Depressed? How Your Mac Can Help Track Your Moods.

Depression is a wide spread mood disorder that affects tens of millions of people, including Mac users. What can be done about it?

Optimism is a Mac utility that tracks depression characteristics in an advanced diary (a version is also available for Windows PC).

Depression is often defined as a severe despondency and dejection, typically felt over a period of time and accompanied by feelings of hopelessness and inadequacy.

It’s a serious disorder that covers a wide spectrum of moods, causes, symptoms, and severity. Depression can be difficult to identify and treat. Your Mac can help.

Optimism is an affordable utility, more of a health and mood diary, which lets depression afflicted people discover various triggers and symptom periods, and can chart the results.

By tracking various causes and symptoms, a person with depression can begin to see where some daily influences may impact mental health, positively and negatively. The resulting record becomes a useful tool for improving health.

Optimism is straightforward and easy to use. Three categories capture different moods and situations through the day.

Stay Well Strategies Today, include click buttons for food, drink, exercise, sleep, and more.

Triggers today include click boxes for problem areas; poor diet, lack of sleep, medicine not taken, and more. Symptoms today uses click buttons to track anger, sadness, irritability, loss of energy, and more.

To the right of the main sections are slider bars to track Daily Mood, How Well You Coped, How Long You Exercised, and the Quality of Sleep.

The ubiquitous Tool Bar at the top of Optimism has buttons for the detail record by day, Charts, Reports, Plan.

The health benefits of tracking daily information become quickly obvious. Monitoring sets the stage for identifying cause and effect relationships. Once they’re identified, then a daily health plan can be implemented.

Mental health is a serious issue for people these days. Many of us may know someone who suffers from depression. Optimism is a utility which may help. It costs $19.95 but also has a seven-day trial version with all features unlocked so you can check it out completely before purchase.

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Off Topic Note: Guess what? Former Mac360 writer Kate Mac is back online after dumping Windows and re-embracing the Mac. Again.