The Luci journal
Blog
About mood tracking, self-reflection, and the patterns hiding in an ordinary week.
Written by the people behind Luci, a mood tracker and guided journal.
Psychology
Winter blues: how shorter days change your mood, and what a mood tracker can show you
When the days get shorter, a lot of people feel flatter, sleepier and less like themselves. What the winter blues are, how they differ from seasonal affective disorder, what helps, and how a mood tracker can show you your own seasonal pattern.
October 7, 2026
Mood Tracking
Why people quit mood trackers, and how to stick with one
Plenty of people start a mood tracker and quit within weeks. Here are the five most common reasons, and what helps you stick with one.
September 29, 2026
Psychology
Managing stress in everyday life: pace it like a marathon
Stress is built for a sprint, yet everyday life is a marathon. Learn why daily stress wears you down and how to manage it: track it, breathe, find your pace.
September 24, 2026
Mood Tracking
Mood logging on Apple Watch: track your mood from your wrist
Luci is a mood tracker with a real Apple Watch app. Log your mood in ten seconds from your wrist, add a journal note, and add the complication to your watch face.
September 19, 2026
Psychology
A mood tracker for anxiety: what your entries can show you
Anxiety is the most common mental health condition in the world, and one of the hardest to see clearly from the inside. What the research says about tracking it, and how Luci approaches the job.
September 11, 2026
Psychology
Living with bipolar disorder: what a mood tracker can show you
Bipolar disorder is often diagnosed years late and hard to see from the inside. Here is what the research says about mood tracking, and how Luci approaches it.
September 8, 2026
Mood Tracking
The power of Mood Trackers and how to use them
How to start a mood tracker and keep it going: what to track, how to pick a mood scale, how to read your patterns each month, and how to close out the year with a full picture of how you felt.
September 1, 2026
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, available August 25.
August 16, 2026
Mind Traps
Sunk cost fallacy: meaning, examples and how to spot it
The sunk cost fallacy is sticking with a choice because of what you already put in. See everyday examples and how to decide afresh.
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: meaning, signs and what helps
Imposter syndrome is the nagging fear of being exposed as a fraud, even when your success is real. See how it shows up and what can help.
May 21, 2025
Mind Traps
Emotional reasoning: meaning, examples and how to spot it
Emotional reasoning is treating a feeling as a fact, like going from feeling silly to calling yourself silly. See examples and how to correct it.
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
The gratitude trap: meaning, examples and how to spot it
The gratitude trap is using "at least" thinking to talk yourself out of problems you could change. See how it shows up, with examples.
September 9, 2024
Mind Traps
Magnification and minimization: meaning and examples
Magnification blows small things up, and minimization shrinks real problems down. See everyday examples of both and how to correct them.
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: meaning, examples and how to spot it
Overgeneralization is taking one bad experience and applying it to everything. See an everyday example and the words that give it away.
August 2, 2024
Mind Traps
Selective abstraction: meaning, examples and how to spot it
Selective abstraction is when one negative detail colors how you see a whole experience. Here is what it means, with an everyday example.
August 2, 2024
Mind Traps
Dichotomous (black-and-white) thinking: meaning and examples
Dichotomous thinking sees things as either perfect or a failure, with nothing in between. Learn how to spot it, with everyday examples.
July 22, 2024
Mind Traps
Mind reading: meaning, examples and how to spot it
Mind reading is assuming you know what someone thinks without much to go on. See an everyday example and how to question those thoughts.
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
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