Most mood apps ask two questions: what mood are you in, and when. Colors also asks why, and splits the answer into two separate tag lists. Triggers are acute events that happened around the mood shift. Factors are chronic variables that quietly shape the baseline the mood is shifting from. They are both causes. They behave differently in the data, and conflating them is the single most common reason a mood log produces nothing useful after three months.
Antecedents on two timescales
Behavioural therapy has a working model of why a state appears: the ABC chain, where A is the antecedent, B is the behaviour or emotional state, and C is the consequence that follows. Functional analysis, the clinical practice of mapping that chain for a specific person, has been around since at least Haynes and O'Brien's 1990 review of the method.1 Ramnerö and Törneke's textbook on the same model is the one most CBT trainees still learn from.4
The A in ABC is not a single thing. It splits cleanly into two timescales.
A trigger is an acute, identifiable event with a clear time stamp. The Wednesday morning meeting. The argument with a partner. The headache that started at 3pm. Triggers in Colors are organised into four categories, each with predefined items: People (Partner, Family, Friends, Pets), Activities (Work, Training, Hobby, Driving), Places (Home, Office, School), and Health (Menstruation, Headache, Fatigue, Sleep). They are what was happening when the mood shifted, and they are stationary in causality: the event came first, the state followed.
A factor is a chronic, often unnoticed variable that runs in the background. The Colors help text puts it directly: use factors as possible triggers for your well-being — for example, you may not notice that sports, coffee, or drugs affect your mood and create behavioural patterns. Factor groups include Nutrition and Stimulants (coffee, vitamins, alcohol, supplements) and Activity and Physical Exercise. A factor doesn't cause a single mood shift the way a trigger does. It moves the baseline across days and weeks.
What goes in which bucket
The check-in flow makes this concrete. When you log a low mood after a hard meeting, Work is the trigger and Office is the place. If the meeting also gave you a headache, Headache is a Health trigger. Three tags, all describing one moment.
Coffee is a factor. You don't tag coffee on the check-in screen because the third cup at 2pm isn't what just happened — the cumulative caffeine across the week is what's running in the background. Same with alcohol, vitamins, supplements, gym frequency. These are knobs you turn slowly. They show their effect across many entries, not one.
Sleep is the case where the line bends. A single bad night is a Health trigger the next day, when fatigue lands. A four-week pattern of six-hour nights is a factor: a baseline shift you'd track on the factor axis to see whether the mean improves when you go to bed earlier. The same variable lives on both axes at different timescales.
Why both axes show the data over time
Triggers and factors answer different questions. Triggers tell you who and what is loaded with affect for you specifically — that meetings with a particular person spike anxiety, that driving in city traffic reliably produces irritation, that the home/office distinction matters more than you thought. Factors tell you what to titrate. The pattern Wednesdays are bad is uninteresting until you notice that Wednesdays are also high-coffee days and low-sleep days, and now you have something to test.
This is exactly the case Trull and Ebner-Priemer make for ecological momentary assessment.3 The point of repeated, in-context tagging is multi-axis pattern detection: context plus state plus time, captured close to the moment, accumulated until the patterns surface. A single axis can't do it. Tagging only the mood gives you a line chart with no causes attached.
How to tag without overthinking it
The check-in is a snapshot. Pick one to three triggers, the most salient ones: the things you'd name if someone asked what was going on. Don't try to be exhaustive. A 20-second log that happens every day is worth more than a five-minute log that lasts a week.
Factors are the opposite mode. They're passive, set once for the variables you actually suspect, and tracked over time without daily fiddling. If you don't drink, alcohol is not a factor for you. If you do, turning it on means the weekly view will show whether your mood scores correlate with the days you drank. Tracking everything is worse than tracking three things, because the noise floor rises and the signal disappears under it.
Sleep is worth a separate moment. Tag it as a Health trigger on a check-in after a bad night. Watch the weekly average as a factor when you're trying to change the pattern itself. Both at once is fine.
Where this lines up with CBT
Process-based CBT, the framing Hayes and Hofmann use in their 2018 textbook, treats clinical work as the identification and modification of the actual processes maintaining a problem.2 A core move in that work is separating chronic vulnerabilities (sleep debt, isolation, substance load) from acute triggers that fire against that vulnerable baseline. The Beck Institute's behavioural activation worksheets do the same split in a different vocabulary.5 You don't need a therapist to start the analysis, but you do need data structured the right way for the analysis to be possible.
That's the reason the trigger picker and the factor list are separate UI in Colors. They're not two flavours of the same tag. They're two axes of why a mood is what it is, and the daily check-in is built so the data accumulates on both.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a trigger and a factor in Colors?
A trigger is an acute, time-bounded event that was happening when your mood shifted — a meeting, an argument, a headache, a drive home. Categories are People, Activities, Places, and Health. A factor is a chronic background variable that may not be noticed in the moment but shifts your baseline over days or weeks — coffee intake, vitamins, alcohol, training frequency, supplements. Triggers are tagged on a single check-in. Factors are tracked across many.
Why does Colors separate them when most apps don't?
Because they answer different questions in the data. Triggers tell you who or what to prepare for in specific situations. Factors tell you what to titrate over weeks. Mixing them into one tag list makes both kinds of pattern harder to see. The split mirrors the way a CBT clinician runs a functional analysis — separating acute antecedents from chronic vulnerabilities.
Where does sleep go — trigger or factor?
Both, depending on timescale. Tag a bad night as a Health trigger when it shows up the next day as fatigue or low mood. Track average sleep duration as a factor across weeks if you suspect a chronic deficit. Sleep is the cleanest example of a variable that lives on both axes at once.
How many triggers should I tag per check-in?
One to three is usually enough. The check-in is a snapshot, not a full diary. Picking the most salient trigger — the thing you would mention if a friend asked what was going on — captures most of the signal. Trying to be exhaustive turns a 20-second log into a chore and the entries stop happening.
Do I have to track factors at all?
No. Factors are opt-in. They're worth turning on for variables you actually suspect — caffeine if you drink a lot of it, alcohol if you're trying to cut back, exercise if you're testing whether the gym helps. Tracking everything dilutes the data and makes the weekly view noisy.
Not medical advice
This article is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute medical advice and should not replace consultation with a licensed mental health professional. If you are in crisis, please contact emergency services in your country immediately.
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Last reviewed: May 2026.
References
- Haynes, S. N., & O'Brien, W. H. (1990). Functional analysis in behavior therapy. Clinical Psychology Review, 10(6), 649–668. doi:10.1016/0272-7358(90)90074-K
- Hayes, S. C., & Hofmann, S. G. (Eds.). (2018). Process-Based CBT: The Science and Core Clinical Competencies of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. New Harbinger Publications.
- Trull, T. J., & Ebner-Priemer, U. W. (2009). Using experience sampling methods/ecological momentary assessment (ESM/EMA) in clinical assessment and clinical research: Introduction to the special section. Psychological Assessment, 21(4), 457–462. doi:10.1037/a0017653
- Ramnerö, J., & Törneke, N. (2008). The ABCs of Human Behavior: Behavioral Principles for the Practicing Clinician. New Harbinger Publications.
- Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavior Therapy. beckinstitute.org