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I’ve tried multiple ways to track my symptoms but most of them didn’t work for one reason or another.
I’ve tried paper but that requires remembering to print or photocopy it each month and keeping it somewhere where someone doesn’t find it.
I’ve tried just writing it down on paper but it inevitably gets lost and its hard to be clear on what means bad and what means good.
I’ve tried lots of phone apps too but most of them were made for depression, not Bipolar and so I couldn’t track my mania or they weren’t easy to use or weren’t free.
Until now…
eMoods Bipolar Mood Tracker Review
I recently found an app called eMoods Bipolar Mood Tracker. It must be new because I’ve been looking for a Bipolar tracker for years.I’ve been using it for over a month now. It tracks your depression, mania, irritability and anxiety. You rank each from None to Severe and you are ranking the worst it was that day. This works best for me since my moods change throughout the day so it’s hard for me to rank my depression at a certain number for the day if it’s been all over the place. But this way I’m ranking the worst it was.
eMoods Log Your Moods
You can also mark if you had psychotic symptoms or had talk therapy that day. Also you can track the hours of sleep you got so you can see any patterns. Those with Bipolar know (or should know) that lack of sleep can be a sign of an Mania. If you are sleeping less and less and your mania is going up, it’s time to talk to your doctor.
In setting you can add a spot to track weight or menstrual cycle. My doctor used to have me track this and I found my depressions were worse during that time of the month. You can also allow it to automatically check that you took your everyday medications.
You can view your results in calendar or graph mode to see how you are doing over time. You can also set a reminder to use the app.
eMoods Sleep Results
eMoods Tracking Points
As you can see below (graph mode) you can see how depressed, elevated (manic), irritable or anxious I was from May 10th when I started using the app until the end of May. The darker, longer lines are worse. The small light blue dot means none. So you can see the 14th and 15th were bad for me with depression and irritability.eMoods Calendar Mode
I don’t personally like this mode as much but you can see how you did in calendar mode. So here again you can see more dark circles on the 14th and 15th. In this mode you would have to remember that the first circle is depression, second is manic etc.eMoods 3 Month Overview
The app just recently added this feature. This is another way to see how you’ve been doing. You see one month at a time but you can scroll down to see the last 3 months.This one is showing June. It drops off on the 20th because that is today, when I wrote the post. You can see two irritability peaks, one of which happened when I was manic (elevated) but not the other. I mostly had mania this month, you can barely see the depression because it mostly was less than the mania was.
The Premium Version
All the above is free but if you upgrade to the paid version (which I have not) you can add custom tracking points so you can say mark down when you exercised.The premium version also allows you to add time stamped notes, generate printable reports older than 6 months and 10% of the profits goes to mental health charities.
All your app data is saved and you can email yourself as a backup as well.
Get the eMoods Bipolar Mood Tracker App
You can find the app on Google Play for Android.You can find the app on the App Store for Apple.
