Bipolar Mood Tracker°

All my life I have been fighting severe depression—or so I thought. A couple of months ago, my diagnosis was changed from severe Major Depressive Disorder (a diagnosis I’d had for 35 years) to Bipolar Disorder. Right now my psychologist, my psychiatrist and I are all working together to try to get me properly and effectively medicated in light of this new information. This app has been an incredibly helpful tool for me to track my mood(s), both high and low, record what happens in my day, and see how the two fit together. One of the best features of this app is that it is completely customizable to fit the terms and conditions that I personally struggle with and that I need to communicate with my doctors about. AND I can easily text or email everything I’ve recorded to my doctors in a very clear, professional way, with full color charts and everything. I am blown away that all of this is free, too! Thank you so much to the creator of this app. It is helping to focus and change my life in a positive way. I have hope that it will help me finally get the medication help I need, as well as help me accept and understand this new diagnosis. Thank you!

I have tried other mood trackers but for whatever reason I couldn’t get into the habit of using them regularly. Some are more complicated or time consuming to use, some aren’t detailed enough, some don’t display the data in a way that was helpful for me. I have used this one almost every day for 2 months now which is by far the longest I’ve been able to keep up with this important routine. Tracking my moods has been very helpful…I was able to easily share screen shots of the weekly/daily mood data charts with my doctor when I emailed her because I started getting hypomanic. I do think it made me aware of hypomania symptoms sooner than usual because the info was presented in such a useful way. I love the ability to change the names of the moods. Selecting from a scale of 1-5 wasn’t as meaningful to me as selecting what I labeled “Full on Mania” versus “hypomania and I am infallible”versus “exuberant aka whoo hoo it’s a party” versus “walking on sunshine” versus “easy like Sunday morning.” Silly but it worked for me. I like the ability to track daily attributes so I can easily see how often I have to take an anxiety PRN or experience various symptoms (I added things like over-talkative, irritable, racing thoughts, tearful, etc.). My only suggestion would be the option to change the iPhone icon so it doesn’t say “Bipolar Tracker” underneath. Just the graph icon would be better because I get worried about people seeing that label. Sadly stigma is a real thing. I am a teacher and sometimes share my screen on the tv and I worry about accidentally showing the app although I do keep it in a folder so it’s not that visible. Thanks for making this awesome free app! It’s made a real difference in my mental health management.

My therapists have been asking me to track my moods for over 10 years and honestly I didn’t want to do it. I don’t always want to know patterns and then feel like I’m stuck in that pattern of highs and lows but she gave me a great response. it wasn’t to feel stuck but to try to change my habits during those times where I’m not so great. She suggested mindfulness walks and meditation and just being more aware. I also felt like it was a daunting task to try to remember and either write it out on a notebook or my phone. Then there was the how exactly am I supposed to track these thoughts. I was searching through the App Store for a calendar and that synced with my normal calendar and I wanted something private. Apparently, someone else already thought of this idea and created a very useful tool for tracking bi polar and I couldn’t be more thrilled about it. For the first time, I see a way to actually make this happen and easily track this so I can be educated to my own patterns and really the more educated you can be on bi polar the better. I love the way that it is set up so I can adapt the titles to fit myself, that there is a reminder that pops up anytime I would like to help urge me to complete the day and that I can then print it all out to take to my therapist. Also, the tracking is already done for me so I just need to make a selection and the information is easy to read and interpret. This is a great resource in addition to therapy, lifestyle changes, medication, and education on the topic. There is hope for this condition and after a long battle I am in a pretty good place of stability. I wish you all the success on your journey and I would urge you and myself to keep tracking because knowledge is power and are many times stronger than we think. May God shine his favor on you and give you success!