First: a mood diary is no substitute for treatment, and RecTake is not a medical device. The app makes no diagnosis and interprets nothing. If you have been feeling low for weeks, talk to your GP or a therapist. If you are in crisis, call your local emergency number or a crisis line; in the UK and Ireland, Samaritans answer around the clock on 116 123.
How was your mood last week? Most people answer with one word, and which word depends on how today is going. A mood diary replaces that word with what actually happened: Tuesday good, Wednesday tired, Thursday evening irritable.
The idea is old and simple. The hard part is keeping it up.
What a mood diary is
A mood diary records briefly, several times a day, how you are feeling, so that weeks later you can look it up instead of trying to remember.
It does not need long texts. A level on a scale and the occasional half-sentence are enough. The value is not in a single entry but in the series: only when thirty days sit side by side can you see whether Mondays differ from Fridays, whether the dip comes in the afternoon or the evening, and whether the good week was really as good as you remember it.
Without a record, memory colours everything. Good days go unnoticed, because nobody asks why they feel fine. Bad days stick and decide how you look back on the whole week.
Why most people stop after a week
Most people stop because every entry asks for a small decision, and decisions cost the most exactly when you feel worst.
Open the app, pick one of twenty emotions, drag a slider, answer a question about your day. On a good day that takes a minute. On a bad one it is precisely the minute you do not have. That is how gaps appear on the very days you would later most want to see.
Then there is forgetting. If you only log when you remember, you mostly log on calm days, and the diary ends up looking better than your life.
One sentence instead of a form
In RecTake you say a sentence such as “I feel tired”, and it becomes a mood on a scale from one to five.
The app knows the usual words. “Exhausted” is the lowest level, “tired” the second, “okay” the middle, “in a good mood” the fourth and “great” the top. A “not” directly in front turns it round: “not good” lands on the second level. If you would rather tap, pick one of the five levels with your finger.
Anything that fits no level goes into a note. You can type it, speak it and have it written down, or record just the audio. You can add a level to a note if you like; without one it simply stays a note.
Your phone’s operating system turns the speech into text, and the recording does not leave the device. On Android that needs version 13 or newer, on iPhone an XS, XR or later. Otherwise you type.
The question that comes by itself
You do not have to remember: RecTake can ask you how you are at fixed times or at a regular interval.
This is off by default, because it is a decision you should make. Under “Plan” you switch on “Ask about mood regularly” and choose up to four fixed times or an interval between one and eight hours. The notification asks “How are you feeling right now?”, and your answer lands in your history as a mood, even on days when you log nothing else.
There is also the follow-up after an entry. When you log something, the app asks a while later how you are, two hours later by default and at most three times a day. It never asks during your quiet hours. There is no streak to break if you skip a question. A day without an answer is simply a day without an answer.
What else to record
A mood only tells you something once what else happened that day sits next to it.
That does not have to be much. RecTake knows six entry types: supplements, medication, food, drinks, mood and notes. An afternoon coffee, a tablet in the morning, a note saying “slept badly” or “row at work”. Sleep is not a measurement of its own here but a note, which is enough to find it again later.
Start small. If you try to capture everything from day one, you will stop in week two. Begin with your mood and whatever you take anyway; the rest comes when it comes. How to keep something like this going for weeks is in A supplement diary you keep for longer than two weeks.
What you see after a few weeks
After a few weeks you see your mood as a bar under each day of the month, your entries beside it, and you can open any single day.
- The month. Each day a cell, with a bar for mood. The colour groups the five levels roughly into three: bad, middling, good.
- The day. An hourly axis with everything you said, in the order it happened.
- Your week. An overview of how many days you logged something and what came up most often.
- The report. A day, a week or a month as a PDF. Under each mood it lists what you logged in the eight hours before, with the time and the gap. The example report shows what that looks like.
What you do not get is an explanation. RecTake does not say why Wednesday was bad and gives the week no grade. Whether the afternoon coffee had anything to do with the irritable evening is for you to decide, and that usually takes more than three weeks. Why patterns are so easily misleading for a single person is explained in Why the same food does not suit everyone.
Where a mood diary stops
A mood diary describes how you felt. It explains nothing and treats nothing.
- No diagnosis. A history with many bad days is a reason to talk to someone trained for it. The app does not judge it.
- A good way into a conversation. Bring a month report to an appointment and you do not have to estimate from memory how often and since when. How to prepare for that kind of conversation is in Medication and supplements at the doctor’s.
- Your data stays with you. Entries and recordings stay on your phone and do not leave it. Only what you export and send yourself goes anywhere.
RecTake isn’t in the store yet. If you would like to hear when it is, join the waitlist. You will get exactly one message.