60-Second Mental Health Check-In

To track your mental health, rate a few things once a day at about the same time: your mood, energy, stress, last night's sleep and how connected you feel to people, each from 0 to 10, plus one line about what happened. Once a week, look back for the line that moved most and what came before it. The value is in the pattern, not in any single day.

That is all the check-in above does. It takes about a minute, saves one entry per day in your browser, and after a few days starts showing you today against your own last seven days. Nothing goes to a server and there is no account. If one number a day is all you want, the mood tracker shares the same history, so its moods land on the same chart.

• Move the five sliders for today. Go with the first number that comes to mind; second guesses tend to drift toward 5.
• Pick one feeling word if one fits. Skip it if none does.
• Add a line about what happened or what helped. Future you will thank you for it.
• Save. You get today's balance index, a plain read of what stands out, and, once there are a few days behind it, how today compares with your week.

The balance index is Lovon's own summary, not a test score: stress is flipped (10 minus stress), the five numbers are averaged and multiplied by ten, so it runs from 0 to 100. The sum is printed under the result so you can check it. Saving again on the same day edits today's entry instead of adding a second one, so you can check in at lunch and correct it at night.

Mood is the headline, but on its own it only says how the day felt. The other four start to say why. Energy often slips before mood does, so a falling energy line is an early sign that a week is costing more than it gives. Stress is rated apart from mood because a bad day caused by pressure needs a different fix from a bad day caused by loneliness or a poor night.

Sleep matters more than most people expect. In a six-week study where 208 adults rated their sleep and mood every day on their phones, the effect of a night's sleep quality on the next day's mood was much larger than the effect of a day's mood on the following night's sleep (Triantafillou and colleagues, JMIR Mental Health, 2019). Connection is the line people forget, and often the one that explains a flat week.

Writing it down is not just bookkeeping. In a randomized trial with young people aged 14 to 24, those who logged their mood and stress on a phone became more aware of their emotions than a group that logged only their activities, and that awareness was linked to feeling less low afterwards (Kauer and colleagues, Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2012). Naming a feeling precisely helps too: in a brain imaging study, putting an emotion into words dampened the amygdala's response to upsetting pictures (Lieberman and colleagues, Psychological Science, 2007). That is why the check-in asks for one word. The feelings wheel helps when "bad" is the only word that comes.

A paper or spreadsheet version works just as well. One row a day, with these columns:

• Date
• Mood, 0 to 10
• Energy, 0 to 10
• Stress, 0 to 10 (10 is overwhelmed)
• Sleep last night, 0 to 10
• What happened, in one line
• What helped, in one line

The template under the tool shows the same columns with example rows, and the print button gives you a blank weekly sheet.

Once a day, at roughly the same time, is the rhythm that makes patterns visible. Evening works for most people because the whole day is in, but any fixed time is better than a perfect time you keep missing. A minute is enough; if it starts taking ten, you are writing a journal, which is good too, just a different tool. The journal prompts are there for those days.

Apple's Health app makes a useful distinction between how you feel right now and how you have felt overall today. This check-in is the second kind. If a day swings a lot, check in when it settles, or edit the entry at night. The daily reminder button adds a repeating event to your own calendar, so the reminder is also the link back.

On iPhone, Apple's own guide (iPhone User Guide, "Log your state of mind in Health on iPhone") puts it under Health, then Browse, then Mental Wellbeing, then State of Mind. You choose whether you are logging a momentary emotion or a daily mood, drag a slider from unpleasant to pleasant, then optionally tap words for the feeling and for what is having the biggest impact on it. Under Options you can switch on reminders during your day and at the end of the day.

On Apple Watch, the Apple Watch User Guide ("Log your state of mind on Apple Watch") puts it in the Mindfulness app: tap State of Mind, choose an emotion or a daily mood, and turn the Digital Crown to set how you feel. Your history lives in the Health app on iPhone, where Show in Charts lets you view your entries next to life factors such as time in daylight, sleep, exercise and mindful minutes. Both guides are linked in the sources under the tool.

You can use Apple's log and this one side by side. Apple's covers how pleasant or unpleasant the day felt; this one adds energy, stress, sleep and connection as separate lines. If you are wondering what else your watch measures, see does Apple Watch track stress?

Wearables give you a different kind of number. Garmin's stress level and Body Battery, Oura's Readiness score and Whoop's Recovery score are worked out by the device from your body. Oura's help center, for example, lists resting heart rate, heart rate variability, body temperature, sleep and recent activity among the inputs to Readiness. They describe physical strain and recovery, not how you feel.

That makes them a good companion to a check-in rather than a replacement. When the device says you recovered well and you rate your stress 8, that gap is information: the strain is probably in your head, your inbox or a relationship, not your legs. The stress score checker explains what a given score means on each device, and there are guides to the Garmin stress score, the Oura Readiness score, the Whoop Recovery score and HRV by age.

Tracking only pays off when you look back. Once a week, give it five minutes:

• Open the 7-day chart and find the line that moved most.
• Read the notes from your lowest and your highest day.
• Ask what came before the dip: a short night, a run of meetings, no time with people.
• Pick one small thing to repeat or to change next week, and only one.

If energy is the line that keeps falling, the energy audit maps what drains and what charges you. If stress keeps climbing, try the stress level test to see what is driving it. If sleep is the problem, the sleep calculator works out a bedtime and your sleep debt.

A check-in is a self-rating. It tells you how you saw your day, which is valuable, but it is not a measurement of your mind and it does not name a condition. A pattern in your own log is a pattern, not a cause: if low days line up with Mondays, the cause might be Mondays, or what you do on Sunday nights. And there is no normal balance index to hit; the only useful comparison is with your own days.

Tracking can also become a chore, or a source of worry when the numbers dip. If it starts making you feel worse, track less often, for example once a week with a fuller measure like the CORE-10 check. If the strain looks like it has been building for months, the burnout test looks at it more closely.

Talk to a doctor or a licensed mental health professional if low mood or a loss of interest in things has been there most of the day, most days, for two weeks or more, or if it gets in the way of work, relationships or looking after yourself. That two-week marker comes from the National Institute of Mental Health's guide to depression. Bring your log along: a few weeks of daily numbers and notes are much easier to talk through than "I've been off lately".

If you cannot name what you feel, try What am I feeling? or the list of emotions. For a good day worth keeping, the gratitude journal. When your head is too full to rate anything, start with a brain dump. If people time is the line that dropped, check your social battery; for two, there is a weekly couples check-in. In the darker months, the winter blues check looks at whether your mood follows the seasons. And for a lighter take on the same question, the mood ring game gives you a color for today in three taps. More questions to ask yourself are in daily check-in questions. When a pattern shows up and you want a plan, how to improve your mental health covers the basics that move mood most and when to get professional help.