This past week has been pretty stressful. I was busy planning a party for my little brother. So when this happy apps assignment I thought oh great something to add to my load. I went through the list of apps and decided to focus on two specifically. I downloaded T2 mood tracker and GPS for the soul. T2 Mood tracker is an app that basically graphs some of your emotions you have daily. From you input every day, so you are able to see your feelings and how they’ve gone up or down. You can notice certain patterns and changes. There are 6 major categories , Anxiety, Depression, General well-being, head injury , PTS, and stress. In each existing category there are sub questions to follow. Giving you a scale between two extremes such as hopeful, to hopeless, unsafe to safe, panicked to content and asking you to rate yourself on where you believe you fall into on that spectrum. I found this pretty difficult, because they were such extremes, it really made me question myself, and I thought maybe if they had other categories or some mid-way kind of thing that would also be helpful. For instance instead of just having two categories having something like, a little, a lot, middle etc. After using this app for 4 days my results were all over the place. I guess that’s kinds true, I was all over the place this weekend. I had some ups and downs, I was at a point extremely content and then I also felt sort of sad. And the graph does represent that. Although I think I’m going to delete it , I don’t find it useful at all. Honestly its burden to be answering all those questions every single day, its repetitive and instead of being helpful it just becomes a task.
The second app I chose to look at was GPS for the soul. I also didn’t have a clue what this app was going to be about , but the app’s name caught my attention. I also downloaded this app on Thursday. On Friday I was beginning to feel a lot of stress and I decided to open the app and sure enough it was a pleasant surprise. The app offers small inspirational type of slideshows/videos. These different tracks are aimed to help you out during some tough times. Its sort of like having yoga on your phone. I opened up a couple of guides “ Finding Calm during the times of change” , the sound that comes along with each guide are very peaceful and make you feel relaxed. On Saturday I got into an argument with someone and I didn’t know how to handle the situation I automatically went to my phone. My first thought was to post something on my social media but just as I was about to open up my Facebook I saw the app and I opened it up instead. There I opened the guide called “Breathe In, Breathe Out, Smile” the name sounded extremely corny but I thought sure why not. And after reading the little messages and replaying it a couple of times it actually did help change my mood. So do I think that these kinds of apps work, sometimes, if your desperate enough . But then again I don’t think I can tell from only a couple of days, I’d have to use them for at least a month to really see .