Moodnotes - Mood Tracker

I’ve been using this app for about two weeks now and it’s by far my favorite CBT based journal app based on its elegance and ease of use. Absolutely incredible. My only issue is the price of the subscription. Now a lot of mental health apps charge for their service, and that’s fine. I understand. But compared to almost any of the other CBT based apps on the market, this one is lacking in features. I don’t mind if it doesn’t have a meditation area, or a community forum. I just wish it had articles or something to help guide growth and progress as well as learn more about CBT. The app pretty much just throws you in with a brief intro and that’s it. Second, I’d love to see account based saves or imports as well. I tried to download this to my tablet but was dismayed to find I couldn’t sign in or import the exported PDF of my journal to the other device. It pretty much guarantees that if anything ever happens to my phone, I can’t easily pull up those journals on another device via a login. It does have cloud based saves but there’s zero info on that I’m not sure how it works, and notably my tablet is on the same iCloud account my phone is, yet couldn’t access my info. A simple email login there could be a game changer. I’d like it noted that even though I think the price is steep, I am in fact paying for the yearly since this app has been a lifesaver for me. I appreciate the quality of this app and it will probably be the only journal I use on my phone ever. But as someone paying for the app, I’d love to see more from it in the future. If that’s not in the cards, even lowering the subscription price would be a major help.

I use Moodnotes as a mood tracker in hope of detecting patterns over time. I log moods about four times daily. I would get hopeless and irritable in the late afternoon so I began testing my blood sugar around that time and it was always low, about 80 on average. This might be normal at 4 AM not PM. I often forget to eat due to ADHD time blindness and rarely eat on schedule. The interactive emoji is helpful for quickly logging mood. Can’t think of a quicker way. Simple and brilliant. Now the problem is the app doesn’t challenge and hook the user by asking “Why” immediately post mood entry. Instead it has Add Detail as an option displayed in the same color with a white boxed line. Not as effective as it could be. I rarely choose to add detail due to avoidance and not really seeing it. There’s no nudge. Ideally it’d go: emoji, why/what’s causing/happening or skip (in smaller font) ending the session, choose feelings, check a thought (applicable CBT)...etc. The pages would change immediately post entry. Now the app would be beneficial to us by reducing mental pain quicker ad more effectively. Moodnotes has a couple of other simple flaws including translating, displaying data effectively. The colors shouldn’t blend into each other. Instead important choices should be in different colors for easier visual flow. These simple changes will increase efficacy and user usage thus more healing and yes, a better world.

I like this app, I like that I lock it, it gives me the privacy I need so that I don’t have to be worried about what I say in my Moodnotes. It’s simple to use, and easy to understand. I’ve tried other similar to this and they can get very confusing. The only problem I have with this app is that dictation doesn’t work too well with it. I preferred to speak out my entries, because I really don’t like typing it out the buttons are just too small for me and it’s always been easier to just speak. So the problem is when you use dictation and sometimes dictation misinterprets what you’re saying it’s hard to correct it and edit it because the page doesn’t move as your entry it’s longer it’s stay stationary and everything you’re saying is now below or underneath the gray bar for dictation and you can no longer see what you’re saying on your screen unless you pause dictation to read it and check, when you do that is it difficult to edit because when you’re trying to type the word you’re trying to correct are now under your keyboard so you can’t see what you’re writing to make sure that you’re in the right spot and there’s proper spacing. They could fix this one issue and just make the page scroll as you write It would be helpful to me, because I like to put in long entries I pretty much dump all my thoughts into my note that I’m writing so they get pretty long. Right now I’m just doing burst entries, so I make them only as long until I get to the gray bar for dictation. And then I stop, and if I still have more to say I just put it in a new entry. But other than that this app is great.