The Luci journal
Blog
Blog about mental health, reflection, mood tracking and CBT techniques. Live your best life
Written by the people behind Luci, a mood tracker and guided journal.
Mood Tracking
Year in Pixels: your whole year on one screen
Three hundred and sixty-five squares. One for each day, coloured by how that day felt. A Year in Pixels is the rare tracking habit that pays you back visually — here's how to start one, how to choose a colour key you won't abandon in February, and what people actually find the first time they look at a full grid.
August 25, 2026
Mood Tracking
Tracking locations: what places do for your mood
Some places really do bring out the best in us — we feel energised, happy and engaged the moment we arrive. Others quietly drain us. With a mood tracker, you can discover which is which. Let's get started.
August 24, 2026
Product Updates
Luci Deep Dive: Customization
Your home screen, the things you track, and every icon you track them with — Luci 4.0 lets you shape all of it. Here's a look at what you can rearrange, add, remove, and make entirely your own.
August 22, 2026
Product Updates
Luci Deep Dive: Self-Reflection
Maya Angelou once said: 'Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.'. Knowing becomes part of the journey and with Luci we wanted to put knowledge right below your fingertips.
August 18, 2026
Product Updates
Introducing the new Luci: understand yourself
Luci 4.0 finds the patterns in your mood and tells you in plain language. All on your device. iPhone, Watch, iPad and Android — August 25.
August 16, 2026
Mind Traps
Sunk Cost Fallacy - Mind Trap
According to research we make an average of 35.000 decisions every day. If your bedtime rhythm is in order, that will account for approximately 2200 decisions every hour.
April 22, 2026
Self-reflection
Reflecting on Your Motivation Is the Key to Achieving your Goals
When you're chasing a goal—whether it's personal, professional, or somewhere in between—motivation is the engine that drives your progress.
June 5, 2025
Mind Traps
Imposter Syndrome - Mind Trap
Are you worth your monthly paycheck? Do you believe you are the right person to lead this team forward? Is this machine maintenance that you do really so hard that it requires a full-time staffer?
May 21, 2025
Mind Traps
Emotional Reasoning - Mind Trap
Have you ever said, “Sorry, I’m just a silly person”? It’s a harmless thing to say, and maybe you do feel silly at times. But the way we talk to ourselves matters — and mistaking a passing feeling for a permanent fact is a mind trap known as emotional reasoning.
March 26, 2025
Product Updates
Luci 3.0 - Celebrating Your Journey
With Luci 3.0, we are bringing home the journey of mood tracking. For decades, psychologists have agreed that tracking your mental state of mind is beneficial to your health. With this new update, we are celebrating that journey so you can live your best life.
March 13, 2025
Mind Traps
Gratitude Trap - Cognitive Distortion
Setbacks are an inevitable part of life, but how we respond to them can reveal hidden patterns in our thinking. Imagine this: you've just returned from a romantic date, only to find that the other person doesn’t want to see you again. As if that weren't enough, your boss calls right before the weekend to inform you that you're being let go.
September 9, 2024
Mind Traps
Magnification and Minification - Mind Trap
'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder'—a phrase you've likely heard before. It's true: we all interpret the world through our own unique perspectives and experiences.
September 9, 2024
Psychology
Apply CBT techniques in everyday life
As we go through life, events or actions may subtly shift our perception of the world, often without us realizing it. This can become problematic when it leads to mental health issues that affect our daily lives, such as stress, lack of confidence, or fear of public spaces.
August 2, 2024
Psychology
Explaining Cognitive Behavior Therapy
Therapy comes in many shapes and forms, and CBT is one of them. CBT stands for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and has been proven to bring about very positive changes for many patients.
August 2, 2024
Mind Traps
Overgeneralization - Mind Trap
Overgeneralization happens when a person takes one isolated experience and applies it to all other events.
August 2, 2024
Mind Traps
Selective Abstraction - Mind Trap
Selective abstraction is the process of taking one, usually negative, aspect out of a larger experience and ignoring the rest.
August 2, 2024
Mind Traps
Dichotomous Thinking - Mind Trap
Dichotomous thinking is a common problem best described as black-or-white thinking. People who think this way are unable to see the complexity in people and situations, viewing things as either perfect or horrible.
July 22, 2024
Mind Traps
Mind Reading - Cognitive Distortion
Mind reading is a mental shortcut where we assume what someone is thinking without having much information to go on. It’s a way to navigate the information-dense world and protect our feelings or empower our biases.
July 22, 2024
Self-reflection
Reflect on Grief
The person you love is gone. The house that was once a home is now mere brick and mortar. Or perhaps you have lost the ability to walk, leaving you “handicapped” for life. One of the certainties in live is change, and odds are we will all face grief at some point in our lives.
May 23, 2024
Mood Tracking
Happiness Scores - Mood Analysis
The core function of any mood tracker is to assess your daily level of happiness and then take action based on that assessment. To do this, you need a system to determine where you stand and, more importantly, where you want to go.
May 9, 2024
Mood Tracking
Moments - Mood Analysis
When you ask someone about their life they can usually sum up a series of memories. Freezes in time that have defined us for who we are. The good, and the bad.
April 22, 2024
Psychology
Live less anxious
Anxiety in some shape or form is completely normal. It happens unconsciously and often is the result of stress. Like it or not stress is important for us to function and can help us to achieve important milestones or keep ourselves out of trouble in dire times.
February 28, 2024
Psychology
Practical Benefit of Self-Reflection
Self-reflection is incredibly important. It allows us to catch, check and change (3Cs) our behavior and improve our outlook on life.
January 18, 2024
Psychology
How to apply Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in real life
Being happy and unstressed is not always something that comes naturally. Post-traumatic stress, or even just the constant pressure from our day-to-day lives, can be enough to fray our mental health.
January 11, 2024
Mood Tracking
How to use a Mood Tracker
You might have heard the term “mood tracker” before. Whether it’s from colleagues, friends or anyone active in the mental health space. In this article we will explain what a mood tracker is, and why you should use one.
January 10, 2024
Psychology
Psychology of Success
What do a game of Monopoly, rich people and a sense of deserving all have in common? Well they have been the subject of an experiment run by the University of California. A rigged game of monopoly has exposed how people can feel given enough success.
December 14, 2023
Mood Tracking
Apps are ideal for Mood Tracking
Everyone should do a daily mood check. Mood Tracking is one of the best ways to find happiness and spot trends that make us sad early on.
November 15, 2023
Psychology
Power of Feeling Unforced
Imagine sitting beside the road seeing cars drive by. In each of those cars sits a person with his or her own goals and feelings. While you are sitting there you might even notice your brain wants to turn its attention towards your own feelings.
October 31, 2023
Self-reflection
Reflect on Finance
Every user of Luci is now able to reflect on our latest topic Finance. With over 30 questions to reflect on you will gain better control of your finance and general relationship with money.
October 31, 2023
Psychology
Happiness is a Journey
What do you want to be when you grow up? It's a question you have probably heard at least a dozen times while growing up. Maybe your answer has changed over time. Or perhaps now that you are an adult you ended up becoming exactly where you'd envisioned you'd be all along.
October 4, 2023
Psychology
Feeling bored boosts creativity
It’s important to be bored, but life is making that so difficult for us. Ask yourself this, did I feel bored today? Your answer could be “no” and you’d not be alone.
September 1, 2023
Psychology
Identify and stop negative thought patterns
We start with a fictional tale about a character named Lisa. She is a teacher with almost twenty years of experience standing in front of a classroom.
June 28, 2023
Psychology
Risk of Procrastination
“Let’s delay project X to next week” is a common answer while planning tasks that we find boring, confusing or intimidating. The thought goes something like this.
June 14, 2023
Psychology
How to maintain your vision and beliefs in the real world
'Hello, it’s me' is part of a popular Adele song, but it also rings home to many of us. Why? Because it’s hard to show who you truly are.
May 28, 2023
Self-reflection
Reflect on stress
Reflection is a super important tool to prevent and combat stress. It’s important to realize where the stress is originating from, how it affects us, and if we are still capable of relativity.
May 28, 2023
Psychology
How to stop feeling depleted and drained
A common sight on the other side of the room. You see a group of 30 somethings. happy and full of life. They are talking about getting kids, scoring that new promotion or how they had a lovely weekend with old friends at a nearby lake house.
May 4, 2023
Mood Tracking
Tips for Tracking Custom Emotions
Personal feelings and emotions is a powerful feature that help you track exactly what makes you special. But great power comes with responsibility so we would like to provide some suggestions and tips to get you started.
May 2, 2023
Mood Tracking
Custom emotions in mood trackers are important
If you ask all scientists in the world to map all possible human emotions you will see just about the same amount of answers as there are scientists. In 1992 Paul Ekman found six human emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust and contempt.
April 12, 2023
Mood Tracking
Benefits of happiness tracking
Keeping track of your mood or happiness comes with many benefits. For one, it can ground you in times of uncertainty. But at the same time can help soften impulsive behavior so you can stay on track of your goals. Let's explore some more benefits that mood tracking provides
March 28, 2023
Psychology
The invisibility of mental health
People are social creatures. Put us in a room together and we gravitate towards each other. This is especially true in the face of adversity.
March 27, 2023
Product Updates
New Luci pricing options
With the release of Luci 2.0.0 we have introduced new pricing options (one-time and subscription) to drastically lower the cost of entry
March 23, 2023
Psychology
Benefits of keeping a journal
Ever wish you had a time machine to go back to that one still moment in time when you were happy? Or re-live a difficult moment of your life knowing what you know now? While impossible physically; looking back is one of the many benefits to keeping a journal. Let's explore.
March 28, 2022