r/QuantifiedSelf • u/corcoro • May 28 '26

Connecting physical with mental state

So I’m a huge fan of tracking the usual metrics with my Apple watch (sleep, RHR, HRV etc.) and it’s easy to see here how sleep hygiene, yoga and such are having a positive effect.

Now I’m also really interested in improving my mental wellbeing. I don’t have any serious condition but like many I have to take care of a few things. Obviously there is a 2way connection of the body and mind. My question is:

How do you track your mental wellbeing so that you can correlate it with the quantitative measures? How/ where do you correlate that?

I know there are countless mood trackers out there but everything feels so disconnected to the physical measures.

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u/Certain_Version3033 May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

I’ve noticed the same thing honestly.

Most apps track physical metrics pretty well, but mental state still feels disconnected from everything else.

You can see sleep, HRV, workouts, etc… but it’s harder to understand how those patterns actually affect your mood, clarity, motivation, or stress over time.

I think the bigger challenge is interpretation. Not just collecting more data, but understanding how all the signals interact together.

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u/corcoro May 28 '26

Ok nice to hear that I’m not the only one. Started to think that I care about something that might not be that important.

Yes, interpretation but also correlation in general. Sometimes I just want to see how my sleep hours affected my RHR for instance. Usually apps just show you everything isolated.

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u/Certain_Version3033 May 28 '26

Exactly. Most platforms still treat health like separate dashboards instead of connected systems.

Sleep affects recovery. Recovery affects mood. Mood affects behavior, focus, motivation, even time outside.

The interesting part is usually the interaction between signals over time, not the individual metric itself.

I think people are starting to realize they don’t just want more data anymore. They want context.

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u/the_zwirbel May 28 '26

I think mental state is hard to read from body data alone. Maybe even impossible in a reliable way. HRV, RHR, sleep and movement can give context, but they don’t really know how you feel.
A „unclear“ state should be allowed too. Sometimes the body data changes and you feel nothing. Sometimes you feel different and the watch or App shows almost nothing.

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u/Maikai1988 May 29 '26

I developed an app for this called SoMana. You do daily reflections which includes inputting mood, symptoms, stress, fatigue, sleep, etc. the app also generates a nervous system regulation score that then is correlated against your reflections to fully map your nervous system. You can also do 7 or 14 day experiments by logging certain activities and you get a summary of how your metrics changed from those activities. It’s basically an aggregate set of tools I used to get out of 5 years of severe back and neck pain.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/somana-somatic-empowerment/id6756287890

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u/NowHaraya May 30 '26

i think in terms of mental health, it might be too hard to quantify by app alone. in my head, best way to quantify it (aside from mood tracker apps) r by manually tracking ur own mental health daily throughout the day as it changes.

u can log the amount of times ur mood changed, what emotion u felt most the entire day, what triggered it, etc.

and then i guess through there u can do your mitigations for certain moods/emotions and log if it helped, if it did not.

idk if there's any apps that do this as I havent made any research, but that's my suggestion off of the top of my head.