I Built a Bipolar Mood Tracker (Nothing Else Worked)

Steadyline was built because existing mood trackers treated bipolar disorder like general wellness. Most apps offered meditation prompts and gratitude journals instead of clinical-grade tracking for sleep variability, medication effects, and episode warning signs. The app was designed by someone living with bipolar who needed a tool that matched the condition’s severity.

I didn’t set out to build an app.

I set out to not fall apart. The app was a side effect.

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The rough version

Sometime around mid-2025, things were not going great. I was between jobs, dealing with some personal stuff that I won’t get into, and my mental health was doing the thing it does. Swinging. I have bipolar disorder, and while I’ve been managing it for a while with medication and self-awareness, there are periods where “managing” is a very generous word for what’s actually happening.

During one of those periods, I did what most people do: I downloaded a bunch of apps. Mood trackers, journal apps, wellness things. I tried them honestly. Some for a day, some for a week.

They all did the same thing. They gave me a smiley face to pick, maybe a journal prompt like “what are you grateful for today?”, and a streak counter to keep me coming back. And I remember sitting there at like midnight, genuinely struggling, staring at five smiley faces and thinking: this is it? This is what we’ve built for people like me?

I’m a software engineer. I work in healthcare tech. I know what a well-designed system looks like. And this wasn’t it. Not because the apps were ugly or broken, but because they fundamentally didn’t understand the problem they were supposedly solving.

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What I actually needed

Here’s what I needed and couldn’t find:

I needed to log my mood, energy, sleep, and stability separately. Because they’re not the same thing. You can have high energy and terrible mood. That’s a mixed state, and it’s dangerous. You can have decent mood but zero stability, which means you feel fine right now but you know it won’t last. A single number or a smiley face can’t capture that.

I needed to see patterns over time. Not just “you’ve logged for 7 days in a row!” but actual relationships between variables. Does my mood drop after bad sleep? How many days is the delay? When I changed medication, did anything shift? These are questions that matter clinically, and no app I tried could answer any of them.

I needed something I could show my psychiatrist. My appointments are 15, maybe 20 minutes. I’m supposed to summarize weeks of mental health in that time, from memory, while potentially in an episode. That’s insane. The APA emphasizes the importance of ongoing monitoring and communication with your treatment team. What I wanted was a report: here’s the data, here are the trends, here are the flags. Let’s skip the “so how have you been?” and get to the actual information.

And honestly? I needed something that didn’t treat me like a child. No gamification, no cute mascots, no “you’re doing great!” when I’m clearly not. Just a tool that takes the situation as seriously as I do.

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So I started building

It wasn’t some grand startup decision. It was more like… I had the skills, I had the need, and I had a lot of empty time that I needed to fill with something that wasn’t destructive.

The first version was terrible. Just a basic form that saved mood data to a local database. No charts, no analysis, nothing fancy. But even that, just the act of having a structured way to record how I was doing, changed something. It forced me to be specific about my state instead of just feeling bad in a vague, amorphous way.

“Mood: 2. Sleep: 4 hours. Energy: 5. Stability: 1.” That’s not a fun thing to type. But it’s a hell of a lot more useful than a sad face emoji.

Over the next few months I kept adding to it. Charts that showed trends. A sleep-mood comparison view. Medication tracking. A place to log triggers and symptoms. An AI chat feature that could look at your history and actually say something relevant instead of generic platitudes.

At some point it stopped being a personal project and started being… a product. Not because I decided to make it one, but because other people started asking about it. Friends, a couple of people online, even my psychiatrist who thought the clinician report feature was genuinely useful.

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The part I didn’t plan

Here’s the thing I didn’t expect: building the tool during a difficult period made it better than if I’d built it during a stable one.

When you’re building a mood tracker while your mood is actually fluctuating, you catch design problems that you’d never notice otherwise. You realize that the log entry form has too many fields for a day when you can barely function. You realize that the chart is useless if it doesn’t highlight the sleep-mood correlation automatically. You realize that showing someone a streak counter when they just broke a four-day log streak because they were depressed is… not great UX. Your worst day is actually your most important log, and the app has to respect that.

Every feature in the app has been tested on me, on my worst days. That sounds dramatic and I don’t mean it that way. I just mean that I’ve used this thing when I was in no mood to use anything, and the parts that survived that test are the parts that matter.

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Where it is now

Steadyline (that’s what it’s called) became a real product. Something I’m actually proud of, built on the exact principles I described above: tracking the things that matter, surfacing real patterns, generating something useful to bring to a doctor’s appointment.

I still use it every day. That’s the only quality bar that was ever going to matter to me.

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I’m a software engineer who lives with bipolar disorder. I built Steadyline because nothing else took the problem seriously enough.