MoodSync for sleep and mood tracking

A short night and a hard day are not always the same day. Sometimes the bad night comes three days before the bad day. A sleep tracker by itself cannot show you that. A mood tracker by itself cannot either. MoodSync puts both on the same chart.

Why sleep belongs in a mood tracker

In a systematic review of early symptoms, sleep disturbance was the most robust early symptom of mania, and manic prodromes lasted more than 20 days on average2003. A 2015 meta-analysis found significant sleep-wake disturbance even between episodes2015. Plante and Winkelman argue that targeting sleep is a therapeutic lever, not a side note2008.

If you only track mood, you can find the day you felt off. If you track sleep too, you can sometimes find the night that caused it.

What MoodSync logs

• Hours of sleep per night — typed in by you, or filled in automatically from Apple Health
• A 1–5 mood for the same day (with optional 0–3 clinical scales)
• A daily "meds taken" yes/no, plus notes for context

If you already record sleep in Apple Health, the hours fill themselves in — and MoodSync backfills past entries too, so the nights you forgot to log still show up on the chart.

The three sit on the same view. Daily smartphone self-monitoring in bipolar disorder has been tested in a six-month randomized trial, which found it did not change symptoms on its own merits2015 — so treat the chart as information to discuss with your clinician, and a tracker that takes seconds is easier to keep up.

Adjacent topics

• How sleep and meds get plotted with mood
• Step-by-step: how to track moods day to day
• How MoodSync works for bipolar disorder
• How MoodSync compares to Daylio