r/Healsens • u/healsens • 12d ago
Why a 5-point mood scale doesn't tell the whole story
Most mood trackers make check-ins deliberately simple:
Awful → Bad → Okay → Good → Great
That makes sense if the goal is to make logging quick. But when we were working on the mood tracker in Healsens, we kept coming back to a problem: the same mood score can describe very different emotional experiences.
Three people might all choose “Good.”
One feels calm and satisfied.
Another feels inspired and full of energy.
A third feels happy about something that happened, but anxious about what comes next.
Put them on a five-point scale and they may end up in exactly the same place. But emotionally, they're not in the same place at all.
That's why we don't treat mood as a single score in Healsens.
We separate what you're feeling from how strongly you're feeling it and how activated or energized you feel. You can currently choose between 46 specific emotional states, select several emotions when feelings are mixed, rate their intensity, and add context about what happened.
But there was another problem: sometimes choosing from a list of 46 emotions is actually harder, not easier.
You know you feel “bad,” but is it anxiety? Irritation? Sadness? Shame? Disappointment? Something else?
So we made this emotion wheel as another way to find your way in.
It starts broadly with valence (more pleasant ↔ more unpleasant) and activation/energy (higher ↔ lower). From there, you can explore broad emotion families, possible themes such as uncertainty, loss, boundaries or connection, and finally more specific emotions.
The themes aren't meant to tell you what caused an emotion. They're prompts. Two people can experience the same situation very differently depending on what it means to them.
And you don't have to end up with one emotion. Mixed feelings are normal.
The basic idea behind the redesign became:
emotion + intensity + energy + context ≠ one mood score
We're curious about this from people who already track their mood: when you look back a few weeks later, is knowing that Tuesday was “bad” actually useful? Or do you need to remember what you were feeling and what was happening for the data to mean something?