Mood Tracking to Recovery
Whether it’s steps taken in a day, how many calories you’ve consumed or hours you’ve slept, it’s a sure bet you’ve used an app to track something. Over 23 million of us track our activity and sleep patterns using a Fitbit and hundreds of millions of us record our diet and exercise habits via apps such as MyFitnessPal.
It seems that tracking our physical wellbeing is covered. But what about tools to help with mental health? What can they track? Is there a mental health Fitbit equivalent?
One such tool is the mood tracker. Essentially, it allows you to regularly record how you’re feeling so you can start to recognise patterns and changes in your frame of mind.
Often people will have ‘go to’ thought patterns or anxiety prompts, for example, which the tracker will help identify. Armed with this data, research has shown people are better able to analyse their individual triggers and are then better prepared to deal with their reactions — or indeed counter them altogether.
You might use a tracker to rate your mood once a day or throughout the day, depending on what you’re doing or how you’re feeling. The tool stores and displays your ratings over time so that you can start to monitor and see trends in how you feel and respond.
According to Professor Shôn Lewis, a leading figure in technology and mental health research, “The basic ability to observe moods is often enough for people to act on them — in other words to start to address behaviours which may lead to low mood or anxiety.”
According to Professor Lewis, accurate reporting of mental health issues is a key feature of the mood tracker: “Crucially, a mood tracker offers accuracy: the ability to record your mood over time and in real time. So instead of guessing or trying to remember the past week or month, you have an accurate account of it stored on your device.”
The accuracy of this recorded information is not only useful for you, but can also be invaluable if you choose to share it with a GP or therapist. Mood tracking means not having to give an average answer when asked how you’ve been: “Oh, I’ve generally been okay”. You can now share a clear and accurate picture of the ups and downs in your mental health and emotional wellbeing.
This data is invaluable when assessing and tackling changes in mood. Mood trackers give a high-resolution read-out of a person’s state of mind over days and weeks so that they can — on their own, or in partnership with their therapist — work towards getting a better handle on what may be causing mood fluctuations.
Understanding the cause of positive or negative fluctuations will bring about greater self-knowledge, so that you can, for example, start to see if your mood changes markedly as a result of a particular situation. It may change after certain foods, or as a consequence of changing sleep patterns or exercise. It may be that aspects of your relationship or your work trigger certain anxieties.
It also might be that fluctuations precede a period of depression or anxiety, or can even ‘predict’ the onset of a psychotic episode.
But whether being used to monitor and predict serious life- threatening conditions or help improve general wellbeing, the mood tracker is an evidence-based tool which can make a positive difference.
Professor Lewis is now using his expertise to help develop new technologies to support mental health conditions. At Minds for Life, his clinical oversight has ensured a series of new mental health apps, and tools contained in them, are clinically robust. The mood tracker is just one of these tools, which are helping people to better mental health. Others, such as goal setting and journaling, are adding to a clutch of powerful resources for people who are looking to achieve recovery or simply to make life better.
