Using Mood Loops
Hello, I’m Austin. I made Mood Loops.
I am also an ex-Google engineer with eight years of professional development experience. You can find me on GitHub.
Have a question not covered by this page? Let me know through the contact form in the app, and I’ll get back to you over email.
What is the point of Mood Loops?
I wrote all about this on the Why? page.
Is Mood Loops free?
- Mood Loops is free if you use only 3 loops, which is enough for important stuff.
- For more loops, you can subscribe. Subscriptions are pay-what-you-want and you can choose $1, $5, or $15 per month.
- I am not going to insult you by pretending $4.99 is better than $5.
- The loop limit is removed no matter what you pay. It’s up to you!
Subscribing
- Subscribe, change price, or cancel through Stripe from your account page.
- You’ll get a reminder three days before renewal.
- Canceling will terminate your subscription immediately. You’ll receive a pro-rated refund within the next couple days.
- Canceling your subscription will delete all your loops except for the first three in your list.
- Changing price will not affect your loops.
Keeping Your Data Safe
You may choose to use Mood Loops to predict sensitive things, like your or your partner’s menstrual cycle. I have been careful to design Mood Loops to accomodate your privacy:
- You can make your tracker look like anything you want. Gaming Schedule: 4 days of 💥, 22 days of 🎃 could mean something different to you.
- I will never sell your information. I hate big companies and their ad shit more than you do. My business model is to make a good product that you want to pay me for.
- My database doesn’t store any history of your previous loops or their changes, so the data cannot be used against you if siezed.
- Note: The calendar feature extrapolates from today, and doesn’t record actual history.
If you have additional concerns, let me know. For more specific details, please refer to my security and privacy pages.
Install the App
Mood Loop is a progressive web application, which means you install it from this website, not the app store.
- On Android: tap the three dots button, then Install App.
- On iOS: tap the Share button in Safari, then Add to Home Screen.
- On Desktop Chrome: tap the install button in the address bar, next to the bookmark star.
Loops
Tap anywhere on the loop to edit it. Tap and drag on the drag indicator to reorder your loops.
A basic loop
Loops are the basis of Mood Loops. Here is a basic way you might use it:
- Your menstrual cycle affects you a lot but you don’t want a complicated tracker, so you decide to predict it with Mood Loops.
- You open mood loops, click the plus button, and click the “28-Day Menstrual Cycle” template.
- The next time your period starts, you open the loop and tap “Restart” to mark that as the first day of the cycle.
- You find that your period actually lasts five days, so on day five you open the loop and tap the plus button on the 🩸 mood to extend it.
And so on.
A Streak-counter Loop
You can make a loop stop after it’s finished, instead of looping. This can be useful if you want to be generally aware of how long it’s been since some normal sequence of events has passed, but you don’t know exactly when the cycle will restart. For example:
- How long you’ve avoided smoking
- How long it’s been since the known phases of your period ended
- How long it’s been since some kind of “cooldown” time has passed
Here’s an example of that last one.
- You want to be sure to do something sweet for your partner at least once every few days.
- You open Mood Loops and use the plus button to copy the “Loving Gesture Once a Week” template.
- You change the 7-day period to 3 and click “Finish Editing.”
- Every time you do something nice for your partner, you click the “Loving Gesture” loop and then click “Restart”.
- Now, when you glance at Mood Loops, the loop will be green if you’ve done something sweet in the past few days. If it’s been a while, it’ll be orange, and will tell you how long it’s been since the 3-day “I did something nice recently” window ended.
An Advanced Loop
Mood Loops also has cool features like:
- Start any specific mood immediately
- Split a long mood into multiple pieces
Here is a more thorough example with some more advanced features:
- Whenever you eat bread, you get sick for about two weeks, but you always forget about the original cause after a few days.
- You make a “Gluten Exposure” loop, with Stops at End mode, 14 days of 🤮, and 1 day of 🙂.
- You haven’t eaten any bread recently, so you drag the slider to the end of the loop. Mood Loops now starts counting the number of days since the last time you had bread. Mood Loops shows “🙂 since…”
- The next time you eat bread, you tap the loop to open it, then tap “reset to start”, then tap “finished”. Mood Loops saves settings whenever you change them.
- For the next two weeks, your “Gluten Exposure” loop shows 🤮, and counts down day by day until it reaches 🙂.
- You realize your 2 weeks of feeling sick is actually one week of an upset stomach and one week of feeling tired. It’s easy to change your loop without losing your place.
- You tap the loop, drag the slider to day 8, then tap “Cut Here.” The 🤮 mood splits into a second one starting at day 8, and you change the second one into 🫠. You can also change the numbers yourself, but cutting can be easier.
- You drag the slider back to the day it was before you changed it.
Calendar
The Calendar lets you predict your mood in the future or past. It doesn’t remember if you reset or changed your loops in the past.
The top bar lets you move day-to-day or choose a specific day. Today’s date is always highlighted. Tap the top-right button to reset the calendar display back to today’s date.
Alerts
With the calendar, you can predict moods yourself. On the other hand, alerts will predict moods for you and let you know when they’re coming.
An alert can tell you directly that “💊 next happens on March 3” or “🥳 and 🥵 overlap next week.”
Mood Loops can send you an email when alerts are triggered in case you forget about them. You can also get notifications in your browser or on your phone; just visit the account page and tap “Enroll this Device.”
A Simple Example
Let’s say you want to get a notification when your medication is running low.
- Create a new loop with the “30-Day Pill Supply” template.
- With this template, you have 30 days total. The last 7 days are marked with a ⚠️, so you know it’s time to go get a new prescription!
- Go to the alerts page and click the plus to make a new alert. Name it “Low on Medication.”
- Check the checkbox next to the ⚠️ mood. The status text should now say “this alert will activate on …”
- Click finished. Now you’ll see that the “Low on Medication” alert will activate on the right day! You can confirm it with the calendar page.
You can view upcoming alerts like these on the Alert page. You can also enable email or browser app notifications on the Account page.
An Advanced Example
Let’s say you have a stressful on-call rotation every 5 weeks at work, and you also have a pretty consistent menstrual cycle. You may want to know in advance when your on-call and period will overlap, so you can prepare some relaxion aids beforehand.
- Create “28-Day Menstrual Cycle” and “1 Week On-Call, 5 Weeks Off” loops for this example.
- Create a new alert named “Period and On-Call Overlap.” In the editor, select the 🔥 and 🩸 moods.
- The status will say “This alert is active today!”, since both of those loops are still at day 1. Let’s advance those loops to simulate a regular alert.
- On the loops page, tap them both and drag the slider to a different mood.
- Back on the alerts page, you’ll see that the alert now tells you the next date where both 🩸 and 🔥 will be happening that day.
You may wish to add a “warning” mood to the end of those loops and alert on that to get a more advance notice.