This article was taken from the January 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Are you so buttoned-up that you regard tears as "confusing eye-water"? Maybe it's time you dug into your emotions. Apps such as mappiness and gottaFeeling encourage you to share your feelings at random throughout the day. Here's their guide to paddling in Lake Me.
Break your cycle "We have this achievement-oriented society and culture, and anything that interrupts that cycle is helpful," says Alicia Morga, creator of gottaFeeling and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. "When you get that ping on your iPhone, it's a moment of mindfulness. Users have said they've been able to go back and see how they were in a bad mood a moment before, and that it got better. So sometimes just putting your emotions in context is really valuable."
Quantify your environment The mappiness app asks you to share how you feel and blends the results with GPS location, weather data, noise levels and more. "Say people spend £10 on a cinema ticket, which gives two hours of happiness," says the app's co-creator, George MacKerron. "If they get twice that happiness up a mountain, you can say the mountain was worth at least £20 to them. Or take a plan to sell off forests -- the app might tell you the value of those forests remaining accessible."
Embrace all emotions "Between a user signing up and completing about 500 responses, there is an average five per cent rise in happiness," says MacKerron. But whereas the pursuit of happiness is not necessarily flawed, don't mindlessly pursue it, says Morga. "Emotions are just emotions -- neither good nor bad. If you can identify and manage what you're feeling, you can express it more cleanly."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
