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Before you even open your first chart for the session, take fifteen seconds to note your current mental state in plain language: tired, anxious, angry, calm, rushed, distracted — whatever genuinely applies. This small step, added consistently to your journal, becomes remarkably predictive over time.

Here's why it works. Most traders assume their losses come primarily from bad setups or unlucky market conditions. When you actually cross-reference logged emotional states against losing trades over a large enough sample, a very different and much more useful pattern often emerges: certain emotional states — "rushed because I started late," "irritated from something unrelated to trading," "overtired" — show up disproportionately often right before the costliest mistakes.

This isn't mystical. It's simply that emotional state affects decision quality, and once you have the data laid out in front of you instead of relying on vague memory, the pattern becomes obvious and specific to you personally — not some generic psychology-book advice, but your own documented tendencies.

Once you know your specific danger states, you can act on that knowledge directly. If you notice you logged "rushed" and then find yourself in that state again mid-session, that's your cue to either slow down deliberately or step away from the platform entirely until the state passes. The journal isn't just recording what happened — it's building an early warning system for what's about to happen.

Hi Fairman,

thank you for this post, its interesting.
I hear for first time to taking notes in trading diary about your mental statement, i have never think about it like this.

You are right, that personal mental health and psychology state is very important for trading .. i guess everybody knows from
their own experience, what is like revenge trading etc.
Plus trading it self is not easy and time to time if you will not care about yourself you can have mental breakdown and lost all of your account.

I found out, what works for me:

1.) I do not trade long never ending trading series. Trading series have its start and end.
2.) Once i trade i take everyday like at least every day 10km walk and some day run, or mountain bike.
3.) I live in Spa city. (huge improvment)
4.) I scale my account from profit, not own money. (biggest improvment)

I think, that is important, that you have opened this kind of topic, because internet is full of fake gurus, who presents only partiing, luxury cars and vacations,
but they do not show the hard reality.

And in long run, you have figure it out for yourself, how to handle stress, because it is huge implicator of your future trading success.

Fairman wrote:Before you even open your first chart for the session, take fifteen seconds to note your current mental state in plain language

Useful habit. I started tagging sessions years ago after noticing that “rushed / slept badly / already annoyed” predicted my worst London opens better than any indicator.

One line in the journal: mood + sleep + whether I am forcing trades to “make the morning count.” Then I compare against the day’s R later. Patterns show up fast — for me, rushed mornings correlate with chasing the first impulse after 8am London.

If the tag is ugly, the fix is not heroic discipline; it is smaller size or no trade until the tag improves. Psychology notes without a behaviour change are just diary fiction.

Do you keep the emotion tag free-text, or use a fixed short list so the sample stays comparable week to week?

Mood tag before the first chart

Fifteen seconds on emotional state before the open is one of the highest-ROI habits I kept. Tired, rushed, angry, calm — written plainly. Over a quarter those tags predict which mornings I should have stayed at warm-up size.

Frankfurt rule: if the pre-session tag is angry or rushed, max risk per trade drops automatically and the two-loss walk-away becomes a one-loss soft stop. I do not debate it after EURUSD has already printed. The tag is the decision.

It also keeps the evening review honest. “I was fine” is not data; “anxious + FOMO tag on three tickets” is.

Prop days get the same checkbox. Funded drawdown rules do not care that you slept badly — your size should.

I keep the tag vocabulary tiny on purpose. Too many mood words and I start performing psychology instead of reporting it. Plain language beats clever labels.

What tag has been your most expensive predictor — tired, or the quiet overconfidence after a green week?

PTScalper wrote: I scale my account from profit, not own money. (biggest improvment)

The daily walk is underrated. I do something similar after any session that included a big release, win or lose, because the adrenaline from a fast market doesn't disappear when the platform closes, and it tends to leak into the next day's decisions if I go straight from the screen to the evening.

Your first point is interesting too. Trading in defined series with a start and an end gives a natural moment to stop and review, which a never-ending account doesn't. It's the trading equivalent of a season.

On scaling from profit, one condition matters: the risk per trade should still be set as a fixed percentage of the whole account, so a good run doesn't quietly turn into much bigger positions. Profit funds the growth, but the rules stay the same.

Plain-language labels work well because they are quick and honest. After a few weeks, sorting trades by label usually shows that "rushed" and "angry" trades lose more than average, while "calm" ones do better.

One step further is to use the label as a filter. If the label before a trade is one of the bad ones, the trade is skipped or taken at half size. That turns the journal from a record into a tool.

I use a short fixed list, and I switched to it after free-text turned into a mess. Mine has five tags: rushed, slept badly, annoyed, flat, fine. The free text version meant I wrote "tired-ish" one week and "not great" the next, and I couldn't count either of them. With five tags, after 40 trading days I could see rushed mornings averaged -0.35R against +0.1R on fine ones.

Your rushed morning chasing the first impulse after 8am matches mine. If the tag is ugly, the fix of smaller size or no trade is much better than willpower. Say I'm rushed and normally risk 0.5 percent. Cutting to 0.25 percent, or waiting until 9:00, turns a 1R stop from 500 dollars into 250 on a 100,000 dollar account, and I still get to trade once I've settled.

The line about forcing trades to make the morning count is uncomfortably accurate, especially on days after a loss. I'd add one more field, whether yesterday ended red, because I think it changes how I behave on the open.

Psychology notes without a behaviour change are diary fiction is good, and I'll quote it in my own journal.

How many days did you need before the pattern showed up, and did you act on it right away or wait for a bigger sample? And do you tag at the open or before the first trade?