Getting Started with MoodLight

You open MoodLight for the first time. No login screen. No onboarding deck. No permission requests. Just five colored orbs waiting for you. The first moment is quiet. You tap one—maybe calm, maybe heavy, maybe something else entirely—and in thirty seconds, you're done. That's the whole app. But what happens next is where MoodLight becomes different from every other mood tracker you've tried.

Step 1: Open and Tap Your First Orb

When you first launch MoodLight, you see the five orbs on a clean screen. Calm (blue), bright (yellow), heavy (red), off (gray), numb (purple). No numbers. No labels asking you to rate intensity or rate happiness. These five states are what most people actually experience—and what most apps skip entirely.

Tap the orb that matches how you feel right now. That's it. If you want to add a one-line note—why you feel that way, what happened, anything—you can. But it's optional. The whole moment takes thirty seconds.

Step 2: Watch Your Week Turn into Color

After your first check-in, return to the home screen. You'll see a thin colored strip representing your week. Each tap adds a new segment. By day three, you have a gradient. By day seven, you see a real pattern—the actual shape of your mood across seven days, not a list of numbers or a clinical graph.

Step 3: Check In, Day After Day

There's no streak counter. No notification pushing you to check in. No penalty if you skip a day. Most people find that the ritual becomes natural—a quiet thirty seconds in the morning or evening, a moment to actually notice how they feel instead of scrolling past it. Some days you'll add a note. Some days you won't. Both count equally.

Step 4: Review Your Mood Map

Open the monthly view and see your entire month laid out as a colored calendar. Patterns emerge that you wouldn't notice in raw notes. Heavy Mondays. Bright Thursday afternoons. Numb Saturday mornings. This is the mood map you actually want to look at—not because it gamifies wellness, but because it tells you something true about yourself.

Step 5: Share or Bring to Therapy

When you're ready, export a shareable mood card—a soft, designed image of your week or month. Share it with someone who gets it, or print it out and bring it to your therapist. No one else sees your notes unless you choose to share. Learn more about getting the most out of daily check-ins in our MoodLight tips guide.

The Privacy Foundation

Everything stays on your device. No account. No cloud. No company tracking your emotional data. If you delete the app, your check-ins are gone—not sold, not stored, not second-guessed by an algorithm. This isn't a feature we add later. It's the whole design from the start. For a deeper look at how mood orbs work differently than traditional scales, read the five orbs: how MoodLight rethinks daily mood tracking.