Excellent App for Mood & Behavior Tracking

This is an outstanding application for monitoring the most essential aspects of an individual’s experience of mental illness over time. It makes it easy to input relevant data such that one is more inclined to be faithful in doing so which is necessary to reap the benefits of the exercise of tracking your moods, effectiveness of various coping strategies in individual use and more. While this could be useful to someone who is simply curious about themselves, where this app really shines is in it’s ability to provide a lot of useful data to a therapist, physician or both as a helpful part of treating illness and promoting wellness for someone. It’s a wonderful thing that they offer this for free to help people.

Inevitably, it is simply impossible to design a one-size-fits-all app for this purpose that will precisely meet the individual needs of every single person trying it out. I would argue however that this app does provide a simple means to track a wealth of highly important information over time and the degree to which it can be customized and made one’s own should be enough for most individuals to benefit significantly from using it as an adjunct to professional care. For anyone in therapy not already keeping some form of mood journal or even if you are, I would recommend downloading this app and taking the time (it is very easy to do) to customize it with the key things you want to track and discuss with your caregivers. It allows you to produce very helpful reports for them which can be brought with you, emailed or even just shown to someone on your mobile device since this app is available on the app store for iOS. Syncing is very simple and works very well. Naturally, you need a login to do this and if you are willing to share your data anonymously you can help with research too but the default option opts you out of this. So you have complete choice there. I find this feature very helpful but you can of course simply skip it entirely if you desire to for whatever your own personal reasons may be.

Core items are fairly fixed which is fine with plenty of opportunity to track everything else elsewhere.

In my own setup, I changed all three major areas of input to suit myself, keeping roughly half of the suggested items, deleting most of the other half and adding my own which are best suited for my own needs. These areas are Stay Well Strategies, Triggers and Symptoms. Each item has a checkbox as a yes/no thing and an optional 10 point scale you can use. Keep in mind, you can define the meaning of this scale for you and it can vary by item. For example, under caffiene consumption you might use the scale to indicate total cups of coffee consumed on a given day while for another item like a symptom the scale could simply indicate severity that day if you check that one off. Lastly, you can skip the scaling altogether if you like. The way I do it is to use scaling for Stay Well items, not use it for triggers which either happen or don’t (in my view) and Symtoms I do rate severity of as appropriate. Another very good feature is optional daily notes where you can get into some detail about anything relevant such as more detail on your feelings, your sleep pattern, life events, etc.

One feature I have not seen in any app of this type is the ability to track sleep in multiple sessions versus one single period of sleep. My solution here is to roll my own with a simple Numbers spreadsheet that lets me easily input this data so I can see it over time along with what Optimism tells me. Another substantial feature this particular app is not designed for (which I think is good actually given its comprehensiveness) is data entry multiple times per day. I set a reminder with the OS X Reminders app to cue me to do this each night at 8:00 PM. There’s nothing saying that you cannot use another or even a few apps together as a suite to suit yourself without making it a very time consuming project. This only takes a few minutes a night usually including the spreadsheet. Sometimes I spend more time looking at reports but often I just input my stuff and that’s that. If you would like to make brief entries about general state of mood, etc. thoughout the day as things happen, there is of course an app(s) for that. I’d highly recommend checking out one called Moodnotes on the app store which is excellent for this purpose. It is in development by a skilled team of iOS developers working in conjunction with clinical professionals and is very well done and offers other very helpful features too.

So in summary, I see this as a five star app easily and highly recommend it as a great starting place with the advice to not hesitate to make your own little suite of apps that works best for you. Lastly, I cannot stress enough that if you are doing this in response to any serious issues, don’t go it alone with just apps. They are great as helps but they are not enough by themselves and they aren’t supposed to be either for the most part. These are a great way to actively participate in helping yourself and helping your caregivers to most effectively help you. I hope you found this review helpful and wish every good thing for you.

Linmukai about Optimism