Apps are ideal for Mood Tracking

Everyone should do a daily mood check. Mood Tracking is one of the best ways to find happiness and spot trends that make us sad early on. If you are not convinced yet, look here for a nice summary of the benefits: benefits of happiness tracking. For those of you already doing it, be it on paper or any other way, this blog post will show you the benefits you will gain when using an app such as Luci for your Mood Tracking needs.

Historical data

See your entire happiness at a glance. That’s easy to do for an app or digital platform, but much harder on paper. As we gather more data it will be increasingly more difficult to organise. Apps can automatically organise your mood records per week, month or year. Luci for example will make an average of your ratings per day. Meaning if you make multiple entries per day, your final day rating will stay representative.

Now let’s go through a what if. Imagine you moved to the other side of the country in 2021. Now you can easily track your average happiness of 2022, 2023 compare these trends to the year before. Allow you to answer the question: does your new environment make you happier? That would be very hard question to answer “objectively” using only a piece of paper.

Freedom to move

A good mood tracker will present you the option to export your data easily. Imagine ten years from now you start to spot signs of depression and wish to seek professional help. Because you have used an app for all these years, now you are able to export your mood scores from an entire decade and bring it to your psychiatrist. This qualitative data will aid your doctor in finding the source of your depression, saving you time and money in the process. While this would be possible using pen and paper it would be much harder to do.

Data loss

We wouldn’t want to loss all that data we recorded, would we? Using an app with backup functionality can prevent that. We advise to stick with trusted parties and only have a copy of your data on servers you trust, such as Apple on iOS or Google on Android. That said you can always make hard copies of your phone data just in case. Backing up your analog mood scores is much harder to do.

Our goal is to feel great

Remember that through all of this our goal is to feel great. So whether you use an app or a piece of paper, if you feel great using it… stick with it. We need to keep the habit of happiness tracking so we can harvest the benefits (that do grow over time).

Bonus: turn it into a game

If you find mood tracking a chore to do, try to turn it into a game. For example aim for 200 ratings per year, or reward yourself with something nice if you are able to average an 8/10 for three weeks straight. Most of the mental health benefits come from conscious thoughts and decisions and that should be our goal. And with that happiness will come.