Free low mood tools
20 short exercises on low mood, 2 to 8 minutes each, free and with no account needed. Open one and it runs right in the page.
The 20 tools
A week of mood and energy
Log your mood, your energy, and your sleep each day for a week. They usually move together, and where they do not is interesting.
What fills you and what drains you
Sort ordinary activities into ones that leave you with more than you started with and ones that leave you with less.
Small pleasures still within reach
Choose ten small pleasures that are genuinely available to you this week. Low mood shrinks the list we can remember; this expands it back.
How low mood shows up for you
Rate how often a set of low-mood experiences has been true lately: heaviness, withdrawal, flatness, harsh self-talk.
Energy cost versus payoff
Place the tasks and activities in front of you on a grid of how much energy they take against how much they give back.
The tiny first step
Build a plan for a hard day that is small enough to actually happen: one thing for the body, one for the room, one for connection.
Self-talk for hard days
Turn over cards that show a common harsh thought on one side and a fairer way of saying the same thing on the other. Keep the ones that ring true.
What changed, and when
Trace back to when your mood started to shift and look at what was different before and after. Sometimes there is a reason hiding in plain sight.
When the low patch is heaviest
Mark the times of day and days of the week when your mood tends to sit lowest. Most people find a shape they had felt but never seen.
The shape of this low patch
Set a dial for each part of how low mood is sitting with you right now: heaviness, interest, appetite for people, pace, hope. Two low patches can have very different shapes.
How much smaller life has gotten
Tick the ways your world has quietly shrunk lately. Low mood tends to narrow life in small, reasonable-looking steps, so most of these go unnoticed until they are listed.
The waking breath
Three seconds in through the nose, three seconds out through the mouth, sitting up. A brisker, even rhythm for the mornings when the body does not want to start.
Five minutes, before and after
Rate your mood, do one small thing for five minutes, rate it again. A tiny experiment in whether action can move mood, run with your own numbers rather than anyone else's claims.
What to protect when the tank is low
Put the basics in order of what you would protect first when energy is scarce. On a low day, not everything can be kept up, and deciding in advance is easier than deciding while in it.
Where a low day's hours go
Divide 100 points across how the waking hours of a typical low day actually go: in bed awake, scrolling, obligations, screens, outside, with people. Seeing it in bars is different from knowing it vaguely.
What is under the low
Narrow the feeling inside a low patch from a rough word to a precise one, find where it sits in your body, and hear what it might be asking for. "Low" covers a lot of different things.
A fact, or the mood talking?
Sort the kinds of things a low day says into facts, mood-talk, and not sure. They arrive in the same voice, which is why the mood's version is so convincing.
A note for the next low day
Write a short note today, from a slightly better place, to be read on the next hard day: what helped, what not to believe, who to call. Future you will not remember any of it without this.
Mood, daylight, and people: a week
Log your mood, how much daylight you got, and how much real contact you had, each day for a week. Two of these are things you can change; the third tends to follow them.
Who helps on a low day
Place the people in your life on a grid of how much effort it takes to see them against how you feel afterward. On a low day, effort and afterglow do not always line up.
What these tools are, and are not
Every tool here is free and works without an account: choose cards, move dials, sort a list, follow a paced breath, or keep a seven-day log, and read back what you noticed at the end. They are built to make a vague feeling more specific, which is often the first useful step.
None of them diagnoses, screens for or treats anything, and nothing you see at the end is a score or a label. If something you notice worries you, a licensed therapist is the right next conversation, and the directory is free to browse.