Have you tried a starting regular journaling habit? Recording your personal thoughts and feelings each day can be a positive tool to improve your mental health. Writing things down can help to relieve stress, clear your mind, give you a better perspective, and promote feelings of gratitude.

The problem many people find with journaling is that it can feel like hard work. Often, people start with good intentions and beautiful notebooks but soon find they are unable to maintain the habit. If you’re one of these people, Daylio might just be the solution for you.

What Is Daylio?

Daylio is a bullet journal app with a difference. Incredibly versatile, it can be used to track just anything you care to keep a record of. This includes your mood and your happiness.

With over 10 million downloads, Daylio has been helping people with self-care since 2015. You can use it to keep a wellness journal without even typing a single sentence. If you’re after a more traditional bullet journaling app, try these apps to make bullet journaling effortless. Meanwhile, if you’re a Windows user, you should explore these great journaling apps for Windows 10.

Download: Daylio for iOS | Android (Free, subscription available)

How to Use Daylio to Track Your Mood and Set Targets

Your first task in the app is to choose the things you want to track. You can select as many activities as you like. The categories Daylio presents to you are:

  • Social
  • Hobbies
  • Sleep
  • Food
  • Health
  • Better me
  • Chores

Next, set up reminders to make checking in each day into a habit. Create a goal, such as sleeping for eight hours, exercising, meditating, or reading. Tell Daylio how often you’d like to achieve this goal, and that’s it!

The check-in process is simple. Again, it’s emoji-based, and all you need to do is check off the good habits you’ve practiced. If you wish, you can add notes and upload photos for motivation. These are optional, though, which means the whole process can take just seconds to complete. If you're looking for more variety, check out other ways to create your daily mental health diary.

Review and Reflect on Your Activities

Daylio presents your habits in a variety of ways. You can check a calendar easily, or access a range of charts to see your progress toward achieving your goals over time. Subscribing to Daylio Premium gives you far more control over the detail presented on the review screens.

You can export your data in PDF or CSV format to share with your health provider or simply to help you celebrate your successes! You can also share your achievements through the social features provided.

Upgrading to Daylio Premium

The level of detail in your review statistics is only part of the package if you upgrade to Daylio Premium. You’ll also get a range of premium features, including the following:

  • Unlimited emoji and color schemes, with over 2,000 icons to use
  • Unlimited tracking of moods and goals
  • Advanced goal setting
  • Automatic backups
  • Custom writing templates to help you if you wish to record more detail
  • PIN protection for the app to keep your journal private

Try Bullet Journaling With a Difference

Daylio is a simple app with a great interface that makes it easy to track your goals and habits. And the fact that you can track and compare different aspects of your life means you’ll quickly start to notice patterns forming. Maybe junk food is causing you to have a low mood. Maybe if you don’t exercise, you don’t sleep well. Daylio is a perfect tool to help you notice and correct such things. It’s like an ongoing self-care education!

And if you prefer to follow a more traditional journaling or diary-keeping route, you can still use technology in a variety of ways to help you self-publish your thoughts.