Mood score is a structured 1–10 self-rating of overall affect, captured at one fixed time window each day. It is the primary outcome for stacks aimed at depressive symptoms, anxiety, stress, adaptogenic load, and hormonal support — think vitamin D, magnesium, saffron, rhodiola, creatine, and omega-3. A 1–2 point lift in the 28-day average is the realistic target; anything larger in a short window is almost certainly expectancy talking.
Why it matters
Mood is the outcome most people actually chase when they say they "feel better" on a new protocol, yet it is the outcome most distorted by expectancy and context. Structured, daily, short-interval logging is the only defense. Without it, a user on a new stack will remember the good days and forget the bad — classic recall bias. Mood is also slow to respond. Most evidence-supported mood compounds need 4–8 weeks of daily dosing before a signal separates from noise, which is why timing and stack cycle windows for mood experiments run longer than for sleep or focus work.
How to log it well
Mood tracking is useful only when the scale is anchored. Decimals encourage overfitting, compressed scales (1–3) lose resolution, and 1–10 with concrete endpoints is the workable middle.
| Score | Anchor |
|---|---|
| 1 | Extremely low, affecting function, hard to get out of bed |
| 3 | Noticeably low, reduced motivation, flat affect |
| 5 | Neutral, steady, neither up nor down |
| 7 | Noticeably better than usual, engaged, warm toward other people |
| 9 | Very good, energetic, broad emotional range |
| 10 | Markedly better than personal baseline, rare peak |
- Log at the same time each day; end of workday is the most stable slot for most people.
- Use a Likert scale with whole numbers.
- Capture a one-tag context (good day, bad day, argument, travel, period) so obvious confounders are visible on the chart.
- Do not score retroactively. Same-day or skip.
Common pitfalls
Mood ratings are especially vulnerable to sleep debt dressed up as stack failure and to placebo expectancy dressed up as stack success. The two most useful counter-moves are to always check the mood score against the prior night's sleep efficiency and HRV baseline, and to run new mood-targeting compounds one at a time across at least a full 8-week window before concluding anything. A 6-day run of high mood scores that happens to coincide with a good sleep streak is not evidence for the new stack.
Interpreting the trend
Mood rarely responds in days. The useful read is the 28-day moving average window, not any single day. A sustained lift of 1.0–1.5 points on the 1–10 scale across 8 weeks is a genuine clinical signal; anything smaller is usually within scale-noise range. Drops of more than 2 points sustained for two weeks are worth treating as a flag rather than waiting out, particularly if paired with sleep or appetite changes.
Pairing with objective signals
Because mood is highly subjective, pairing it with at least one objective proxy catches the common failure mode of good mood riding on a good sleep streak that would have happened anyway. Sleep efficiency and HRV are the two most commonly paired signals, and Unfair uses this pairing when producing first recommendations for mood-focused stacks — weighting objective confirmation alongside the subjective score.
How this appears in Unfair
Mood score is a default subjective proxy field in the daily check-in prompt and is charted against 7- and 28-day averages on the review screen. Mood trends are plotted on the same surface as the prior-night sleep efficiency and HRV so the cause-effect read is immediate rather than buried in another tab.
Clinical safety note
Mood scores persistently at or below 3 for more than two weeks, any new suicidal ideation, or a sudden emergence of severe anxiety after starting a new compound is a clinician conversation, not a stack question. Unfair will surface a crisis resource prompt in those cases and pause optimization nudges until the user confirms next steps with a professional.