Moodnotes: A Personal Trainer for Your Moods

Moods, everyone has them.  Whether you’re in a good mood or bad mood determines what your day, week, or even year will look like.  If you are constantly in a bad mood, or even just an eh mood it can cause havoc in your life and physical health.

Most people just push their feelings aside and don’t deal with problems, but if you continue to ignore the true underlying issues to your moods then you might never be able to resolve what is bothering you and never find out what is actually causing your bad or eh moods. This is where Moodnotes comes in.  It helps you actually think about your issues. And in the long run trains you how to think more positive so you can have more happy days and less eh days.

How Moodnotes can help monitor your moods

Moodnotes is an app that asks you to record your emotions using the simplest of interfaces: A digital face. At a specific time every day, the app asks you to tell it how they are. You are then supposed to respond by manually altering a smiley face to reflect your current mood. There’s also options to add notes or assign specific feelings to your mood. By filling out this information you can track changes in your mood over time, but there are also options to explore your feelings further. If you have expressed a series of negative feelings, for example, the app will ask you to describe your thoughts and identify thinking traps that you may have fallen into — such as catastrophizing or blaming — and that may have therefore induced specific feelings.

Moodnotes has partnered with two clinical psychologists in order to create the (scientifically sound) mental health app, based on the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT is an established form of treatment for all manner of psychological issues, and in the context of Moodnotes, it is being applied to encourage you to track your mood and therefore develop healthier thinking habits.

Moodnotes ($3.99 for iOS) is the work of Ustwo’s London design studio and Edrick Dorian and Drew Erhardt, two clinical psychologists who founded Thriveport, a company that uses digital tools to help people make sense of their feelings. For all the insight and understanding the quantified-self movement has brought to our physical health, Dorian and Erhardt believe mental health is woefully underserved. “Thinking habits are one of the most important but least taught areas of our well-being,” Dorian says. They believe a journaling app like Moodnotes will foster greater self-awareness of how and why we feel certain emotions, and help us deal with them.

Changing the way you perceive things isn’t easy, but it is worth the effort if you truly want to change the way your moods affect your life.

Until Next time,

Megabite