How We Feel is a free mood-tracking app built by a nonprofit founded with Yale psychology researcher Marc Brackett, and after using it daily for six weeks to log our mood several times a day, our verdict is that the core emotion-tracking and journaling tools are genuinely useful and cost nothing, with no paid tier at all standing between a reader and the full feature set, though it is a tracking tool rather than a treatment and it says so itself.
Unlike Calm or Headspace, which both gate most content behind a subscription, How We Feel remains free and ad-free, funded through donations rather than a premium unlock. That funding model matters for a mood tracker specifically, since there is no pressure to nudge a user toward a paywall in the middle of logging a difficult emotion.
How the Mood Meter Actually Works Day to Day
The app's core tool, the Mood Meter, asks a user to place their current feeling on a two-axis grid of energy and pleasantness before naming the specific emotion word, an approach drawn directly from Brackett's published emotional intelligence research at Yale's Center for Emotional Intelligence. Across six weeks of logging three to four times a day, that two-step process, placing the feeling before naming it, genuinely slowed us down enough to notice patterns we would have otherwise glossed over, particularly a recurring afternoon dip in energy that showed up clearly once charted over several weeks. The app also prompts for context tags, work, sleep, a specific person, which made the weekly summary meaningfully more useful than a bare mood score would have been on its own.
Comparing the Free Tracking Tools to Finch and Calm
Against Finch, another free-forward mood and habit app we have tested previously, How We Feel is narrower and more clinical in framing, built specifically around naming and tracking emotion rather than gamified daily check-ins. Against Calm's mood check-in feature, which sits behind that app's subscription and behind a much larger meditation library, How We Feel's tracking alone is more detailed but offers nothing in the way of guided sessions once a difficult mood is logged. A reader who wants tracking plus guided meditation content in one place will still end up paying for Calm or Headspace alongside a free tracker like this one.
Privacy and What Happens to Logged Mood Data
How We Feel states that mood data is not sold to advertisers and that the organization operates as a nonprofit rather than a venture-backed company monetizing user data, which is a meaningfully different privacy posture than most free mental health apps carry. We could not independently audit the backend, so this is based on the organization's own published privacy policy rather than a third-party security audit, and a privacy-conscious reader should read that policy directly before logging anything sensitive.
The Journaling Feature and the Weekly Insight Summary
Beyond the Mood Meter grid, How We Feel includes a short journaling prompt tied to whatever emotion was just logged, and across six weeks that prompt was specific enough, asking what triggered the feeling and what might help, to produce more useful entries than a blank journaling page usually does for us. The weekly insight summary charts logged emotions across the axis of energy and pleasantness over the previous seven days, which surfaced a pattern neither of our testers had consciously noticed before, a consistent low-energy, unpleasant dip on Sunday evenings that both later traced to the start of a new work week. The app does not offer any coaching or suggested action beyond the prompt itself, which is a deliberate scope limit rather than an oversight, since the organization positions the tool as awareness-building rather than intervention.
How We Tested This App
We used How We Feel daily for six weeks, logging mood three to four times a day across a mix of routine and higher-stress weeks, and compared the tracking depth and privacy posture against Finch and against the mood check-in features inside Calm and Headspace. We are reviewers, not clinicians, and this app is not a substitute for therapy or psychiatric care. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline; an app is not built for an emergency, and no mood tracker should be the only support in place during a genuine crisis.
Onboarding and Whether the App Works Without a Background in Emotional Intelligence Research
How We Feel's onboarding walks a new user through the Mood Meter concept with a short interactive tutorial before the first real log entry, and across our six weeks that tutorial was enough for testers with no prior background in Brackett's emotional intelligence framework to use the grid correctly on the first try. The emotion vocabulary the app offers, dozens of specific words rather than a handful of generic moods, took longer to feel natural, and testers found themselves defaulting to the same few words for the first week or two before branching out into more precise labels. Notifications default to a few gentle daily reminders to log a mood, and those proved easy to adjust or turn off entirely in settings without losing access to any other part of the app, a contrast to some habit apps that bury notification controls or nag regardless of the setting.
Who Should Use How We Feel and Who Needs More Support
Use How We Feel if you want a free, ad-free way to build the habit of naming and noticing emotional patterns over weeks, especially if the two-axis Mood Meter approach appeals to you more than a simple one-tap mood score. It is not built to replace therapy, and anyone managing a diagnosed mental health condition, anyone in ongoing crisis, or anyone who needs more than self-tracking should talk to a licensed therapist, and platforms like BetterHelp or Talkspace exist specifically for that level of support. Our best mental wellness apps roundup covers where a free tracker like this fits alongside paid therapy platforms and meditation apps.
The bottom line: How We Feel is a genuinely useful, genuinely free mood-tracking tool built on real emotional intelligence research, but it is a tracker, not a treatment, so pair it with a licensed therapist if you need more than self-awareness, and call or text 988 immediately if you are ever in crisis.
