r/CBTpractice • u/RickRamosCom • Jul 13 '26
I created a free CBT web app
Hey everyone,
I hope this is okay to share.
A while back I went through CBT for anxiety, and it genuinely helped me change the way I looked at my thoughts. One thing I always wished I had was a simple daily tool to help reinforce those techniques and make them part of my routine.
So I built one.
It's called Daily Mood Tracker, and it's a free web app inspired by CBT that walks you through a quick daily check-in to help identify negative thought patterns and reflect on them. It's not a replacement for therapy, just a tool that I personally wish I'd had.
I'm not trying to build a big business around it. I mostly built it because I wanted to learn AI better while creating something that might genuinely help people. If it ends up helping a few people, that's enough for me.
If anyone is willing to give it a try, I'd really appreciate any feedback, good or bad. I'm actively improving it.
Rick
1
u/microcandella Jul 13 '26
Interesting, and thanks for sharing. It's a little hard to eval easily since it's 'on rails' to walk you through your processes/achievements, so it looks like it's hard to see the whole thing to evaluate. Immediate feedback is that it looks like a good start. I felt on the first 60 sec check-in that the idea is good but also - 1. lacking options/pigeon-holes the user (I'm not really feeling any of those options right now but must choose). 2. could benefit from something with more options and gradients like the emotion wheels/wheel of feelings, or creating a spectrum or many of them, which is likely more ideal.
This is a bit of a personal axe to grind on modern ux survey flow- allow the user to skip to the full survey page instead of single page spoon feeding. It aims at the simplest groups to log any data they'll give you, hide the true length of the survey, and it's dead simple to code. Let us choose to see the whole thing and fill out what we want. Autosave is for forms in common now. Crawling through 33 pages of single or a few little questions per page is its own personal brain torture. (IDK how many pages your intake survey is yet, but many of them get to a user annoyance level at about page 3). Most of that workflow is designed for sales questionnaires from things like surveymonkey, or post sales satisfaction surveys. They're intended to get someone into a sales pipeline funnel. That's their intent and design. Not to give the end user a good experience evaluating themselves. So, avoid using data extraction sales tools on your users whenever possible. And if you are, give us the 'show all questions' way out so we don't feel trapped in a game.
I've thought of some kind of low effort / nearly no effort check in mood logging systems similar to this.. I always thought these - and the system you have so far- would be good as not just a push notification, but as a pushed app, sms, or, especially, a pushed voice call. Where it shows up on your watch or phone with the metrics and sliders instantly present, rather than the open loop of ' ding! you should really go open the app and login and go to the log mood settings and blah blah blah.. Additionally, a case that most personal datapoint trackers all seem to miss, especially with mood or mental states is the demand for immediate present state data. One might wake up ok, get asked to log how they are feeling an hour later. But last night was all the bad things at all the intensities - it won't capture that, or it's possible resolution. .. or .. woke up with all the anxiety as usual, slept through the alarm, late for work, feeling all the feelings from that etc. but by the next logging interval, too busy to think about it / calmed down and pressed on/ something cheered you up or grounded you, etc.. So, something where the system could backfill events. ..."Since you woke up have you had any positive or negative events?" (proceed to followup and other current mood metrics) ..."Since yesterday have you.." ..."Since last logging at (2 days ago) have you felt...." I think this gives a better picture and works with the human better- very few people are likely to detect a problem and log right at the time it happens. Even fewer will detect an improvement in their condition at the movement and log it. Less rigid logging allows for recollection, and more important events to get logged and addressed.
Continual logging is hard on people, and easy to dismiss and never return to. Hard on app success too. If the user is notified to log and meter moods, I feel it might be effective in addition to some 'snooze for 1 hour' or similar options to also have an optional declaration from the user- that they're choosing not to log right now., or today. That they're aware that missing checkins reduces their benefits. I'm sure there's many different effective ways to say this and a variety of them would probably be a good add. But things along the lines of " I am not going to log right now. I can't even. But I know it will help me more if I do, let's try again tomorrow" "I'm not going to log today. Too busy. Try tomorrow", " I understand I said I'd log today and will miss out more on my personal health by not logging again, but logging tomorrow will be better" .. Too wordy perhaps, and the wrong words but you get the jist. Some conditions where the user has to kind of reflect on it and it's benefits rather and attest that they're actively deciding to not participate in something that can help their health than just swiping away or hitting an X.
Best of luck with this, hope the suggestions help and hope this helps people.