Are you struggling with emotions? Do you find it difficult to connect with others? You're not alone. Every 1 in 10 people has alexithymia - difficulty, or inability to identify, understand, and express emotions. And it’s even more prevalent among neurodivergent people (autism, ADHD,...).
Animi is a free app (currently only in English) with some optional premium extra features that helps you learn about your emotions, understand their causes, manage them effectively, and over time figure out your patterns. Like an evidence-based emotion coach utilizing the latest research on alexithymia and emotion regulation, Animi is designed to improve alexithymia, emotional awareness, and emotional intelligence, and over time help you build emotional vocabulary and understand the nuances of hundreds of feelings and emotions.
- Take an alexithymia test and learn your alexithymia score, indicating how severely you are disconnected from your emotions
- Identify & log your emotions with the help of one of our emotion wheel like tools (on a much more detailed and granular level than other emotion trackers)
- Understand the meaning, causes, and symptoms of emotions with the help of our emotion encyclopedia
- Experience quick breathing techniques to regulate emotions (like cyclic physiological sighing, bhastrika, or resonance breathing)
- Learn how to communicate emotions in a productive way
- Journal about your emotions with the help of introspective, reflective prompts
- Get daily notifications to check in with yourself and build a streak
With our optional Premium subscription, you'll also get access to:
- 100-lesson, 3-month daily evidence-based Emotions 101 course designed specifically to address alexithymia by teaching a productive mindset about emotions, interoception, and emotion schemas
- Optional AI-enhanced features including guided identification & processing chat workflows, knowledge base search & LLM-generated journal insights
- Cross-device user accounts and data backups to sync data on phone & browser
- Advanced analytics, including the ability to filter logged journals with multiple filters and extract useful insights from unique charts
And over the longer period of using the app:
- Reduce your alexithymia score
- Improve your relationships
- Enhance your mental health and even physical health
Download Animi now and start your self-care journey today!
Sample of user reviews:
- The app is in my opinion much better than emotion wheels as there is so much more details/information.
- This was far more informative than talking with a therapist for an hour to figure out what I'm feeling, so I would recommend it.
- Very helpful! Feel like the tool has allowed me to regulate even when having very distressing emotions through understanding.
Disclaimer: Animi is incorporated as a public benefit corporation with a mission to build a solution that improves alexithymia, and that's also why we collect the anonymized alexithymia test data, so we know whether the app succeeds at it. Your sensitive journal data stays on the device by default. It can be stored on our server for cross-device sync only with your opt-in explicit permission after enabling that feature. By default we are only collecting metadata necessary to evaluate the effectiveness and improve the app, though you can opt-in to share more detailed data for research and creation of future helpful content. We don't share the data with any third-parties nor sell it or use it for any kind of advertisement.
This app is the best thing to ever happen to me, no joke. Without going into too much detail, I had a pretty rough childhood with lots of emotional neglect, among other things. I’ve been in and out of therapy and though it’s helped with a lot, figuring out how to connect my mind to my body in a safe way has not been the easiest process. When I learned about Alexithymia, I felt like I had finally found a loose thread that I could pull to unravel decades worth of things I couldn’t quite verbalize. That, alone, was a big help in my healing, but it was complete happen-chance that I found this app. I couldn’t be more grateful for all the work that’s gone into creating something so extremely beneficial like this! It’s so simple, yet so thorough. I can wax poetic about emotions all day, but actually sensing them physically and knowing what to do with that does not compute to my brain. The glossary and physical sensation sections have really helped increase my awareness with these things. I feel like I finally have a link between these parts of myself that I’ve been struggling to find my whole life! I’m so so happy to have this to rely on when I can’t make sense of anything going on with me, it’s the biggest relief ever. I’ve already shared it with several people in my life, and I hope more people find out about it because it’s a great way to learn/relearn emotions and healthy ways to embrace them. I’m so so thankful I found this!
Thank you.
*Nickname Entered*
I’m not sure if I’m on the spectrum or not, my evaluation is this month, not super relevant. I’m 19 and always been very moody but was bad at explaining what was up. Thank you for this app. If you’re reading this and confused, it’s worth a try. Not for everyone, but there’s some science here. Can’t say I get the science but psychology is in fact a science haha. My favorite feature is the list of emotions, which I think is comprehensive enough. But I wouldn’t mind an update with, perhaps ONE extra emotion, per update maybe, if you have the time 😅 no one in particular, just love all the vocab, hah. I wish the emotion compass and body sensations were more descriptive somehow (?), but they are very, very descriptive, so maybe that’s a me problem. My only issue is the pictures are rather, well, abstract. That’s one word for it lol, no judgement here, thank you. I do tend to copy others but I haven’t read the other reviews, this one is from the heart. A happy heart? A grateful heart? Good enough. Thank you. 💙💙💙💙 PS: editing this, at least on my version, the search function for the emotions list doesn’t work. That would definitely be helpful haha. Still so grateful 🩵 PS PS: I guess the Apple App Store loops all these paragraphs together. Oh well.
It feels like a generous gift
m477hun73r
When I opened the app I was a little confused, but this team created a thorough video linked on the main view that takes the user through all the app’s features. Everything made sense after watching it. It’s still challenging for me to use, but only because I struggle with the very thing this app is meant to help users understand and improve. While logging my first unknown emotion, I found out three things:1. The app flow has a wealth of information but helps narrow down emotions before asking the user to figure out how they feel so i felt much less overwhelmed than I would normally. The development team clearly put a lot of thought into how to make an app legitimately useful to people who struggle with understanding their emotions.2. This app should compliment my therapy sessions really well because I am usually using generic and simple words to describe my emotions. With Animi, I’ll have specific emotions already identified and the journal prompts will make my notes much more useful. This should give my therapist something more specific to help me through.3. Information is presented and organized in a much better fashion than an emotional color wheel and doesn’t require that the user know what the emotion words mean. I can take my time, tap on words I don’t recognize, and learn what different emotions are and their accompanying signs and symptoms.This app should in no way be free, but I’m really grateful that it is. I highly recommend it for anyone who struggles with alexithymia or autism.
Wonderful app
Sandplague
I’ve always had a hard time identifying and describing my thoughts and emotions and this app has already been a huge help. It also has similar elements to coping exercises that my therapist has recommended to me (e.g., “RAIN”) so having a structured app for it is extremely helpful. Thank you so much for developing this. ❤️ Some suggestions I have are: (1) Subtitles for the videos; (2) some more guidance on the “process” exercise; I’ve read the tooltips but am still confused about what I’m supposed to do; (3) possibly an abbreviated version of the “process” exercise if possible, in addition to the current 10 minute one, since it can be difficult to work through it all before getting overwhelmed and giving up. Thank you again!!
Added alexithymia-associated health outcomes to the test result screen.
Fixed journal text being cleared after selecting tags.
Fixed submitting AI searches from the native keyboard and improved account and subscription error messages.
Improved the journal entry screen for large emotion selections and made the text field stay visible above the keyboard.
Improved emotion card text readability across different backgrounds.
Version 1.6.5
The developer, Animi PBC, 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
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
Health & Fitness
Identifiers
Usage Data
Diagnostics
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based 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
Information
Seller
Animi PBC
Size
86.5 MB
Category
Health & Fitness
Compatibility
Requires iOS 16.4 or later.
iPhone Requires iOS 16.4 or later.
Mac Requires macOS 12.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.
Apple Vision Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
Location
This app may use your location even when it isn’t open, which can decrease device battery life.