How We Feel

Name: How We Feel
Rating: 4.9 (25218 reviews)
Author: The How We Feel Project, Inc.

An emotional wellbeing journal

Only for iPhone

Free

25K Ratings
Awards

Editors’ Choice

Apps
Ages

4+
Years
Category

Health & Fitness
Developer

The How We Feel Project, Inc.
Language

EN
English
Size

215.7
MB

iPhone

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.

Ratings & Reviews

4.9

out of 5

25K Ratings

Editors’ Choice

Created in collaboration with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, How We Feel is a science-based mood journal designed to help you achieve a more balanced sense of well-being. Its daily check-ins help you fully explore nuanced emotions by guiding you through an elegant color-coded matrix complete with explanations.
An Amazing App & Project, 1 improvement
01/22/2023

Elykahn
I have been absolutely loving this app, from the beginning the tone and language used is welcoming, warm, supportive and encouraging. I am a designer myself and I find the majority of apps are functional but devoid of character and this app maintains the ease of use (and even facilitates it) with a lot of character that makes reporting my feelings fun even when I’m not feeling like anything would be fun, the playfulness and abstraction in no way takes away from the experience and the human descriptions in the videos are so calm and purely helpful that they are not threatening the way self-improvement videos can be. They don’t make me feel bad for not having done a suggestion, just optimistic that I can see benefits from trying it.My main point of improvement is that I have input a sizable number of check-ins on my iPad and others on my iPhone and although the two apps appear to be sharing the same identifier they don’t compile the data to get the full picture and that would be a huge improvement for me since I can’t easily compare the times that I am using one or the other. I looked for a way to export my data and import it to the other device(the long route) but I didn’t find anything, ultimately the best solution would be automatic sync. Keep up the great work!
An Amazing App & Project, 1 improvement
01/22/2023

Elykahn

I have been absolutely loving this app, from the beginning the tone and language used is welcoming, warm, supportive and encouraging. I am a designer myself and I find the majority of apps are functional but devoid of character and this app maintains the ease of use (and even facilitates it) with a lot of character that makes reporting my feelings fun even when I’m not feeling like anything would be fun, the playfulness and abstraction in no way takes away from the experience and the human descriptions in the videos are so calm and purely helpful that they are not threatening the way self-improvement videos can be. They don’t make me feel bad for not having done a suggestion, just optimistic that I can see benefits from trying it.My main point of improvement is that I have input a sizable number of check-ins on my iPad and others on my iPhone and although the two apps appear to be sharing the same identifier they don’t compile the data to get the full picture and that would be a huge improvement for me since I can’t easily compare the times that I am using one or the other. I looked for a way to export my data and import it to the other device(the long route) but I didn’t find anything, ultimately the best solution would be automatic sync. Keep up the great work!
love the app! don’t love the AI…
12/06/2024

chocosprinkles
my therapist recommended my girlfriend and i try using this app to improve our communication, and it’s done wonders! it’s expanded my vocabulary when it comes to describing my emotions, and made it much easier to communicate to her and to others how i’m feeling. it’s been a great tool for me in my mental health journey. i was disappointed to see the addition of AI to an app i use to journal my emotions and inner thoughts. i don’t like the idea that my private thoughts might be used to train the AI, and it feels unnecessary in an app like this. i understand the intention is to help people gain insight into why they’re feeling a certain way, however it feels like users are expected to take mental health advice from or confide in a robot with no mental health training. it feels impersonal to me, and saddened me to see this feature on an app i use daily. i would have loved to see these resources used to add other useful features; more to the incredibly helpful “tools” section of the app, an option to enter custom emotions with descriptions, or a quiz of some kind that can be taken to help identify the correct emotion word one can attribute to any given moment, to name a few. the AI might be great for some, but personally, it caused me to lose faith in the app and made me sad when i feel like there could be more helpful features added with the resources used to add an unnecessary AI.

Developer Response
Thank you for trying how we feel! The ai feature is optional. We know it’s not for everyone. If you do decide to give it a try, your journal entries will not be used to train models per an agreement made with Open Ai. Hope that is helpful!
love the app! don’t love the AI…
12/06/2024

chocosprinkles

my therapist recommended my girlfriend and i try using this app to improve our communication, and it’s done wonders! it’s expanded my vocabulary when it comes to describing my emotions, and made it much easier to communicate to her and to others how i’m feeling. it’s been a great tool for me in my mental health journey. i was disappointed to see the addition of AI to an app i use to journal my emotions and inner thoughts. i don’t like the idea that my private thoughts might be used to train the AI, and it feels unnecessary in an app like this. i understand the intention is to help people gain insight into why they’re feeling a certain way, however it feels like users are expected to take mental health advice from or confide in a robot with no mental health training. it feels impersonal to me, and saddened me to see this feature on an app i use daily. i would have loved to see these resources used to add other useful features; more to the incredibly helpful “tools” section of the app, an option to enter custom emotions with descriptions, or a quiz of some kind that can be taken to help identify the correct emotion word one can attribute to any given moment, to name a few. the AI might be great for some, but personally, it caused me to lose faith in the app and made me sad when i feel like there could be more helpful features added with the resources used to add an unnecessary AI.
Developer Response 12/08/2024
Thank you for trying how we feel! The ai feature is optional. We know it’s not for everyone. If you do decide to give it a try, your journal entries will not be used to train models per an agreement made with Open Ai. Hope that is helpful!
This app is ALMOST there!
Mar 14

flykitemindfind
This -desperately- needs graphs. The data how it is, that’s fine, keep it, but bring in an option to use graphs and slightly more significant data analysis. It’s easy to do just correlations and stuff. I know you want to make the app user friendly, and not add something too complicated, but please add an option for those of us who want to double or triple the usefulness of this app for ourselves. Further, the AI reflection thing is huge, that’s a game changer! Fantastic feature. Now, what you need is a further feature that will analyze trends in your chats with the AI, trying to draw out possible connections that aren’t obvious unless an overview was taken of the conversations. And for this, add an “easy” version for folks who don’t care to get into the weeds about, and a more sophisticated analysis, maybe so certain words correlate with one another. For instance, allergies acting up and depression or anything like that to discover occurrences happening simultaneously that we might not automatically pick up on. This would be MUCH better than every time having to manually add tags, people skip those because they don’t have the time or possibly energy. The possibilities to help people learn about themselves a whole lot more through a little extra sophistication are endless here. I’ll definitely change to 5 stars if see this stuff come in, not that one rating will change much. But for what it’s worth.
This app is ALMOST there!
Mar 14

flykitemindfind

This -desperately- needs graphs. The data how it is, that’s fine, keep it, but bring in an option to use graphs and slightly more significant data analysis. It’s easy to do just correlations and stuff. I know you want to make the app user friendly, and not add something too complicated, but please add an option for those of us who want to double or triple the usefulness of this app for ourselves. Further, the AI reflection thing is huge, that’s a game changer! Fantastic feature. Now, what you need is a further feature that will analyze trends in your chats with the AI, trying to draw out possible connections that aren’t obvious unless an overview was taken of the conversations. And for this, add an “easy” version for folks who don’t care to get into the weeds about, and a more sophisticated analysis, maybe so certain words correlate with one another. For instance, allergies acting up and depression or anything like that to discover occurrences happening simultaneously that we might not automatically pick up on. This would be MUCH better than every time having to manually add tags, people skip those because they don’t have the time or possibly energy. The possibilities to help people learn about themselves a whole lot more through a little extra sophistication are endless here. I’ll definitely change to 5 stars if see this stuff come in, not that one rating will change much. But for what it’s worth.

Thanks to your valuable feedback, this release includes fixed bugs and performance improvements. Fixes: - Fixed and issue where the tabs at the bottom of the app were not longer displaying - Fixed an issue where shared check-ins were not visible - Fixed an issue where certain emotions did not have suggested tools

Version 1.15.3

Oct 23

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