How Forecast Works

What is the forecast?

The dashed line that extends off the right edge of your weekly chart is a forecast. It's our best read on where your energy and mood are likely to land over the next three days.

It is not a prediction in the weather-forecast sense. We are not telling you what your Wednesday will be. We are showing you the shape your body has been running, and what continuing that shape looks like.

Why it matters

ADHD brains are consistently inconsistent [1]. The myth that energy "should" be flat across days is one of the biggest things tracking tools get wrong. NeuroSpicy starts from the opposite assumption: cycles are normal, not failures of discipline.

A forecast turns that pattern into something you can use. If your energy has been climbing for two days, the forecast might project it to keep climbing, meaning today is a good day to commit to demanding work. If you're four days into a charged stretch with no recovery in sight, the forecast might project a dip starting tomorrow, useful information for whether to take on a hard meeting or schedule a rest day.

The forecast doesn't tell you what to do. It tells you what your body is likely to do, so you can plan around it.

How it works

The forecast combines four signals to project the next three days. Each one accounts for a different piece of how ADHD energy actually moves.

1. Phase shape

We know how your past cycles have looked. The average length of your charged phases. The depth and length of your drained phases. How quickly you tend to bounce back. The forecast assumes the current phase will follow that historical shape, with some smoothing so a single outlier day doesn't dominate.

2. Day-of-week tilt

If your data shows that Mondays consistently run lower than the rest of the week (or higher, or whatever your pattern is), the forecast factors that in. The strongest day-of-week effect gets the heaviest weight; weaker effects get less. If you have no clear day-of-week pattern, this stays neutral.

3. Mood lead

Sometimes mood moves before energy. If your Mood Shield signal says mood is leading energy by a day or two, the forecast nudges the energy projection in the direction the mood is already going. This catches early-recovery and early-dip patterns that would not otherwise be visible until the energy line confirms it.

4. Mean reversion

Bodies do not hold extremes forever. A run of 9s tends to come back toward the middle. A run of 2s tends to come back up. The forecast applies a gradual pull toward your personal baseline that grows stronger the further out the projection goes. Day 1 of the forecast is weighted heavily by your current trajectory; day 3 is weighted more toward your typical range.

What the shaded band means

The fuzzy region around the forecast line is a confidence band. It widens for users whose energy is more variable, and narrows for users whose energy is more predictable. The band is your own range, not a generic 1-10 scale.

A wide band on day 3 does not mean the forecast is bad. It means your body has more degrees of freedom than usual, and the actual reading could land anywhere in that range without being a surprise.

The mood band is separate from the energy band, and uses your mood standard deviation rather than energy standard deviation.

What you can do

• Do not treat the forecast as a script. It is a tendency. Your actions, sleep, stress, medication timing, social demands, all of these can shift the actual outcome by a point or two in either direction.

• Use it to schedule, not to judge. If the forecast projects a dip on Thursday, that is information for whether to put a hard task there. It is not a reason to feel bad about Thursday in advance.

• Compare it to what happens. Over a few weeks, you will start to notice when the forecast is reliably right and when it is reliably off. That divergence is itself useful data.

• Check it against Mood Shield. When mood and energy forecasts diverge, that is a signal the rebound or the dip is just starting. The asymmetry is often more informative than either line alone.

A note on the math

The forecast is computed fresh on every API call from your full check-in history. It uses no machine learning, just deterministic math over your patterns. The same data always produces the same forecast.

For users with fewer than 7 days of data, the forecast does not appear yet. We need at least one completed phase cycle (a charged stretch followed by a recovery, or vice versa) to have something to project. Until then, the chart shows your history alone.

The forecast is updated whenever you log a new check-in. Each new data point can shift the projection slightly, especially in the first three days of a new phase.

Sources

1. Barkley, R.A. (2015). Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment. Guilford Press.
2. Volkow, N.D., et al. (2009). "Evaluating dopamine reward pathway in ADHD." JAMA, 302(10), 1084-1091. PubMed 19738093
3. Rahimi (2026). "Energy Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (EDHD) model." Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.