Windows/OS X/iOS/Web: Your emotional state can vary throughout the day, and there are certain things that you may not even realise affect your mentality. Optimism keeps track of your mental health and helps you find those emotional triggers.
The app is free, and it’s relatively simple to use. It includes four main tabs where you enter daily data:
- Core Data: Basic info about your mood and habits
- Stay Well Strategies: You record data about potential methods for staying healthy. Exercise, spending time outside, professional support, and so on.
- Triggers: You’ll enter potential emotional triggers or stressors: a lack of sleep, relationship problems, social events, etc.
- Symptoms: In this tab, you add a little more detail on how you feel: your level of irritability, sadness, guilt, poor concentration, etc.
Each tab includes customisable fields. In these fields, you simply record how you feel and what activities you completed that day. It’s sort of like a journal, in that you record your own habits and feelings, but instead of free writing your thoughts, you fill in a series of questions every day.
It doesn’t take much time, and when you have enough data, you can check out their “Charts & Report” tab. This lets you see how your mood fluctuates over a period of time, and you can also see how that correlates to activities like your sleep schedule and quality.
The app seems to be designed for people managing depression, bipolar, and other conditions, but it’s helpful for anyone who wants to track their mental health. By keeping track of things like triggers, symptoms and health behaviours, you get a better idea of how you can manage your mental health.
You do have to use your email to register to use the app, but they take great care to keep your info safe. Via their security policy:
The only personally identifiable information held on the server are email addresses and first names. Email addresses and passwords are encrypted.
We use a PostgreSQL database for storing clients’ records. PostgreSQL is a mature object-relational database that has been in open source development since 1996. The PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG) takes security seriously, so that users can have confidence in the security of the database and applications built around it. Their approach allows excellent configuration options, ensuring a secure, robust database, and seamless integration with our applications.
You can read more about their policy here. For now, the phone app is only available on iOS, and while they don’t mention any plans for Android, they do have a web app version, linked below. You can also download a desktop version on Windows and Mac from that link.
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