Five apps that will help you manage your bipolar disorder

Due to the constant mood changes of bipolar disorder, one might find it difficult to progress with everyday activities. Even though there is no cure for bipolar disorder, you can keep the condition under control through a combination of medication, therapy, and lifestyle changes.

It is essential for the person who has bipolar disorder to build healthy habits and effectively manage their mood. Stress reduction is also crucial, as chronic stress is a major contributive factor to the episodes of depression. 

I’ve picked these apps to help me track, understand, or control my mood a bit better, so I can live a healthier, more balanced life.
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eMoods​
eMoods is a mood tracker built for people with bipolar disorder. To capture your daily highs and lows, the app prompts you to track depressive symptoms, psychotic symptoms, irritability, and elevated mood throughout the day, including an estimate of severity for each. Your input gets summarised in colour code on a monthly calendar, giving you an easy snapshot of your mood changes. The app also lets you view and export a monthly summary report, which you can email to your healthcare team to help them identify your specific triggers and improve your care.
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​stoic
stoic.’s goal is to help users manage their mental health by providing mood tracking, journaling, and meditation tools. The tools are based on cognitive behavioural therapy, as interpreted by Stoicism, an ancient school of philosophy. The app personalises the user’s tasks with assessments of their feelings (ranges from excellent to angry) and activities the user may have enjoyed (e.g. work, fitness, date, nature, etc.) at the beginning and end of every day. The app also provides the user with journal prompts and quotes from Stoic philosophers to reflect on. The app keeps track of the activities completed by the user in the “trends” section. Users also can go directly into exercises that interest them, such as “visualization”, focus, thoughts, goals, etc.
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Pillow
There are several popular sleep tracking apps on the App Store, but Pillow is, without a doubt, one of the best. The free app tracks sleep quality in great detail and even records audio and heart rate data. When activated, Pillow will monitor your sleep overnight and provide a breakdown of sleep quality the following day. The app offers information on periods of waking, REM, light sleep, and deep sleep using a colour graphic that is easy to read and interpret.
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Insight Timer
Insight Timer is a comprehensive meditation app. It boasts the world’s most extensive library of free meditations that are instantly available to anyone with a smartphone or computer. Meditation offers many benefits to our mental health and overall wellbeing, but it can be challenging to do without support. Insight Timer provides that support.
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Down dog
Between Down Dog Yoga's customizability and its endless configurations, the app makes it tough to get bored regardless of your skill level. Rather than choosing from many pre-recorded videos, Down Dog has over 60,000 configurations of sessions that it mixes up for you each time. Then, all you have to do is fill out your preferences and hit start.
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The list doesn't end here. So many other apps can prove to be a helping hand while undergoing treatment for bipolar disorder. These apps assist in tracking your emotions, let you stay organised with your treatment and routine while optimising your daily habits. So, get going by downloading the app that you think can turn out beneficial for you.

And above all, be optimistic that the treatments and your efforts of fighting this disorder will pay off pretty soon.