mood diary that does not know when your period started cannot do this.

An exportable report. Your clinician needs the pattern on paper or a screen, not your phone passed across a desk.

PinkyBloom is built for this: mood and energy are logged on their own scales, irritability and anxiety are logged alongside them from the symptom list, and the picker offers 24 symptoms in cycle mode out of a catalogue of 65. Every entry is tagged with its cycle phase, and on iPhone a doctor-prep flow turns the last months into a short PDF report you can hand over, with a CSV export of the raw days. It is free on iPhone and Android, and the record stays on your phone.

It can, if what he receives is timing rather than explanation. Partners of people with PMDD describe the same confusion: two good weeks, then a person who seems to have changed, with no warning and no framework. Knowing the luteal phase has started, and that today is a hard one, lets him plan lightly and not take a sharp answer personally, without anyone narrating it in the moment.

PinkyBloom does this through PinkyBond, a companion app on his phone, and you decide how much crosses over. At the Basic level he sees your phase. At the Mood level he also sees the mood word and energy you logged today, drawn from the same daily record you keep for your doctor. A separate toggle can share a coarse rough-day pattern: the share of hard days by phase and where they tend to peak, never which days or why. Notes, symptom lists and raw entries stay on your phone at every level, and you can pause sharing whenever you like; he is not told.

Two cautions. Sharing a phase is not a diagnosis, and it does not make his reactions your job to manage. And if the response you get is “you’re only upset because of your hormones”, that is a conversation about him, not about the app.

This deserves a real answer, because a daily mood log is some of the most sensitive data a person generates, and most period trackers with a cloud or partner feature store it in readable form on the company’s servers. The FTC’s cases against Flo and Premom were about exactly this class of data leaving the phone.

Ask three questions of any tracker. Where does the data live? Who can read it? What happens if I share it?

For PinkyBloom the answers are these. Your health data stays on your phone unless you turn on iCloud backup or partner sharing, and we can’t read it either way. There is no account, no email and no phone number, so there is no profile to attach the log to. iCloud backup, if you turn it on, goes to your own private iCloud. Partner sharing is end-to-end encrypted between the two phones; what he receives is a derived snapshot (phase, a mood word, energy), and the relay in between holds only ciphertext it cannot open. Analytics are first-party only, with no third-party SDKs, and health fields are blocked from ever being sent. The PDF report you generate for your doctor is a file you hold, and you decide who receives it.

PMDD has effective, evidence-based treatments, and the daily record that got you the diagnosis is also how you and your doctor judge whether one is working. In summary, following ACOG and IAPMD guidance:

SSRIs are first-line. Unusually for antidepressants they act within days for PMDD rather than weeks, so they can be taken continuously or only during the luteal phase, from around ovulation until the period starts. Which pattern suits you is a conversation with your prescriber.

Combined oral contraceptives containing drospirenone, taken with a short or no pill-free interval, suppress ovulation and are an option if you also want contraception. One formulation — 3 mg drospirenone with 20 micrograms of ethinyl estradiol on a 24-day regimen — carries a specific PMDD indication in the United States, for people who want an oral contraceptive anyway. Worth knowing that approval is not the same as a demonstrated mood benefit: ACOG cites a Cochrane review in which drospirenone-containing pills did not significantly improve premenstrual mood symptoms against placebo.

Cognitive behavioural therapy adapted for premenstrual symptoms helps with the emotional and behavioural side and combines well with medication.

GnRH analogues, which switch off the ovarian cycle and are given with add-back hormones to protect bone, are a later-line option for severe cases that have not responded, usually under specialist care. Surgery is a last resort.

Calcium and regular exercise are in the guidelines as supportive measures — ACOG suggests 1,000 to 1,200 mg of calcium a day and routine exercise, both as conditional recommendations on low-quality evidence. Cutting alcohol and caffeine is a different kind of advice: it is Mayo Clinic self-care guidance, and neither ACOG's 2023 guideline nor RCOG's Green-top 48 mentions either substance at all. It may still be worth trying; it is not an evidence-backed treatment, and we should not have implied it was. None of this is a prescription; it is the menu your doctor will be choosing from, and this page is not medical advice.