I’ve had a couple of mental health revelations this year, simple things that I’ve learned about myself. They mostly fall under the category of things that you read tips for all the time and think, well sure that’s just common sense, then realise you’re not actually doing it and that might be why you’re bending under the stress.

Meanwhile, recently, Apple launched a new element to their health tracking platforms called State of Mind. This falls under the category Mental Wellbeing in the health app, alongside Time in Daylight (I really want to use this measure but seem to always have too long sleeves) and Mindful Minutes (used to be called Breathe, I think?).

This new state of mind tracking is a really great way of following your moods over a length of time and trying to flag if there are any specific reasons for it. When you log a mood, you pick how you feel on a scale from Very Unpleasant, through Neutral, up to Very Pleasant, and then you are given a selection of words that might help describe the feeling in more detail. I love this bit because generally my description for bad days is ‘tired’ but that’s not an option because there should really be more to it than that.

You log on overall mood for each day, but can also do spot checks at any point through the day, ultimately creating a scatter graph to see how you are trending.

This is so useful. I’ve not managed to be entirely consistent and use it every day, even with the reminder, but when things start going slightly awry, it’s nice to have this to log and ultimately follow your way to feeling better. I hope there are more developments on this front in future, as we all know, the more we can understand on mental health, the better!