Using Mood Tracker Apps To Understand Client’s Emotions

Mood tracker apps can be a revealing tool for therapists who want to help clients identify where their negative emotions are coming from, as well as the things that bring them joy. While trends, triggers, and patterns can be tough to spot on a moment-to-moment basis, regular or daily tracking can yield a bigger picture perspective that is far more revealing.

This article takes a closer look at how mood tracking benefits mental healthcare professionals and their clients, and shows you how to create your own digital mood tracker to uncover the daily ups and downs of those you help.

Before reading on, we think you’ll enjoy trying out Quenza’s mood tracking tools with our 1-month, $1 package. Our easy-to-use digital toolkit includes everything you need to monitor client progress with live updates, so you can help them play a more proactive role in their own mental health.

Mood Tracking in Mental Healthcare

In theory, mood tracking is as straightforward as recording emotions at regular intervals, while making a note of the external factors that could be affecting how your client feels. Over time, these logs together provide useful experience sampling data that helps them better understand their mood over time, as well as how it changes.

Mood tracking can yield insightful experience sampling data that clients and their therapists better understand their mood over time, as well as how and why it changes.

It can be a particularly revealing way to pinpoint the various impacts that situations, events, medication, diet, and other people have on their moods, a highly valuable thing for patients who are trying to manage symptoms of depression, stress, and other mental health conditions.

In practice, however, remembering to monitor moods on an hourly, daily, weekly, or even ad-hoc basis can be tricky for clients, which is where mood tracker apps can come in very useful.

Is It Important To Track Client’s Emotions?

Mood tracker apps can play a few crucial roles in therapy, and emotion tracking specifically can be particularly helpful where clients are struggling with burdensome mental health symptoms that are disrupting their lives.

According to studies, tracking emotions can:[1]

• Increase clients’ awareness of their wellbeing
• Help them take a more proactive role with regard to self-regulation, and
• Equip practitioners with important information about how treatments, medications, and therapies are playing a role in a client’s journey to better health.

Where tracking data is used as part of e-therapy or online psychiatry, it can thus work in a few ways to help with mood stabilization, improved self-management, and as a useful starting point for identifying coping strategies.

What Is The Best Mood Tracker Online App?

Thanks to the ever-growing ubiquity of smartphones, there are now countless Android and Apple mood tracker apps for clients who want to log their emotions throughout the day – at least 249 Android apps and 493 available for iOS in 2017.[1]

Some examples can be found in our reviews of the 25 Best Mental Health Apps to Download Today [2021 Update]

Because mood tracker apps range in specificity, as well as the extent to which they have been based on scientific and clinical research, finding the best mood tracker online app for your specific purposes is a little more complex than opting for the most popular app at the moment.

For practitioners, choosing the best mood tracker app means considering the features it offers and how they fit in with your patient’s treatment needs.

Some useful tools and features to look out for include:

• Customizable trackers – allowing you and your clients to choose what you’d like to measure and when
• Suitable science-based scales – e.g. validated psychological assessments, rather than arbitrary measures
• A convenient, user-friendly interface – to encourage more regular tracking and complete data sets
• A secure telehealth solution – so that your clients’ data won’t be accessed by third parties
• Automated reminders and notifications – another helpful way to motivate clients
• Private chat – so that you can answer your clients’ questions, or even respond with advice in the moment, and
• Free client apps – which allow your patients to log in conveniently without paying for additional software.

While many apps offer a few of these capabilities extremely well, they fall a little short for therapists who want to share their own unique measures.

In the next section, however, we’ll show you exactly how to do this by using Quenza as a mood tracker app.

How To Use Quenza To Track Emotions

With two basic templates, creating a stress diary with Quenza is simple.

Using the same drag-and-drop tools, it’s also quick and easy to create behavior diaries, habit trackers, thought logs, and any other worksheets or journals in a few straightforward steps:

Start with an introduction to your exercise using Quenza’s Activity Builder, where you can add your own personalized, explanatory text to the exercise:

If your client prefers a convenient video or audio guide, Quenza’s Activity Builder is where you can upload mp3s, Vimeo or YouTube links, and other multimedia as we’ve done above.

You might want to include physiological stress indicators to watch out for in your introduction, or a broader psychoeducational overview that covers common triggers and coping strategies as below:

Your second template might be the diary itself, which could include a drop-down menu of various symptoms, or a sliding scale that patients can quickly and easily use on the go.

Then, simply select your Activities as Steps using Quenza’s Pathway builder to pre-schedule when it will be shared with your client. Here, we’ve created a daily mood tracker using one-day intervals.

All your activities will be securely delivered to your patient on their free Client Portal, which they can use as a HIPAA-compliant mood tracker app at any time.

It’s also easy to send reminders, prompts, and notifications as gentle nudges where needed using the ‘Resend’ button, or check in via Quenza Chat for a private chat to see how they’re going:

Like all your clients’ mood tracking data, shown below, all Quenza Chats are sent and received in real-time:

All results and chats are also private, encrypted, GDPR-compliant, and HIPAA-compliant, meaning they’re visible only to you and your patient.

Downloading Quenza: 7 Unique Benefits

Using Quenza as a mood tracker app is only one potential way to make the most of your secure telehealth software.

It’s also a useful way to:

1. Simplify therapy note-taking – using the Activity Builder for customized physical therapy, occupational therapy, CBT, BIRP, or SOAP note templates
2. Collect valuable CRM insights by sharing Session Rating Scales, Feedback Surveys, and similar
3. Implement patient engagement strategies with personalized solutions and treatments, live chat, reminders, or even full-scale outreach programs
4. Motivate clients with check-ins, personal videos or audio, and Goal-setting Exercises
5. Securely store sensitive data, including online psychotherapy notes, client tracking data, results, and responses
6. Coach others remotely with real-time results, custom programs, lessons, and courses, and
7. Design and share unique interventions under your own practice brand.

Now, we’ll share our step-by-step guide for a little closer look at how you can create your own emotion or mood tracking tools for clients using Quenza.

Tracking Journals, Worksheets & Ideas in Quenza

If you’re ready to try your hand at creating mood tracking activities of your own, why not start with some versatile templates?

Other useful mood trackers and journals might assess:

• Automatic negative thoughts – when and where they bother your clients, and the situations that trigger them, a useful tool in online CBT
• Happiness ratings throughout the day
• Energy levels – to help clients distinguish between ‘Depleting’ and ‘Nourishing’ activities
• Panic-related symptoms and related thoughts
• Habits – both negative habits and positive ones, such as practicing Self-Compassion
• Social anxiety symptoms – within a Mental Health Relapse Prevention treatment plan, for instance, and
• Cravings and temptations – as part of treatment for substance abuse or addictions.

Final Thoughts

Journals, diaries, and mood trackers can help you and your patients put together all the little puzzle pieces that make up how they feel – as well as triggers, risk factors, and even potential coping strategies.

While there’s no shortage of mood tracker apps on the market today, creating your own is a powerful way to align your solutions with your clients’ precise needs. Just by talking to your patients, you’ll now be able to craft your own using simple digital tools.

We hope you enjoyed this article. Don’t forget to try our mood tracker app with Quenza’s $1 trial for everything you need to get started.

With real-time insights, secure data storage, and powerful online tools, you can build your own mood trackers and stay on top of your clients’ progress in a few simple steps.

References