How We Feel is a free app created by scientists, designers, engineers, and therapists to help people better understand their emotions and find strategies to help them navigate their emotions in the moment. Conceived in conjunction with Yale University's Center for Emotional Intelligence and based on the work of Dr Marc Brackett, How We Feel helps people find the right word to describe how they feel while tracking their sleep, exercise, and health trends using HealthKit in order to spot patterns over time.
Founded as a science-based nonprofit, How We Feel is made possible by donations from people who are passionate about bringing mental wellbeing to the widest possible audience. Our data privacy terms are clear and easy-to-understand: all of your data is kept on your device unless you opt-in to send an anonymized version of your check-ins to be used in research to help more people.
Whether you are downloading this app in order to build better relationships, make your emotions to work for you, not against you, improve how you handle stress and anxiety or simply to feel better, How We Feel will help you identify patterns through daily HealthKit tracking and find emotional regulation strategies that will work for you. The How We Feel friends feature allows you to share how you feel with the people you trust most in real time, strengthening your most important relationships.
Filled with step-by-step video strategies you can do in as little as one minute on themes like "Change Your Thinking" to help you address negative thought patterns with cognitive strategies; "Move Your Body" to express and release emotions through movement strategies;"Be Mindful" to gain perspective and minimize the negative impact of misunderstood emotions with mindfulness strategies; "Reach Out" to build intimacy and trust, two important tools for emotional wellbeing, with social strategies.
This science-based mood journal aims to help you achieved a more balanced sense of wellbeing, via daily check-ins and a colour-coded matrix to help explore your emotions.
Great tool for autism!
APHELION08
TLDR: Beautiful, practical and so helpful! I use it everyday and it’s feels easy and helps me understand my emotions and above all, helps me calm down. The generated reflections are so useful as an autistic person wanting to see things differently without having to constantly bother my loved ones. It helps give me clarity and communication more efficiently after feeling through my emotions. All the features make this so accessible. My favourites are:- the free resources, such pretty and thoughtfully designed breathing tools and helpful practices on demand.- the abundance of visually appealing data u can use to analyse and understand your feelings and patterns- the entry itself is so easy and uses such useful visuals, especially helpful for the neurodivergent! Or just even if colours and shapes are your thing lol! - THE WIDGETS (I would forget to check in without mine.) - the different types reflections you can generate to explore your journal entry. - being able to add photos, voice notes and health data tags to an entry.- seasonal reflection questionnaires + weekly recaps of entries (even more helpful reflecting!!!)- PHYSICAL SENSATIONS. This popped up a month ago and I genuinely cried out of joy, its links intensity, location, and feeling through a beautiful 3d design to your entry. - being able to share with close ones, and the option to share less or none at all! It doesn’t just feel like a journal app. This aids me with tools to manage my extreme emotions more effectively by myself. It has been such a lifesaver as someone who struggles with extreme rollercoaster emotions. Thank you so much How We Feel.
App very glitchy/buggy
nikkinomad
I just downloaded this app but straight away it’s problematic the biggest most serious problem being that it won’t let me turn the most important security feature on - every time I press the button to turn on passcode/biometric ID to access check-ins the app crashes when I reboot it the feature still hasn’t turned on. 2nd the app is not importing the health data it says it will import consistently.. it’s imported a couple of nights of sleep data but not last nights and it’s not importing exercise data, this despite me having switched on these features in settings. There is no way of contacting any app support either within the app or here in the app shop when you click dev support here it just takes you to a general Yale university website. If I can’t get the security or the health imports working properly I’ll be deleting it as without these features it’s not fit for purpose my phone is an iPhone XS running at least OS 16!now the technical problems are out the way I’ll turn to functionality of the app.. I find the high low energy bit difficult and also I find it doesn’t really represent feeling complexes - I rarely just experience 1 emotion at a time but rather a complex of emotions for example if I’m feeling angry there’s often another emotion underneath the anger so only being able to select anger doesn’t really allow me to express what’s really going on. I’ve been working on recognising my emotions and feeling my feelings for a number of years now in a therapy, I was hoping this was going to help with the recognition more but if it can’t express feeling complexes I’m not sure it will. I like the privacy in that it doesn’t export my data straight to servers but it’s not protecting my privacy against intrusion on my device.
Great app with 1 annoying issue
SP.-
I would highly recommend this app to anyone. The only issue i have found with it is that if you add exercise to a evening check in to say you are feeling great now you have done the exercise, then it changes the exercise for the morning check in too? Which is annoying because i might be feeling sad in the morning but then once i have done exercise feel much better. This causes the “how exercise makes you feel” section to be incorrect as it would say that exercise makes me feel bad when in fact it makes me feel better. The same problem applies to sleep too as if you take a nap and sleep more it changes it for all of the previous check ins too. If this issue could be fixed so that exercise and sleep are only set for that specific check in then this would be perfect. Other than those issues it is such a good app literally!
Bug fixes.
Version 1.17.8
The developer, The How We Feel Project, Inc., indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Linked to You
The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:
Contact Info
Identifiers
Other Data
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
Contact Info
Diagnostics
Privacy practices may vary based, for example, on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
