Move Mood

The main feature of the Move Mood app is scheduling tasks, marking them as complete as you do them, and adding information to track how doing the different things affects your mood.

When you first download the app, you choose a companion to help with motivation.

Then, you set yourself tasks. It can take a few minutes to enter all the information, but it’s an important step to get the app set up so it’s helpful for you.

Move Mood encourages you to start with a routine task, a necessary task, and an enjoyable task. You can tell the app what you’re struggling with so it can help you choose a task from different categories (like mental health, physical wellbeing, and relationships), or you can write in your own task if you want to work on something specific. If you want to, you can break tasks down into their individual steps.

Once your task’s ready, you schedule how often you’ll aim to do it in your calendar (and decide how long you want to commit to trying it for). You also tell the app how difficult you find each task, and log your mood, so you can notice change when you complete tasks.

Then, you commit to doing the tasks you chose as regularly as you can to help yourself feel better.

When you complete a task, you track whether it helped lift your mood and how difficult it was, as well as adding a note if there’s anything you want to reflect on. When you do this, the app helps you to keep track of your progress and how doing different tasks has an impact on your mood.

For extra motivation, you can achieve awards for completing tasks, as well as completing multiple tasks in a day and week.

Move Mood is based on an evidence-based treatment called behavioural activation therapy.

The idea behind behavioural activation therapy is that the things we do affect how we feel. If you’ve struggled with low mood or depression, you might have experienced this –  when you feel low, it’s difficult to keep doing the things you can usually manage, from keeping your living space tidy to seeing your friends. The problem is, having an untidy home and not spending time with people ends up making you feel worse – and it can become a pattern that’s hard to break.

Behavioural activation therapy is based on the idea that if we deliberately try to do activities to help our mood, even when we don’t feel like it, it can actually help us to feel more positive too.