Daylio Journal - Daily Diary 4+

Wonderful Mood Tracker

I was looking for a mood tracking app where I could have multiple entries throughout the day, not just one at the end. I use this app to help track my anxiety and how I feel leading up to an anxious period as well as other moods. I love that I can go back and add entries even days later if I forgot. I also love that it’s completely customizable and I can have tons of options. I did end up upgrading to premium to unlock unlimited moods and activities because I find it really beneficial and absolutely worth the around $20 a year. I have an activities folder with ranges for my heart rate so so can track that during an anxiety attack, I have one with different physical symptoms like sweaty, dizzy, etc., and even a folder for methods and techniques I’ve already tried to calm down. I hate having to type out every little thing so being able to just go through and simply pick what applies at the moment is great. The small comment section is great as well if I want to add a small note about something that might be important but not frequent enough for its own button. This app is really fantastic for helping track moods and keeping a record of how I am feeling and when in an easy to use format that’s customizable to every person, even down to the color scheme. I started off simply looking for an app where I could have more than one daily entry but this app goes above and beyond.

Great insight into yourself, simple, useful - Love it!

I have always loved to journal and document both important and mundane days in my life. It’s easy to do with this app, even if you only have a few minutes to check in with yourself to see how you are feeling. All you do is click a few buttons to record what you’ve been doing and how you feel, the app records the time stamp and you’re done! Or if you have more time you can add text too - a little or a lot - I’ve written paragraphs at times.

As someone diagnosed bipolar over 20 years ago, using this app is a great way to track moods (I too am in to the popular “mindfulness” trend, even before it became popular): it allows me to pause throughout the day, take a few minutes to sit quietly, notice how my body feels, see what kind of feelings my thoughts bring up in me, and then record that snapshot. Then, at any time I can look at the app’s simple reports that show a variety of trends in you activities and mood over a given period of time. I may think, “wow, I’ve been down and frustrated a lot lately” and then look over the report for the month and see that I actually had a lot of really positive times too. It helps me focus on the positive and work on training my brain not to go automatically to the negative. With practice, our brains CAN be rewired that way! I’ve done it successfully with a couple different things I wanted to change.

Anyway, try the app. It’s great!

Wonderful yet lacking

I always argue with myself about whether or not to renew my subscription. A few months before the subscription renews, I find myself abandoning the app. I don’t want to renew it because something is lacking. The correlation vs causation element isn’t as evident as I’d like it to be. For example, I have set to have my mood assessed every four hours (during waking hours, of course). I then choose a mood 1-5 and list what I’ve been doing the last four hours. Sometimes it’s shopping, with family, making art, with friends, etc. However, there is no good/bad element to this, so if my mood is bad, soon the app is correlating innocent things like time with family as frequently accompanied by my poor mood. It winds up just being a lot of data that I don’t know what to do with.

I see no way to run experiments. It would be great to be able to automatically integrate data from Apple Health, showing things like HRV and sleep quality that would have an obvious bearing on mood and energy.

So here I sit on the fence again, wondering what the point is. Am I learning anything from recording all of this, or is it just another compulsive activity to do on the phone? How can this make my life better? Something’s lacking here. As basic mood apps go, it’s really the best I’ve found, but then again, I’m not learning anything from the random activities I’ve charted every four hours. Therefore, why pay for another subscription?

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