I’ve been using Moodscope to track my mood for the last year. This is the only quantified-self approach to tracking my emotional state that I’ve found long-term worthwhile[1].
Most other apps that support mood tracking just as “How was your day?” and ask you to rate 1-5 on a classic Likert scale. That kind of prompt seems to prime for the outside view of my life. I implicitly substitute “How was your day?” with the questions “Am I alive, healthy, employed?” and then stoically answer 3 every day, while missing macro trends towards what Venkatesh Rao calls “failed reality maintenance”.
Instead, Moodscope presents a panel of 20 specific emotions and asks you to rate how much you identify with each from 0 to 3. The increased specificity has helped me catch problematic ruts in my state-of-mind, at the cost of 1-3 minutes of my morning routine[2]. If I consistently rate “irritable” above 0, I know I had better focus on sleep hygiene and more exercise. If “hostile” is trending, I had better do some journalling and reframe whatever family or work situations are on my mind.
The folks behind Moodscope have been running it on the side for 10 years, but they have a crowdfunding campaign going right now to fund improvements to the interface. Please give it a try and consider supporting them.
[1] I found Moodscope via Alex Vermeer’s excellent “Life Hacking” page. He has since removed the reference to Moodscope (I’m not sure why), but he has plenty of other good tips.
[2] I have “take mood inventory” in my Complice dailies and of course I keep myself accountable for doing it with Beeminder.
I agree that a single linear scale is unhelpful; even if you’re not judging by an extremely low bar, it’s just hard to collapse so many different emotions into a single number. And that single number’s not going to be all that helpful for troubleshooting moods later – a week of being really angry is different from a week of being really sad, which is different from a week of sometimes being angry and sometimes being sad.
I found Clue (a period/fertility tracker) simpler to Moodscape but similarly helpful for figuring out my mood patterns; it has 4 binary moods you can pick (you can pick as many as you want): happy, sad, sensitive, and angry. It’s obviously focused on identifying hormonal mood effects, but I found it useful enough to be able to say “did I experience these emotions strongly today?” instead of trying to rate my day overall. (And of course, yes, I beeminded “Fill out Clue” every day"!)
I should clarify that the chart up above is not from the Moodscope user interface; I made that with R and ggplot2 from a CSV export of my tracking data.
They do have similar visualization, but only for the last 30 days of data.
Moodscope also generates a composite mood score (on a 0-100 scale) from the mood panel. It’s still a linear scale, but because I’m not rating on that scale directly it manages to be more useful and representative of my emotional well-being.
I’ve been using Gyroscope https://gyrosco.pe/ which has a similar feature minus the 1-5 scale. You’re presented with some mood states and are asked to give a yes/no answer (on swipe left/right tinder-style) for each of them. The app calculates a score from your answers.
You then have weekly / monthly graphs of your result.
Oh, that’s interesting. I really don’t want to get started with another QS app any time soon however, since I’m busy enough figuring out and implementing the ones I already have as it is.
So I’ll leave Gyroscope at that and make a note to check it out sometime later. Thanks for the suggestion!
