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 .

There is literally an app available for everything. There are apps to help you find the nearest starbucks to apps that deliver food right to your door. With these apps you are able to get anything you need with in minutes. It is even arguable if such apps make us lazy or if they are actually designed for convenience. If you’re an extremely busy mother that can barely make it to the market for tonight’s dinner or a disable person who isn’t even able to make it down the block these apps are life savers. Apps that can help you study for a huge exam or even apps that can keep you entertained are available with in a few clicks of your phone.

So of course there has to be apps available to track your happiness. Or to even promote happiness and well-being. It might have seemed somewhat silly a few years ago to have your phone ask how you’re feeling at that very moment or to even have it tell you who you’re the happiest with. But now a days that something typical and available with apps such as Mappiness. With Mappiness researches from the London School of Economics are able to track you anonymously through GPS. They are also able to graph your happiness out with just answering a few questions a few times a day. Their primary interest is to figure out how your environment affects your happiness.

But not only are you able to use apps alone but you can use these apps more socially with groups of friends with what’s called a buddy system. With the app called Headspace you are able to share your experience and other fun content with your friends what have similar interests. Headspace focuses on treating your head right through techniques that fulfill their mission of a healthier, happier world one phone at a time. Within this app there are techniques available to deal with stress, relationships and even creativity. This app even uses ethos to establish their reputation by using Emma Watson as a sponsor she states how genus this app is. They also use other former anonymous clients that speak on how amazing this app is.

After looking through all of the apps and checking them out. I signed up for most and try to test my happiness earlier today on happily first, but that didn’t give me much info at all on my happiness it wanted me to sign up to see how Im feeling. Then I looked at the other apps and downloaded especial and in-flow because those were the main apps that caught my eye and the others I signed up and played around with them especially headspace because it was more about meditation and relaxation which I didn’t understand how to work. Then I played around with espereal and it was cool although I didn’t have any friends, but I was playing with the mood changer and I saw what all of the colors meant, one color meant jay-z which I thought was cool and weird at the same time because why does the app have a mood feeling as if their Jay-z.

Then as I waited for in-flow to down load I played around with it and the way that works is it goes buy face expression based on how someone is feeling whether it is sad,happy, or angry at the time I downloaded it and was doing my homework I was feeling ok and calm at the time. Then they track it on a line graph by the date and I’m supposed to track how I am feeling for the week, then it will tell me what is my mood through the day whether it changes or stay the same. Which I thought was cool and it gives you advice as well such as taking a shower, donating, and exercising to make you feel more happier during the day?

Also I have received numerous emails from all the apps and so far I enjoy them because I am bored half of the time and I play around with them. I think I have to understand how to work them more, most of them consist of a lot of reading to get to the next step and some apps did, some didn’t I want to get straight to the point with the app. Also I thought some apps I didn’t like that you had to use Facebook in order to signup and I am a person who don’t trust apps and I don’t use Facebook and the type of apps that ask for access for your Facebook I dont know why they did and don’t see the point, but overall they were cool and most of them you needed to pay something in order to get the full access of the app or the website. Overall trying something knew on my phone wasn’t a bad experience and looking at something different on the internet was fun and different as well and made me think more about happiness anyhow release stress more and cool out more instead of overthinking things and getting myself worked up and listening more.

In my opinion apps do not tell whether or not your are happy. Maybe I didn’t use the apps in the correct way but they didn’t work for me. But the most common app that a lot of people seem to go after is to track their mood and see whether or not the app can figure out how happy they may be. I tried out the T2 Mood Track and it wasn’t successful, you basically just put in your moods and nothing happens. It just shows up on a scale and the way they changed over the days kind of like keeping a chart of how much weight you lost every few weeks. Another app I tried was the Expereal and I was kind of not excited about it because of the fact  that the only way to login in was to login with your facebook account. You also had to put a picture and give access to your pictures and basically everything on your phone. So I don’t think that apps can figure out how happy you are, maybe the apps I tried out didn’t work for me or I didn’t use them correctly but they weren’t very helpful. It was more of just me putting information into my phone. I also noticed that some apps that were listed only worked on androids which sucked because when I looked at the information it looked that it would have probably worked better than the other apps. Another thing is that the apps that you had to pay for looked more interesting obviously than the free ones because they might actually work if you really have to pay for it right ?

I was interested in trying the apps. I was curious to how it worked and if it even helped at all. So I downloaded the app “Mappiness”. When I first got it it asked me to answer some questions about my personal happiness and also my money and my income. I didn’t expect to be asked about money, so that took me off guard. When I was finally done they asked me questions based on how happy, relaxed and awake I was on a scale from 1-10. Then I was asked what I was doing and to check off all that apply and also where I was. That was about it. I get a update everyday from the app telling me to do the same thing. After a couple of days I looked at it and noticed it starts to create a chart based on my happiness. The app said I was most happy when I was home and indoors, which is very true. To be fair the times when I was notified to update my happiness I was home and I was recently sick, so that could have something to do with it. The more I use the app I’m sure the more I will find out. So far the app is telling me things I already know, so it’s helpful to see my happiness being tracked but at the same time I already know what they are telling me so far. Maybe after a while it will tell me things I don’t know, after all I did just start the app.