Over the summer, my lovely and emotionally intelligent coworker, Caroline Dougherty, sent me a link to “share feelings” with her through an app called How We Feel.
Considering we were working 24 hour days, five days a week, it wasn’t the first thing on my mind.
When I was eventually convinced by her persistent link-sending, I was pleasantly surprised by what I was so hesitant to introduce into my daily routine.
How We Feel “is a nonprofit organization created by scientists, designers, engineers, and therapists to help everyone better understand their own emotions.”
It is completely ad-free, has no in-app purchases, and costs nothing to download. The app is intended to promote emotional intelligence and emotional well-being.
How We Feel suggests two daily check-ins, but users can choose as many or as few as they’d like.
When users log an emotion, four bubbles and a prompt show up.
Each bubble has a different genre of emotion and different feelings appear when the bubble is pressed. The bubbles are high energy unpleasant, high energy pleasant, low energy pleasant, and low energy unpleasant.
The feelings that appear when a bubble is pressed range from enraged to serene.
When a negative emotion is logged, tactics to help deal with the emotion pop up. These include small videos and meditations, which can really help in a pinch.
The app records daily-use as a streak and even tracks how many ‘unique feelings’ users log.
After every three check-ins, users are invited to watch a new lesson. Lessons are about one to five minutes and provide tactics to aid in gaining a better understanding of personal emotions and the emotions of others.
While I have been unsuccessful in getting my best friends on the How We Feel train, I have personally really enjoyed the app.
I have struggled since high school with addressing my emotions. I’m what the How We Feel app calls an “emotion judge”. I tend to bottle up my emotions and either not deal with them at all ever or cry for an hour every four months or so.
Since downloading the app, I have been able to visualize how I have been feeling over the past couple of weeks in relation to the weather, my daily exercise, and the amount of sleep I get.
How We Feel has helped me understand myself and my emotions on a deeper level and I can feel myself slowly, but surely, becoming an “emotion chemist.”
Overall, the app is fun, free, and interesting. What’s not to like?