How happy are you? Apps Mappiness and MoodPanda can tell you

Do you ever stop during the day to think about how you feel about everything? Is life good, bad or just exhausting? Are there times of the day when you feel top of the world, but other times when you are in the dumps?

There are now several iPhone apps which can help you track your mood and give some information about when and where you are happiest.

Mappiness has been around for quite a while now. It is part of a research project at the London School of Economics and so far nearly 50,000 people have signed up to use it. Twice a day it pings your phone and asks you a few quick questions about how happy you feel, how alert you are and where you are etc. You then get a quick snapshot graph that shows you where and when you are happiest. As for the data the LSE is using it to see how people’s happiness is affected by their local environment — air pollution, noise, green spaces, and so on — which the data from Mappiness will be absolutely great for investigating.

The biggest upside as a user is that twice a day you get to think seriously about your wellbeing – which is priceless.

A rival app to Mappiness is MoodPanda which launched a few months ago. It works in a similar way on the iPhone, but the key difference is that you can also track your moods online at the MoodPanda website. You can also share your mood on Facecebook or Twitter and look at mood calendars, graphs and maps.

You also get the choice of whether you want to keep the data private or allow MoodPanda to share it. The company has just produced this handy infographic which highlights how happy, or otherwise, Britons were last year.

Findings show that April was by far the happiest month – was this the Royal Wedding, or more likely the number of days off we all had.

Men were happier than women and they tend to like Wednesdays while women rated it as the worst day of the week. Why do you think that is?

The infographic also shows that if you’re a 30-something and not feeling too cheerful, you’re not alone as this age group recorded the lowest feelings of happiness overall. But on a positive note, it only appears to get better from your forties.