Getting the Most from Mood Log

The "Mood Log" is where your days quietly gather — each one recorded automatically from the fluctuations of your heartbeat, then laid over the same timeline as your body's balance. Among the app's five tabs, the Mood Log tab is your way in.

It isn't here to make you rejoice or despair over a single day's numbers. The longer you keep at it, the more your own patterns of swinging and settling will quietly begin to surface.

Your record fills itself in — automatically

You don't have to tap or type anything to keep a Mood Log. Every day you wear your Apple Watch to sleep, Feelmo reads your overnight HRV and works out your Balance score (0–100) and the day's mood on its own, then sets both down as that day's record. Nothing to write, nothing to pick.

• The record is automatic. Your "streak" and record count simply reflect the days a reading came in — that is, the nights you wore the watch — not the days you remembered to tap.
• A short note is optional. When something stirs your feelings, you can add a line to the day if you like. There's no need to overthink it, and it's perfectly fine to leave it out.
• The mood and balance are auto-judged and final. You can't change them — but if a day's mood doesn't match how you felt, that's exactly what the optional note is for.

Feelmo isn't an app that "guesses your emotions" — it's a companion that gently watches over the balance of your autonomic nervous system. Think of any note you add, too, not as a field for finding the right answer, but as a small footprint you leave so you can compare it with your own body later.

Ways to look back

Your automatic records open onto several ways to look back.

Weekly, monthly, and yearly reviews

Your daily records can be viewed together across the span of a week, a month, or a year. Just switch between Week, Month, and Year with the tabs at the top — every span is free to view.

• Week brings out the rhythms of a near horizon — things like "there were a lot of unsettled days this week" or "I tend to settle in the latter half of the week."
• Month and Year bring longer waves into view, the kind that span the seasons and the turning points of life.

For those who'd like to look back more deeply, Feelmo Premium offers long-term trends and an exportable Kokoro Report (a yearly look-back). But for everyday watching-over, the free weekly, monthly, and yearly views are plenty.

Calendar

Take in a whole month of your feelings at a glance, in color. Rather than tracing one day at a time, gazing at the month as a cluster brings out month-scale rhythms — like "there were a lot of unsettled days this week" or "I tend to settle on weekends."

Charts (graphs)

By week, month, or year, you can see at a glance which feelings were most common over the period, as a bar chart. Instead of chasing a single day's ups and downs, the Feelmo way is to step back a little and watch the trend. The time-series of balance, autonomic and HRV lives on the separate Trends tab (Premium).

Recent logs

You can also see a list of your most recent entries. It's a way in when you want to quickly glance back at "how the last few days have been."

Why meaning grows when you "lay things over"

On its own, a day's mood is just a single mark. But when it's laid over other data on the same timeline, it turns into a clue for the first time.

The things you lay it over might include, for example:

• Your heart's balance (Balance score) — an indicator of how settled your autonomic nervous system is, estimated from the variability of your heartbeat (HRV / R-R interval variability) that Apple Watch reads, centered mainly on multiple HRV-derived clues, measurement quality, and movement from your own baseline. For details, see Balance score.
• Behavior tags and wellbeing records — records of daily life such as sleep, sunlight, steps, and hydration (water / caffeine). On the Wellbeing page, you can see the connection between your habits and your balance.

For example, a day on which you noted "my mood was low" might overlap with a day when your sleep the night before was short — and when you can make that kind of comparison, the Mood Log becomes, for the first time, a clue to the question of "what settles me."

Checking "whether it works for you"

"It feels like I'm steadier the day after I sleep well" — you can quietly see whether that intuition holds for yourself, using your own records alone. The habit-impact analysis, Which habits help you — in the Kokoro Report's "This week's insight" — individually compares how your next morning's balance differed between days you kept a habit and days you didn't (Premium).

The feelings you leave in your Mood Log also become a gentle hint for reading the background behind these comparisons.

How to read the graphs

• What you're comparing against is your usual self. There's no absolute standard of good or bad. What carries meaning is the difference from your own baseline.
• A single day's ups and downs are, more often than not, just chance fluctuations. Even if there's a day when the line dips, that in itself is neither good nor bad.
• Gazing at the trend over several days to a few weeks, and receiving it with the looseness of "maybe I've been a little slower to settle lately," is just the right distance to keep.