Am I doing enough to recover?
This is educational, not diagnostic. These questions help you notice a pattern in your own routine. They cannot tell you what is causing it, and they are not a substitute for care from a doctor or clinician.
Your answers are scored on your device. Nothing you enter here is sent to us or saved.
In a typical week, how many minutes do you spend moving hard enough that your breathing picks up? Brisk walking counts.
Add up everything: walks, classes, cycling, running around after children if it gets you out of breath.
How many times in a typical week do you do something that works your muscles: weights, resistance bands, bodyweight, a strength class?
In the past week, on how many days did you deliberately slow your breathing down for a few minutes?
Any deliberate slow breathing counts. It does not have to be an app or a class.
On the days you do it, roughly how long for?
In the past week, on how many days did you spend time paying deliberate attention to the present: meditation, a body scan, a guided practice, or a walk without your phone?
In a typical week, roughly how much time do you spend outdoors in green or blue space: a park, a garden, woodland, near water?
Walking through it counts. Commuting past it does not.
In the past week, how many times did you have a proper conversation with someone you are close to? Not logistics, not messages.
On a normal weeknight, how many hours do you actually give yourself for sleep?
Time in bed with the lights out: not how long you slept.
Is any of the above already a habit, something you do without deciding to?
This one does not affect your result. It is here so we do not suggest something that would not suit you right now.
When you do the things that used to help, do they still help?
Answer only what you are comfortable answering. You can skip this and still get a result.
Has your mood been low or flat recently? If so, roughly how long for?
Answer only what you are comfortable answering. You can skip this and still get a result.
Is that getting in the way of your day?
Answer only what you are comfortable answering. You can skip this and still get a result.
Are you pregnant, trying to conceive, or breastfeeding?
Answer only what you are comfortable answering. You can skip this and still get a result.
Please talk to your GP about how you have been feeling
Please arrange this soon.
You told us your mood has been low for a few weeks and that it is getting in the way of your day. That deserves a proper conversation with a clinician soon, not a habit plan from a quiz, so we have not scored your answers.
A GP appointment is a good next step, and it is fine to bring exactly what you told us here: how long this has lasted and how often it gets in the way.
Please talk to your GP about how you have been feeling
Please arrange this soon.
You told us that the things that used to help are not really helping at the moment, and that your mood has been low or getting in the way of your day. When rest and the usual comforts have stopped landing, the useful next step is a conversation with a clinician soon, not another habit, so we have not scored your answers.
A GP appointment is a good next step, and it is fine to bring exactly what you told us here: that nothing is helping right now, how long this has lasted, and how often it gets in the way.
Your result: Running on empty
Your week sits at out of 100 of the trial-supported doses, read together with the six bars rather than on its own.
On the six habits with the best evidence behind them, your current week is a long way from the amounts that were tested. That is a statement about your diary, not about you. And the reason we would rather show you six bars than one number is that they are almost never all short. Yours are not.
The lever with the most room this week is moving. This is the one with the strongest evidence behind it of the six, and the dose-response curve is steepest at the start, which is why the first thirty minutes a week matter more than the last thirty.deliberately slowing your breathing. This is the cheapest lever on the list: the trial that beat meditation on mood used five minutes a day.the hours you give yourself for sleep. This is one of the three levers carrying the most weight in the score, and note it is about opportunity rather than quality: the amount of time you allow, not how well you sleep in it.proper conversations with people you are close to. Of the six, this has the strongest long-run evidence and the weakest guidance on how much, so we have set the boundary on frequency logic rather than a tested dose, and said so.deliberate attention practice. Worth being straight about the evidence here: it helps on average, but the most rigorous review found no advantage over other active approaches, which is why it carries fifteen points rather than twenty. Treat it as one option rather than the answer.time outdoors in green or blue space. Two hours a week is the figure associated with reporting good health. Associated, not proven to cause it, because that study looked at people at one point in time.
- One lever, not six. Start with the lowest bar above and ignore the rest of this page for a fortnight.
- Make the first version smaller than feels worthwhile. If breathing is the gap, five minutes was the dose in the trial that worked, not twenty.
- If nothing on that list is currently automatic, the first job is building one anchor rather than raising a score.
Where this goes in Femy: Assigned by the lowest lever: breathing or mindfulness to Sleep Reset, movement to 'Movement That Actually Helps', connection to 'Connection and Recovery'
Start with: Stage 01 Foundation, 'Stress, Mood, and Your Cycle'
This is an educational description of the pattern in your answers. It is not a mental health assessment and it does not measure depression or anxiety. If your mood has been low for two weeks or more, please speak to your GP. If something here is new, getting worse, or worrying you, speak to a clinician rather than wait.
Your result: Patchy
Your week sits at out of 100 of the trial-supported doses, read together with the six bars rather than on its own.
Some of these are already at or near the tested amounts and others are at nothing. That is the commonest shape by a distance, and it is a better starting position than the number suggests, because raising a lever from zero is easier than raising one that is already half done.
The lever with the most room this week is moving. This is the one with the strongest evidence behind it of the six, and the dose-response curve is steepest at the start, which is why the first thirty minutes a week matter more than the last thirty.deliberately slowing your breathing. This is the cheapest lever on the list: the trial that beat meditation on mood used five minutes a day.the hours you give yourself for sleep. This is one of the three levers carrying the most weight in the score, and note it is about opportunity rather than quality: the amount of time you allow, not how well you sleep in it.proper conversations with people you are close to. Of the six, this has the strongest long-run evidence and the weakest guidance on how much, so we have set the boundary on frequency logic rather than a tested dose, and said so.deliberate attention practice. Worth being straight about the evidence here: it helps on average, but the most rigorous review found no advantage over other active approaches, which is why it carries fifteen points rather than twenty. Treat it as one option rather than the answer.time outdoors in green or blue space. Two hours a week is the figure associated with reporting good health. Associated, not proven to cause it, because that study looked at people at one point in time.
- Work the lowest bar, not the one you enjoy most. The gain per minute is largest where you are currently at zero.
- Protect the ones that are already full. A lever you have to rebuild costs more than a lever you keep.
- Give it four weeks, then look at which habit stuck rather than at whether the number moved.
Where this goes in Femy: Assigned by the lowest lever, as above
Start with: Stage 01 Foundation, 'Stress, Mood, and Your Cycle'; Stage 02 'Reset and Recharge'
This is an educational description of the pattern in your answers. It is not a mental health assessment and it does not measure depression or anxiety. If your mood has been low for two weeks or more, please speak to your GP. If something here is new, getting worse, or worrying you, speak to a clinician rather than wait.
Your result: Well-stocked
Your week sits at out of 100 of the trial-supported doses, read together with the six bars rather than on its own.
You are at or close to the tested amounts on the best-evidenced of these six: at most one of the three strongest levers is missing entirely. That is genuinely uncommon. Note that the top band does not require all six at maximum, because reaching the tested dose on the two weakest-evidenced levers is not something anybody's data asks of you.
The lever with the most room this week is moving. This is the one with the strongest evidence behind it of the six, and the dose-response curve is steepest at the start, which is why the first thirty minutes a week matter more than the last thirty.deliberately slowing your breathing. This is the cheapest lever on the list: the trial that beat meditation on mood used five minutes a day.the hours you give yourself for sleep. This is one of the three levers carrying the most weight in the score, and note it is about opportunity rather than quality: the amount of time you allow, not how well you sleep in it.proper conversations with people you are close to. Of the six, this has the strongest long-run evidence and the weakest guidance on how much, so we have set the boundary on frequency logic rather than a tested dose, and said so.deliberate attention practice. Worth being straight about the evidence here: it helps on average, but the most rigorous review found no advantage over other active approaches, which is why it carries fifteen points rather than twenty. Treat it as one option rather than the answer.time outdoors in green or blue space. Two hours a week is the figure associated with reporting good health. Associated, not proven to cause it, because that study looked at people at one point in time.
- Protect this rather than extend it. The commonest way a well-stocked week collapses is one new commitment, not one missed session.
- If you want a next move, take the lowest bar to its first threshold rather than taking a full bar higher. There is no extra credit above the tested dose, in this quiz or in the research.
- Consider whether the thing that is actually short is something this quiz does not measure: sleep timing rather than sleep length, for instance.
Where this goes in Femy: Whichever protocol matches the lowest lever, run as a maintenance habit
Start with: Stage 02 Understanding, 'Reset and Recharge'
This is an educational description of the pattern in your answers. It is not a mental health assessment and it does not measure depression or anxiety. If your mood has been low for two weeks or more, please speak to your GP. If something here is new, getting worse, or worrying you, speak to a clinician rather than wait.
Not enough answers for a result band
Your week sits at out of 100 of the trial-supported doses, read together with the six bars rather than on its own.
You skipped enough of the scored questions that a band would be guesswork, so we have left it off rather than pretend. The bars below show what we could read from the answers you did give.
The lever with the most room this week is moving. This is the one with the strongest evidence behind it of the six, and the dose-response curve is steepest at the start, which is why the first thirty minutes a week matter more than the last thirty.deliberately slowing your breathing. This is the cheapest lever on the list: the trial that beat meditation on mood used five minutes a day.the hours you give yourself for sleep. This is one of the three levers carrying the most weight in the score, and note it is about opportunity rather than quality: the amount of time you allow, not how well you sleep in it.proper conversations with people you are close to. Of the six, this has the strongest long-run evidence and the weakest guidance on how much, so we have set the boundary on frequency logic rather than a tested dose, and said so.deliberate attention practice. Worth being straight about the evidence here: it helps on average, but the most rigorous review found no advantage over other active approaches, which is why it carries fifteen points rather than twenty. Treat it as one option rather than the answer.time outdoors in green or blue space. Two hours a week is the figure associated with reporting good health. Associated, not proven to cause it, because that study looked at people at one point in time.
- Start with the lever whose bar is lowest, or answer a few more questions next time for the fuller picture.
This is an educational description of the pattern in your answers. It is not a mental health assessment and it does not measure depression or anxiety. If your mood has been low for two weeks or more, please speak to your GP. If something here is new, getting worse, or worrying you, speak to a clinician rather than wait.
Most advice about recovery is either vague, rest more and be kind to yourself, or a list of twenty things nobody has time for. Neither tells you whether what you are already doing counts.
This one is different in a specific way that is worth understanding before you start. Six recovery habits have real trial evidence behind them, and those trials used specific amounts: so many minutes a week of moving, so many minutes of breathing, so long outdoors. We ask what you actually do and compare it to those amounts. So the score is not a rating of you: it is a measure of how close your current week sits to the doses that were tested.
That means every part of the score can be traced to a published number, and we have listed all of them at the bottom of this page. It also means the score can go up this week, which is rather the point.
How this self-check is put together
This is a dose-attainment index. That phrase is doing real work, so here is what it means: for six recovery habits, researchers have run trials at specific amounts, and we compare what you told us to those amounts. Being at the tested amount earns the lever's full points. Being at nothing earns none. The six lever scores add up to a number out of 100.
Why the levers are not weighted equally. Because the evidence behind them is not equal, and pretending otherwise would be the easy dishonest choice. Moving, slow breathing and sleep opportunity carry twenty points each: those are the three where a specific amount has been tested and the outcome data are strongest. Social contact and deliberate attention practice carry fifteen: the first has excellent long-run evidence but no tested weekly amount, the second has a tested amount but the most rigorous review found no advantage over other active approaches. Time outdoors carries ten, because the study behind its threshold looked at people at a single point in time. The six add up to one hundred. Each ceiling is set by the quality of the research behind the lever, not by how much we like it.
Moving: 150-300 minutes a week of moderate activity is the WHO recommendation (Bull 2020). Full marks start at 150 rather than 300 because the relationship curves: around the recommended volume, 8.8 marginal MET-hours a week, was associated with 25% lower depression risk (95% CI 18-32%) compared with no activity, with returns diminishing above it (Pearce 2022). In randomised trials, walking or jogging, yoga and strength training all beat active controls, with effects proportional to intensity (Hedges' g -0.62, -0.55 and -0.49 respectively, Noetel 2024); higher activity was also associated with lower odds of developing anxiety (OR 0.74, 95% CI 0.62-0.88, Schuch 2019). Two muscle-strengthening sessions a week is the guideline figure.
Breathing: five minutes a day of slow breathing is a real tested dose. In a month-long randomised comparison, cyclic sighing improved mood more than mindfulness meditation did (Balban 2023). Across twelve randomised trials the pooled effect of breathwork on self-reported stress was g -0.35 (95% CI -0.55 to -0.14, Fincham 2023): real, and modest.
Sleep opportunity: seven to nine hours in bed. Seven to eight hours is one of five components of a sleep composite whose bands carry published hazard ratios (Hu 2024) and which replicated in 384,758 people (Bai 2024). Note that we ask how much time you allow, not how well you sleep: this is a habit question, not a sleep measurement.
Social contact: here we have to be honest that no trial gives a weekly dose, so the boundary is frequency logic. What justifies the fifteen-point ceiling is how strong the long-run evidence is: across 148 studies and 308,849 people, stronger social relationships were associated with a 50% greater likelihood of survival (Holt-Lunstad 2010), and social isolation and loneliness each carried elevated mortality risk (Holt-Lunstad 2015).
Deliberate attention practice: mindfulness-based stress reduction pooled at g = 0.55 across 29 studies of healthy adults (Khoury 2015). The ceiling is fifteen rather than twenty because the most rigorous review found only low-strength evidence for stress specifically, and no evidence of superiority over other active approaches (Goyal 2014), which is what keeps its ceiling below the three levers above.
Time outdoors: 120 minutes a week is the threshold above which reporting good health was more likely (OR 1.59, 95% CI 1.31-1.92), with benefits peaking at 200-300 minutes (White 2019). That study looked at people at a single point in time, so it shows an association rather than a dose-response, which is exactly why this lever carries the smallest ceiling.
Where the band boundaries come from. The lower one, at 40, is the point below which you cannot be at the tested dose on both of the two best-evidenced levers at once: those two total 40 points on their own. The upper one, at 70, is the lowest score at which you can be at the tested dose on the four best-evidenced levers. Both are statements about dose attainment. Neither is a clinical threshold, and neither came from a population distribution.
What this score cannot do. It cannot predict how you will feel, and we will not imply otherwise. The cautionary case is a smartphone app trialled for preventing depression in workers: no effect at all in the intention-to-treat analysis, and benefit only among the people who genuinely engaged with it (Deady 2023). A score is a description of a week, not a forecast.
Common questions
How should I use this estimate?
Look at the lowest bar and ignore the number. The index exists to make the six bars comparable; the bar is what tells you where the next thirty minutes should go.
Is this medical advice?
No. Femy is educational content about wellness habits. It does not diagnose, treat, or replace care from a doctor or clinician.
Why is my score not 100 when I do all six?
Because the six levers carry different maximums by design: twenty for moving, breathing and sleep opportunity, fifteen for social contact and attention practice, ten for time outdoors. And because within a lever there is no extra credit above the tested amount. Doing more than the trials tested is not something we can claim a benefit for. The top band starts at 70 for the same reason: it asks that at most one of the three highest-weighted levers is missing, not that all six are maxed.
Why does moving count for more than time outdoors?
Because the evidence is stronger: twenty points against ten. Exercise has been tested in randomised trials against active comparators at specified amounts; the nature figure comes from a large study of people at one point in time, which can show an association but not a dose. We would rather weight the levers by the quality of their evidence and tell you we have done it.
What happens to what I enter?
It is scored on your device against a table of thresholds that ships with the page. Nothing you enter is sent to us or saved. We count how many people finish and which of the three results they get, as totals only.
Will raising my score make me feel better?
We are not going to promise that. The habits behind each lever have evidence for average benefit in groups of people; that is not the same as a prediction about you, and app-based programmes in particular have a track record of working only for the people who genuinely engage with them. What we can say is that the score describes something you control.
Sources checked
Built from published research, with every source listed below. We checked these sources for the figures we quote: the typical ranges, the guideline targets, and the doses used in the trials we describe. We compare your answers to published general guidance for adults. We have not tested this quiz against any clinical measure.
- Pearce (2022). Association Between Physical Activity and Risk of Depression. JAMA Psychiatry. doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2022.0609
- Noetel (2024). Effect of exercise for depression: systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. BMJ. doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2023-075847
- Schuch (2019). Physical activity protects from incident anxiety: A meta‐analysis of prospective cohort studies. Depression and Anxiety. doi.org/10.1002/da.22915
- Bull (2020). World Health Organization 2020 guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour. British Journal of Sports Medicine. doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2020-102955
- Fincham (2023). Effect of breathwork on stress and mental health: A meta-analysis of randomised-controlled trials. Scientific Reports. doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-27247-y
- Balban (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine. doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100895
- Goessl (2017). The effect of heart rate variability biofeedback training on stress and anxiety: a meta-analysis. Psychological Medicine. doi.org/10.1017/S0033291717001003
- Khoury (2015). Mindfulness-based stress reduction for healthy individuals: A meta-analysis. Journal of Psychosomatic Research. doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2015.03.009
- Goyal (2014). Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-being. JAMA Internal Medicine. doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.13018
- White (2019). Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing. Scientific Reports. doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44097-3
- Holt-Lunstad (2010). Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review. PLoS Medicine. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
- Holt-Lunstad (2015). Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality. Perspectives on Psychological Science. doi.org/10.1177/1745691614568352
- Hu (2024). Sleep patterns and risks of incident cardiovascular disease and mortality among people with type 2 diabetes: a prospective study of the UK Biobank. Diabetology & Metabolic Syndrome. doi.org/10.1186/s13098-024-01261-8
- Bai (2024). Sleep patterns, genetic susceptibility, and venous thromboembolism: A prospective study of 384,758 UK Biobank participants. PLOS ONE. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309870
- Smith (2008). The brief resilience scale: Assessing the ability to bounce back. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine. doi.org/10.1080/10705500802222972
- Kunzler (2018). Construct Validity and Population-Based Norms of the German Brief Resilience Scale (BRS). European Journal of Health Psychology. doi.org/10.1027/2512-8442/a000016
- Deady (2023). Selective Prevention of Depression in Workers Using a Smartphone App: Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of Medical Internet Research. doi.org/10.2196/45963
- COLEMAN (2012). Initial Validation of an Exercise “Vital Sign” in Electronic Medical Records. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. doi.org/10.1249/mss.0b013e3182630ec1
- Wang (2023). Comparative efficacy different resistance training protocols on bone mineral density in postmenopausal women: A systematic review and network meta-analysis. Frontiers in Physiology. doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2023.1105303