Sleep and meds, plotted next to mood

Most mood diaries treat sleep and medication as afterthoughts. For bipolar disorder, they're often the signal — not the side note.

Why sleep matters this much

A systematic review of early symptoms found sleep disturbance was the most robust early symptom of mania, and that manic prodromes lasted more than 20 days on average2003. A 2015 meta-analysis found significant sleep-wake disturbance in bipolar disorder even between episodes2015. Plante and Winkelman argue that sleep is a therapeutic lever in bipolar disorder, not a decorative metric2008.

In MoodSync, sleep hours sit on the same chart as your mood scales. A run of short nights doesn't have to be reconstructed from memory — it's already there next to the day you felt off.

Since version 2.0, your sleep hours fill themselves in from Apple Health. Last night's hours arrive in the sleep field automatically, and past days get backfilled too — so the chart stays complete even on days you only had time to tap a mood.

Why meds matter alongside

A medication change rarely shows its full effect on day one. Mood data kept over weeks gives you and your clinician something concrete to discuss. MoodSync has a daily "meds taken" toggle on every entry — so the chart shows the days you took your meds alongside the days you didn't, next to the way mood and sleep moved.

What you can see

• Sleep hours per night, plotted against mood scales for the same day
• A daily yes/no on whether you took your meds
• A month-at-a-glance view that reads in seconds

What this measurement is not

It's not an actigraphy device. If the sleep field fills from Apple Health, the hours are whatever your Watch or sleep app recorded there; if you type them in yourself, the accuracy is the accuracy of your own estimate.

Keep reading

• How MoodSync works for bipolar disorder
• Step-by-step: how to track bipolar moods
• The two-layer mood scale
• How MoodSync compares to Daylio