Before downloading several apps and trying each one, it helps to understand what they’re actually designed to do.
There isn’t one tracker that’s right for everyone. The better question is what you want the tracker to help you understand.
If you’re new to mood tracking, it can be tempting to start recording everything you possibly can. You might track your mood and energy alongside your sleep, exercise, caffeine intake, screen time, workload, social activity, symptoms, meditation, and anything else your app allows you to add.
That sounds thorough, but it can quickly turn tracking into another responsibility.
Instead, start with what has actually changed for you.
Maybe you used to feel tired after a difficult day but recovered after a good night’s sleep. Now you’re waking up tired even after spending enough time in bed.
Perhaps your mood seems relatively normal, but you’ve become increasingly impatient at work or find yourself dreading meetings you previously didn’t mind.
Or maybe you’ve noticed that you have enough energy to get through work but very little left for anything afterwards.
Those are exactly the kinds of patterns that can be difficult to judge from memory alone.
The World Health Organization describes occupational burnout through three dimensions: exhaustion, increasing mental distance or cynicism toward work, and reduced professional efficacy. Burnout is classified as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition.
That’s also why tracking mood alone may not give you the whole picture.
For someone starting out, paying attention to how you feel, how much energy you have, how you’re sleeping, and whether your relationship with work seems to be changing can give you a much more useful starting point.
You don’t necessarily need to record every one of these manually every day. The right approach depends partly on which tracker you choose.
If burnout is the reason you’re looking for a mood tracker in the first place, Anticipate App is the most directly focused option on this list.
Unlike a general-purpose mood diary that starts with the question “How do you feel today?”, Anticipate App was designed specifically around chronic stress and burnout.
It brings together information you choose to connect or add, including sleep, activity, calendar events, journal entries, and quick check-ins. Over time, it looks for repeated relationships between what’s happening in your life and changes in your energy, exhaustion, and capacity.
That matters for a first-time user because burnout rarely comes down to a single bad mood.
You might discover, for example, that the days when you feel most drained tend to follow particular types of meetings, several nights of shorter sleep, travel, or periods when you’ve had very little recovery time.
Another practical difference is that Anticipate App doesn’t require you to maintain a perfect daily logging streak. Where you’ve given permission, it can continue collecting signals such as sleep and activity even when you don’t manually check in.
That’s useful if your concern is that the weeks when you feel worst are also the weeks when you’re least likely to keep up with a tracking routine.
Best for: Someone looking specifically for a burnout and chronic-stress tracker rather than a general mood diary.
How it works: Combines passive signals with information you choose to add to build a picture of your patterns over time.
Manual effort: Low. You can add check-ins and journal entries, but the app is designed to reduce dependence on daily manual logging.
Main limitation: Anticipate App is currently designed for iPhone. If you specifically enjoy manually recording and reflecting on your emotions every day, you may prefer a more traditional mood diary.
Bearable makes sense if your main question isn’t simply “How has my mood changed?” but “What might be contributing to how I feel?”
It lets you track mood alongside things such as sleep, energy, symptoms, habits, medications, and other factors.
That flexibility can be useful when you’re trying to understand whether difficult days seem to coincide with something else in your routine.
The downside is that flexibility can also become work.
If you’re experiencing burnout for the first time, don’t assume you need to use every field Bearable gives you. Choose the two or three things you genuinely want to understand and start there. You can always add more later.
Best for: People who enjoy detailed tracking and want to investigate several possible influences on how they feel.
How it works: You choose the factors you want to track and gradually build a record that can help you look for relationships between them.
Manual effort: Medium to high, depending on how much you decide to track.
Main limitation: The amount of customization can be unnecessary if all you want is a quick daily check-in.
Daylio is probably the easiest option to understand if you’ve never used a mood tracker before.
You choose how you’re feeling, add activities if you want to, and gradually build a history of your moods.
There’s very little to learn before you can start using it, which is a genuine advantage when your energy is already low.
For someone experiencing burnout, Daylio can be useful if your main goal is simply to answer questions such as: “Have I actually been feeling worse recently?” or “Are there particular days or activities that repeatedly show up when my mood drops?”
The tradeoff is that Daylio still depends on you opening the app and recording how you’re doing. It also isn’t specifically designed around burnout, so it won’t necessarily capture the broader context unless you choose to add it yourself.
Best for: Someone who wants a straightforward first mood tracker without much setup.
How it works: Select your mood, optionally record activities or notes, and review your history over time.
Manual effort: Low, but regular logging is still required.
Main limitation: It’s a general mood tracker rather than a burnout-specific tool.
Sometimes the difficulty isn’t remembering to track your mood. It’s knowing what to write when an app asks how you’re feeling.
“Bad” can mean a lot of different things.
You might be frustrated after a difficult meeting, overwhelmed by the amount of work waiting for you, emotionally flat after several exhausting weeks, or worried about something completely unrelated to work. Those experiences can feel similar in the moment but tell you very different things when you look back.
How We Feel is particularly useful for this problem because it focuses on helping you identify more specific emotions.
That makes it a good starting point if you’re trying to develop a better understanding of your emotional state rather than collecting lots of health or lifestyle data.
Best for: People who find it difficult to identify or describe exactly what they’re feeling.
How it works: Helps you select and record more specific emotions rather than relying only on a simple good-to-bad mood scale.
Manual effort: Low.
Main limitation: If you’re specifically investigating burnout, you may eventually want additional context around sleep, energy, workload, and recovery that an emotion-focused tracker doesn’t capture by itself.
If you’re still unsure, don’t compare every feature. Start with the problem you’re trying to solve.
If you’re specifically worried about burnout: Start with Anticipate App. It’s the only option here designed specifically around chronic stress and burnout, and it requires relatively little manual tracking.
If you want to investigate everything that might affect how you feel: Bearable gives you the most flexibility.
If you just want a simple record of how your mood changes: Daylio is probably the easiest place to start.
If you often know that something feels wrong but struggle to put the feeling into words: How We Feel may be more useful.
And if all four still sound like too much, you don’t actually need an app to begin.
Open the Notes app on your phone once a day and write down how you’re feeling, how much energy you have, and one sentence about your day. Do that for a couple of weeks and see whether anything starts to stand out.
The point isn’t to build a perfect dataset. It’s to have enough history to see something that you couldn’t see before.
Whichever tool you choose, resist the temptation to customize everything immediately.
For your first couple of weeks, focus on a small amount of information.
You might record your general mood and energy once a day, while also noting whether work felt manageable or particularly draining. If you’ve slept unusually badly, had an especially difficult day, or something significant happened, add a short note.
A real entry might look like this:
“Tuesday. Mood was okay, but energy was low all day. Felt drained after the team meeting and didn’t really recover in the evening. Slept badly the night before.”
That’s enough.
After you’ve collected some history, look back and ask practical questions. Are your low-energy days becoming more frequent? Do they mostly happen during the working week? Are you recovering after weekends? Do certain situations repeatedly appear before particularly difficult days?
Once you know what you’re trying to understand, you can decide whether tracking something else would actually help.
Mood tracking should make things clearer, not give you another system to maintain. When you’re experiencing burnout for the first time, a few mistakes can make tracking less useful than it needs to be.
Don’t track everything just because you can
An app may let you record dozens of variables, but that doesn’t mean you need all of them.
Start with the information that relates to the question you’re trying to answer. If you later suspect that exercise, caffeine, particular meetings, or another factor is affecting you, you can start tracking it then.
Don’t worry about maintaining a perfect streak
Missing a day doesn’t make the rest of your history useless.
In fact, if you repeatedly stop logging during your most difficult periods, that’s useful information about whether a highly manual tracker is right for you.
This is one reason Anticipate App is designed to continue building context from the signals you’ve chosen to connect even when you don’t manually check in.
Don’t treat your tracker as a diagnosis
A tracker can help you see that something has changed. It can’t tell you with certainty why it changed.
Changes in sleep, mood, energy, motivation, or concentration can have many causes. Anticipate App and the other tools discussed here should not be used to diagnose burnout or another mental or physical health condition.
If the changes you’re experiencing are persistent, severe, or worrying, consider speaking with your doctor or another qualified healthcare professional. The history you’ve built through tracking may help you explain more clearly what you’ve been experiencing and when it started.
Anticipate App also includes tools designed to help organize your patterns into clearer information you can bring to a healthcare appointment.
If you’re experiencing burnout for the first time, your first tracker doesn’t need to be your forever tracker.
It needs to help you answer the questions you have right now without adding unnecessary work to your day.
For someone specifically concerned about burnout, Anticipate App is the most directly relevant starting point because it was designed around chronic stress and burnout rather than general mood logging. It also reduces the amount of information you need to manually enter.
But that doesn’t make it the right choice for everyone.
If you enjoy detailed self-tracking, Bearable may give you more control. If you simply want to record your mood each day, Daylio may be all you need. And if understanding your emotions is the difficult part, How We Feel approaches the problem differently.
Choose the one that matches the question you’re trying to answer. Use it for a while. Then look back and ask whether you understand yourself any better than you did before.
That’s a much better test of a mood tracker than the number of features it has.
