If you’re reading this post, you’ve likely heard of How We Feel, the award-winning mobile app. If you haven’t heard of How We Feel, here’s what you need to know: How We Feel is an intuitive way to regularly check in with your emotions, and those regular check-ins allow you to spot patterns and navigate your emotional wellbeing.
Did you know that navigating emotions is not an innate skill?
Though every human experiences emotions, not everyone understands what their emotions are trying to tell them, the cause of their emotions, or how to effectively express and regulate their emotions. The space between experience and insight is crucial. It’s where family and work relationships live. It’s where decisions are made. And it’s where we learn to regulate our urges.
We built How We Feel to help people move from emotional experience to insight. A skill that requires practice. Many apps employ game mechanics – streaks, content unlocks, and push notifications – to drive user behavior. (A report from 2018 showed that the average US smartphone user gets 46 push notifications a day!) But at How We Feel we’ve adopted a subtle, low-touch approach to encourage users to exercise their emotional wellbeing.
Two new features to help you exercise your wellbeing
We are releasing two new features on the app to encourage people to practice emotional navigation everyday. (Note: these features are available on the latest version of the app in the App Store and will soon be released on the app in the Play Store.)
Unique feelings. Research has shown that the more specific you are when describing your emotions – the wider your emotional vocabulary – the better positioned you will be to navigate your emotions. Now you can see your total number of unique feelings in a new view. By tapping and pressing emotions, you’ll now be able to see the last time you logged that emotion, its description, and the total number of times you’ve logged it.
Day streak. Provides a visualization for how often you’ve checked in over time. Each day is represented by a ring, a bond to yourself, that interlocks with a neighboring ring to give you a quick indication of how often you have checked in with your emotions. The ring colors mirror your check in activity; tapping and pressing the rings will reveal more information about your daily check ins.
These new features are not designed to drive unnecessary consumption – we have not employed notifications to drive behavior change. Tracking your emotional vocabulary and check-in frequency are great ways to exercise your emotional wellbeing.
What’s next?
We want to help people become the best version of themselves. We would love to hear from you about what would help you most on your emotional wellbeing journey. Get in touch by responding to this thread or tagging us in a note!