10 Apps to Increase Your Wellbeing By John C Haven l Apps to Make You Happy

Quantified Self is a growing trend that utilizes apps on our mobile phones to create the interventions that can help us measure, analyze and optimize our lives. Of course, the apps don’t automatically make you happier. They simply provide the permission to reflect on your life and gather data about your actions and how your behaviors make you feel. It’s by taking a measure of your life, in the literal and metaphorical sense, that you can identify what brings you increased health, happiness and meaning and focus on those moving forward. Let's take a closer look at ten apps that can increase your wellbeing.

John C. Havens is the founder of The H(app)athon Project, a non-profit organization, “Connecting Happiness to Action” by creating sensor-based smartphone surveys utilizing economic indicators to increase civic engagement and wellbeing. This article is based on John’s upcoming book, Hacking Happiness –- Why Your Personal Data Counts and How Tracking it Can Change the World. (Tarcher/Penguin, March 2014).

Cardiio

Multiple studies show that increasing your physical exercise can also increase your happiness. There are dozens of apps and wearable technologies (like bracelets with sensors embedded inside) focused on helping you track, measure, and optimizing your health. For a great list of over 500 apps, check out the Quantified Self Guide and download some free apps along these lines to try for yourself.

To get you started, check out the Cardiio app. Born out of technology from MIT, the app measures your heart rate by pointing it at your face. Less light is reflected to your face every time your heart beats, and the biosensors in the tool use that to provide an accurate heart rate. Data can be shared via social networking channels, and insights about other people in your age/health range help provide a context for how you can improve your health.

Track Your Happiness

Track Your Happiness was born out of research from Harvard University, and features a scientific method of study known as “Experience Sampling,” pioneered by positive psychology luminary, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The method, utilized by this app, involves sending a series of questions like the ones above to users throughout the day in the form of texts, emails or other prompts.

The logic is to help a user examine how they’re feeling in a specific moment when the app alerts them. This means data collected will have less bias then in a traditional survey. When using these types of apps, users often are very surprised at the data aggregated about them, not realizing how much they don’t realize they experience as they go about their days.

Tidepool

While not directly focused on increasing happiness, Tidepool is an app that encourages/improves emotional intelligence, especially at work. In a game-like environment, users (above) determine their dominant personality traits, helping to better match them to colleagues at work.

A second game lets users see a photo of a person's face and rate their emotional expression. As the game gets faster, users have less time to assess how others may be feeling based on their expressions in the photos in the game. The app encourages people to reflect on other people's emotional states as a way to improve empathy as well as workplace productivity. As altruism and compassion are shown to increase happiness, this means users can improve their happiness while helping their colleagues do the same.