The Best Emotion App I've Seen

Lindsay Miller  0:07  
You're listening to The Stress Nanny podcast, and I'm your host, Lindsay Miller. I'm here to help you keep an eye on your family stress levels. In our fast paced lives, the ability to manage stress has never been more important for kids or adults. When it comes to stress, we have two choices, we can decrease stress or increase our resilience to it. Here on the number eight ranked stress podcast, I interview experts and share insights to help you do both. When you tune in each week, you'll bring your stress levels down and your resilience up so that stress doesn't get in the way of you living your best life. I'm so glad you're here. 

Hey, there, this is Lindsay, and I'm so glad you're joining me here on the podcast. Some weeks I interview guests. And some weeks I share a message myself. And this week, I'm sharing a message. This is not an ad. So before we get started, just know that no one is paying me for sharing this app with you. It's just one that I was introduced to. And I have shared with my clients and friends and neighbors and anyone who listened to me talk about it. And I wanted to make sure to highlight it here on the podcast too. So the app is called how we feel. And it's put out by Mark Brackett who's a leading emotion researcher. It's fully funded. And so it's a free app. And it's super powerful. So I recommend anyone with an Apple device, get it, it's only available on Apple right now, hopefully, they'll have an Android version soon. But there are some specific reasons that I think this app is really powerful and really useful for everyone, whether it's grownups or kids. And I'm going to share those reasons with you today. So the four reasons are that it promotes self awareness, it helps you access the full range of emotion. It provides simple and effective lessons. And then it gives you a really great suite of analytics. So let me go into those in a little bit more detail. So in terms of self awareness, there's a part of the brain that is designed to kind of monitor everything that's going on. And it has the job of like monitoring our emotions, our physical state, our mental state, and just really keeping tabs on on all the higher level operations of, of our body and brain. And so that part of our brain needs exercise. And it only gets exercise when we take that high level view of those things. And so if we're just kind of immersed in our day, and going about things from task to task, we don't always access that part of the brain. And it's really, really helpful to be able to have a quick connection there. So that we can kind of zoom out and see what's going on with us and then zoom back in and be present with what we're doing. So by using this app, when you can set a notification, I have it set to notify me twice a day to check in, where you can use the notifications to automatically invite you to practice self awareness by doing a check in on this app. So the how we feel app has a whole range of emotions split into high energy, pleasant, high energy, unpleasant, low energy, pleasant, and low energy unpleasant. And in each of those categories, there are a myriad of emotions available. Which brings me to my second point, which is the app helps us experience the full range of emotion. Now, as kids, it's really important to be able to access the full range to know what each feels like, and to be able to glean information from them. Sometimes we stunt our development when it comes to emotion by only using a handful of phrases like I'm angry, or I'm sad. And this app really gives you a whole host of nuanced iterations of you know, different emotions. And it gives you the space to track over time, different aspects of your life or your experience when you are feeling that emotion. So it asks about the time of day you were feeling it what you were doing when you were feeling it who you were with, was it morning evening, was it you know what day was it and so there's all this different data that you enter when you enter the different emotions. And so again, it gives you the chance to reflect and cultivate that self awareness will also really inviting you to experience the full range because when the words and phrases are there, and there's some fun shapes that are associated with each emotion, it really is an invitation to explore and get curious like what am I actually feeling right now? Is this sadness? Is it loneliness? Is it like listlessness, I mean, there's just so many different options on there. And so, giving yourself the chance to really get specific about what's going on is a great way to practice the forming, accessing the full range of emotion. And then the next aspect of it is the lessons. So I've gone through all the lessons, and they're incredible. So you unlock lessons after like three check ins, and so gamifies it for kids and makes it kind of special to unlock the lessons. They're also really succinct. And so there are a variety of people sharing messages. And they're all professionals in various fields who have insights and advice. The lessons are engaging, and also really, really high impact. And so if you can encourage your kids to use the app, they'll unlock these lessons, and then hopefully, listen to at least a snippet, you know, of each one. And then the same. If you're a grown up and you have the app downloaded, and you unlock the lessons, it's good to just listen, take a few minutes, go through each of the messages being shared, along with the tools and practices in order to give yourself insight into like, what responses to emotions can look like, and how we can learn more about emotion by being aware of it. And then the fourth thing is the analytics. So this is my favorite part. Remember, I said earlier that when you do a check in each of the times that you check in, you have the option to add a whole bunch of other information to the check in. Well, once you add all that information, the app compiles it, and then gives you summaries. So there's a little Analytics tab, and you can have a summary of all the different things that you felt and it gives you them in color. So it shows you the high energy, pleasant high energy, unpleasant, low energy, pleasant and low energy unpleasant, each of those have a different color. And then in those there's the different shapes for specific emotions. But it gives you a high level view of how often you were feeling each of the categories. And then it gives you the specifics into which emotions they were, what what you were doing, when you experienced those emotions, what time of day it was, how much sleep you got, what day of the week, it was all these different bits of info so that you can go through and take a summary high level view of how you were feeling how you've been feeling. And it gives you clues as to how you could support yourself. And sometimes maybe if you've been feeling down kind of a lot, and you do these check ins and you see that like oh, I've actually have felt, you know, great a couple of days this week. Or if you find that you are feeling down a lot, you can notice any patterns like is it first thing in the morning isn't when I haven't gotten very much sleep, you know, and then you can troubleshoot from there. So the specificity of all of it is so powerful. Because when you combine really specific articulation of emotion, with those kinds of details, you can really troubleshoot patterns. And just notice ways you can help yourself, you know, when things are going well, what are the what did those high energy pleasant emotions have in common? You know, what about them is something I could repeat what's in my control. And so that's also really powerful. Along with the analytics, there is an option to share your emotion with other people. So I encourage families to just share within the family and close friends, I don't think of it like a social media app, necessarily, you could use it that way if you wanted to. But there's a passcode you can use to share your emotion with, you know, someone that you trust. And so that can also be a nice way as as a grown up to check in with someone that you love, who has this app, and kind of keep tabs on their emotional state at each check in they have the option to share or not share. But you know, just noticing what what they're registering on their emotion app can invite a conversation later, along with, you know, any questions around what they might have learned what patterns they've seen, what they noticed about the app. And that's one of the things I love about this is that it just really creates an opportunity for curiosity. And we don't have to get to where we're offering lectures, but we just need to be curious. So again, app is called how we feel. And it's really easy to just get set up and get going. And it'll help build self awareness. It'll help access the full range of emotion, share some really powerful and insightful lessons, and then offer a great opportunity for kind of analyzing and noticing patterns. So that gradually over time, we can shift our emotional state if we desire or keep doing the things that are really building us up and making us feel, you know, high energy pleasant emotions a lot of the time. So let me know if you give it a try. It's a my favorite, favorite emotion app. And I think it has the potential to impact individuals and families in some really dynamic ways.

So give it a try. You've just finished an episode of the stress nanny podcast, so hopefully you feel a little more empowered when it comes to dealing with stress, feel free to take a deep breath and let it out slowly as you go back to your day. I'm so glad you're here. If you're a longtime listener, thank you so much for your support. It really means the world to me. If you're new, I'd love to have you follow the podcast and join me each week. And no matter how long you've been listening, please share this episode with someone who is stressed out. If you enjoyed the show, would you please do me a favor and go to ratethispodcast.com/thestressnanny and leave a review. The link is in the show notes. I'm so grateful for all my listeners. Thank you again for being here. Until next time!

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