Mood tracking. Can it keep your health on track?

To stay healthy, you need to be able to manage your physical and mental health on a regular basis. That’s why we’re introducing Babylon Monitor. It helps you take control of your wellbeing, so you can live your healthiest life.

With taboos around mental health being broken down, now is as good a time as any to talk about one of our favourite features on Monitor - the mood tracker. It lets you track how you feel and understand yourself better. It can also help you look out for things that could potentially affect your mental health. Here’s why we made it and how it can help you.

Why is your mood such a big deal?

‘How are you feeling?’ So many of our conversations begin with this question. It’s because everything you think and do is inspired by your mood. It impacts almost every aspect of your daily life. This includes your health-related decision making and wellbeing. Ever avoided exercise when you’re feeling sad and sluggish? Chalk it down to your mood.

A better way to track your mood.

Babylon Monitor helps you track your mood, so you can gain insights into your feelings and how they’re influencing your everyday life. It can also help you understand how situations, people and other factors affect how you feel.

You might then be able to avoid things that have a negative impact on your mood and seek the triggers and associations that have a positive impact. Reflecting on your mood can help empower you to manage it more effectively. This can have a positive knock-on effect on your health-related decisions, enhancing your overall wellbeing.

Mood isn’t black or white.

Most conventional mood trackers consider a single, emotional dimension - how happy or sad we feel. But we’ve approached mood tracking in a new way. The Babylon Product and Health teams listened to our members and harnessed academic research to build a product that combines the emotional dimension and the physical dimension.

The true colours of your mood.

Our in-house doctors have created a unique mood wheel, just for our mood tracker. Using a range of colour codes, it lets you assess how you feel in two dimensions:

• Positivity - how agreeable or pleasant your mood is
• Energy - your body’s level of response, from calm and still, to active and alert

For example, you might feel energised and positive. But what kind of positive feelings are you experiencing? Are you excited? Or are you feeling content? If you’re feeling energised and negative, what sort of negative feelings are you having? Are you tense or anxious?

The colourful mood wheel is a quick, intuitive way to express how you feel. Each mood has its own colour. The colours become bolder as feelings increase in strength.

Follow the patterns.

Most importantly, the mood tracker helps you gain insights by allowing you to input triggers. These triggers are events or situations that relate to your mood.

You may start to see patterns, such as particular days or times when your specific moods recur. And as well as logging your moods, you can make diary notes alongside trigger entries. This helps you keep a record of your mood, which can be very useful.

The more you use the mood tracker, the more you begin to notice how certain situations trigger certain moods. It boosts your self-awareness, supporting you to adapt your day-to-day decisions.

All this means our mood tracker can help you keep your wellbeing on track. So go on, take control of your physical and mental health with new Babylon Monitor.