It’s been a year. A year to the day since I discovered How We Feel, a free, science-backed emotional wellbeing and mood-tracking journal led by co-founders Ben Silbermann and Dr Marc Brackett of the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence.
I discovered it through the Modern Wisdom podcast, and later the Huberman Lab podcast, where Chris and Andrew were joined by Dr Brackett on their respective shows to talk all things emotional intelligence.
And it’s fair to say it’s changed how I relate to and manage my emotions. Most notably, by becoming more aware of how I feel, and the triggers and events that lead to certain feelings, emotions, and emotional trends.
I say “just,” but that’s no understatement. Becoming aware of how we truly feel, going deeper below the neck, as Chris Williamson would say, is not an easy task. Even now, I’m not always aware of how I truly feel, or able to clearly articulate it, despite feeling the way I do.
The app helps with this. There’s no doubt about it.
But what I’ve noticed is sometimes there isn’t an emotion in the app that accurately describes my feelings or emotional state. Or there is, but the description that goes with it is slightly awry from how I perceive it.
This highlights that our emotions and feelings, how we feel, are deeply personal. Much like every other facet of our health and wellbeing.
How I Started Using the How We Feel App
When I started using the app, it wasn’t with any big goal or intention in mind. I just found it an interesting, cool way to start logging how I feel. It was something I was curious about, really, to get to the bottom of the emotional trends I was experiencing at the time. And it was another tool I could add to my tool belt, so to speak.
Historically, I’ve been a big journaler, journaling at least twice a day, morning and evening. So integrating a check-in with the app into my journaling was the obvious place to put it.
My 30-Day Emotional Check-In Challenge
Several months later, in April, I decided to go even deeper. I’d noticed I had become a bit more emotionally dysregulated throughout the first four months of 2026, so I set May as the month I would embark on a 30-day challenge. Every day, I would check in emotionally at least twice a day, no matter what, if not more.
I wrote about my experience of the challenge, and what it taught me about my emotional landscape, in I Tracked My Emotions for 30 Days. Here’s What I Found on the Ancient Wisdom Modern Science blog.
In summary: beforehand, I was logging emotions morning and evening, and here and there. That ramped up during the challenge, as I went from 23 check-ins in April to 111 in May. And I’ve stayed more consistent with tracking my emotions ever since.
Mornings are where I’m most consistent. I hardly ever miss a morning check-in, and when I do, I never go two days in a row.
This is a life principle I’ve applied to most of my habits: never go two days in a row without completing a habit. It’s allowed me to stay consistent with many habits, including this one.
What I Love About the How We Feel App
The great thing about the app, the thing I love, is how easy it is to use.
It allows you to explore and go deeper into each emotional check-in. You can add tags that cover different areas, such as what you were doing at the time, who you were with and where you were, as well as add physical locations.
It also syncs with Apple Health to track things like hydration, movement and your step count. We’re not always aware of it, but these things can all impact our emotional state and how we experience the world around us.
It’s by far the number one tool I now use for tracking my emotions and exploring my emotional landscape at a deeper level.
Weekly Summaries and Seasonal Snapshots
Every week, the app provides a summary of how you felt, highlighting emotional trends. I find this very helpful, and I use it as part of my bigger weekly reflection process.
There are also seasonal snapshots: another check-in feature that offers a reflective pause on our overall wellbeing as we transition between the seasons.
Other Features Worth Knowing About
There are many other features in the app, including:
- Self-regulation tools, from meditations and guided breathwork audios to affirmations, quotes and sound patterns
- Reflection takeaways you can save, and reframing strategies
- Sharing how you feel with friends
- An in-depth calendar breakdown summarising how you felt over the week, the month, and since you started using the app
- Daily reminders, helpful for never missing a day
- Settings like check-in preferences and the ability to turn on an AI feature that offers guided reflections for each emotional check-in. I find this extremely helpful.
If you’re curious about exploring your emotional landscape, I’d highly recommend the How We Feel app. I’m not associated with it in any way. It’s a free tool that anyone can use, available on the iOS App Store and on Android.
It’s helped me to go deeper below the neck and truly feel my feelings by bringing me into the present moment and increasing my awareness, mindfulness and daily presence.
What a Year of Tracking Taught Me About My Emotions
I shared many of the biggest insights I gained from using the app in the article over on the Ancient Wisdom Modern Science blog. But some of the most prevalent still stay with me to this day.
We Feel Unpleasant Emotions More Intensely
While I don’t want to speak for everyone, most of us typically feel and naturally respond more intensely to unpleasant emotions than pleasant ones.
We’re typically biased towards negativity rather than positivity, for primal survival reasons. Psychologists call this the negativity bias. Positivity, on the other hand, requires conscious effort to cultivate.
Don’t get me wrong, though. This can be trained, like any trait. It requires a bit more time, energy and effort for the majority of us.
The Four Emotion Quadrants (and Why They’re Easy to Confuse)
You may be wondering what I mean by this, but the How We Feel app splits emotions into four quadrants:
- Low unpleasant emotions, such as sadness
- Low pleasant emotions, such as a sense of calm
- High pleasant emotions, such as excitement
- High unpleasant emotions, such as anxiety or anger
On both sides of the quadrants, the high side and the low side, it can sometimes be a challenge, at least in my experience, to decipher emotions.
For me personally, I realised how low unpleasant emotions can have a calming energy to them, similar to low pleasant emotions, and I’ve often confused the two in the past. It takes really feeling into them, going deeper, to notice the difference.
I also experienced this a lot on the high side, with excitement and eagerness on one hand, and a sense of nervousness and anxiety, which are high unpleasant emotions, on the other.
Nervous Excitement vs Nervous Anxiety
This points to an insight I learned long before I started using the How We Feel app: there’s a difference between nervousness and anxiety. I often call it nervous excitement and nervous anxiety.
Nervous energy is a sign of growth, whereas anxiety, for the majority of us, is something to transcend.
I’m definitely a more nervous, anxious and agitated person, especially when doing new things and when there’s a great deal of uncertainty. At the time of writing, I’ve been in this state. It seems to be a recent theme, one that has led to a lot of anxiety, stress and unrest, and to me becoming more dysregulated.
How High Unpleasant Emotions Turn Into Low Ones
If you look at my How We Feel app and navigate to the weekly breakdown, you’d see that the majority of my time has been spent in either the low or high unpleasant quadrants.
I can often feel a high unpleasant emotion in the moment, as a situation or event occurs, and then later this transitions even into a low unpleasant emotion, such as feeling unhappy, sad or down.
So I could be in a heightened state of anxiety, stress or overwhelm, and three or four hours later feel sad, low, or depressed.
It’s been interesting to experience the peaks and troughs in this way. Although, at the time, it’s unpleasant at best.
It’s only by reflecting and looking back at how my emotional landscape has risen and fallen in this way that, at least in my experience, you can start to draw insights and lessons from it. Lessons to apply moving forward, so you can respond more and react less to similar situations and life events in the future.
Respond, Not React: Awareness Is the Real Work
This points to a fundamental life lesson I share often: it’s how we respond, not react, that matters.
How we respond is in our control. It’s one way we can cultivate agency, and it requires conscious effort. I’ve explored this before in how to stop reacting to every feeling.
The How We Feel app is now a tool that has helped me respond more and react less to life’s events and situations. It does this through awareness. Whether that’s cultivating awareness in the moment, by pausing and checking in with the app to go deeper below the neck, or reflecting on a situation after the fact and drawing out valuable insights and lessons to apply moving forward.
There’s research behind the value of that pause, too. Simply putting feelings into words has been shown to dampen activity in the amygdala, the brain’s alarm system.
Remember, our emotions and feelings are feedback tools that we can learn and grow from. This app helps us do just that.
The Honest Drawbacks
Overall, as you can hopefully begin to see, I’ve found using How We Feel extremely beneficial for my emotional wellbeing. I put this down to the awareness and mindfulness it helps us cultivate.
However, don’t get it wrong. We still have to do the work. The app isn’t some sort of magic tool that does everything for us.
There are things I would improve and don’t really like:
- The AI-guided journal. Some of the questions it asks aren’t always necessary or appropriate, and it can go off track a little. It’s a work in progress.
- You still have to remember to use it, despite the reminder notifications you can turn on.
- The emotion descriptions don’t always fit. As I mentioned, sometimes the right emotion isn’t there, or its description doesn’t match how I experience it.
I use the tool alongside journaling. Although I’ll be honest, I’ve started writing a little less, really due to where I’m at in my life at the moment. Yet I always have How We Feel right by my side, as an app on my phone I can check in with at any time.
Recently, they’ve also changed the design, the UX/UI of the app, which makes navigating it a little better. Although when you’re used to navigating something a certain way, it can take a little more time to find where all the settings are. That’s just because I’m used to the old version.
Why Feeling Our Feelings Matters
Despite that, the visuals and the design are better, and I’m curious to see what other changes, design-wise or feature-wise, they add in the future.
The fundamentals stay the same, though: a way to help us check in with how we truly feel, going below the neck and truly feeling our feelings.
When we do so, rather than suppressing them, we’re more often able to get on with our day and our lives in a more regulated, calm, composed way.
It’s when we hold on to or suppress emotions that they build up over time, resulting in resentment or manifesting in our physical body. That’s something I shared in the Ancient Wisdom Modern Science article, and found fascinating: the connection between our emotions and our physical body, and how physical pain, unease and discomfort could be the manifestation of undealt-with, suppressed emotions. (I’ve written more about this connection in Out of Your Head, Into Your Body.)
Is the How We Feel App Worth It?
In summary, if you’re wanting to explore your emotional landscape, maybe because you’ve been feeling a lot of intense emotions recently and want to explore them further, or simply want to become more aware of how you feel and your emotional trends out of pure curiosity (again, not to underestimate that), then the How We Feel app is one tool I would highly advocate adding to your personal growth and emotional wellbeing toolbox.
Curiosity isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. It’s actually a huge part of our personal growth and unfolding.
It’s free, so, as they say, there’s nothing to lose and perhaps a lot to gain. All I can say is that over the last year, it has definitely changed how I relate to and navigate my emotional landscape.
If you’re curious about more of the insights and lessons I learned from a whole month of tracking my emotional state, over 100 check-ins, then head to that article. Otherwise, if you’re curious about using the app for yourself, download it from your app store and start using it.
I can share my experience, insights and lessons with you all day, every day. But using it and experiencing it for yourself is where you’ll find the biggest insights, lessons and, most importantly, personal breakthroughs. It’s where you’ll learn more about your own emotional landscape and hopefully propel your own personal growth.
This has been an insight into my experience with the How We Feel app, and some of what I’ve taken from it over the last year.
Here’s to the next 12 months: continuing to grow emotionally and propel my personal growth, with How We Feel as one of the tools in my toolbox.
Key Takeaways for How We Feel App Review
- What the app is: How We Feel is a free, science-backed mood-tracking journal co-founded by Ben Silbermann and Dr Marc Brackett of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, available on iOS and Android.
- Consistency through challenge: A 30-day challenge of checking in at least twice a day took my check-ins from 23 in April to 111 in May, and the habit has stuck since.
- Never miss twice: Never go two days in a row without completing a habit. Missing one day is fine; the rule keeps the habit alive.
- Four quadrants: The app sorts emotions into low unpleasant (sadness), low pleasant (calm), high pleasant (excitement) and high unpleasant (anxiety or anger).
- Easily confused emotions: Low unpleasant emotions can feel calm, like low pleasant ones, and nervous excitement can feel like anxiety. Telling them apart takes deliberate attention.
- Negativity bias: Most of us feel unpleasant emotions more intensely than pleasant ones for survival reasons. Positivity takes conscious effort, but it can be trained.
- Emotions shift over hours: A high unpleasant state like stress or overwhelm can turn into sadness or feeling low three or four hours later.
- Respond, not react: Awareness is what lets you respond rather than react. Pause and check in during the moment, or reflect afterwards and carry the lesson forward.
FAQs for How We Feel App Review
Is the How We Feel app free?
Yes, the How We Feel app is free to download and use. It is available on the iOS App Store and on Android. Because there is no cost, there is nothing to lose by trying it, and you can explore features like weekly summaries, tags and self-regulation tools without paying.
Who created the How We Feel app?
How We Feel was co-founded by Ben Silbermann and Dr Marc Brackett of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. It is a science-backed emotional wellbeing and mood-tracking journal. Dr Brackett has discussed emotional intelligence on podcasts including Modern Wisdom and Huberman Lab, which is how many people first hear about the app.
What are the four quadrants in the How We Feel app?
The app sorts emotions into four quadrants: low unpleasant, low pleasant, high pleasant and high unpleasant. Sadness is low unpleasant, calm is low pleasant, excitement is high pleasant, and anxiety or anger are high unpleasant. Emotions on the same side can be easy to confuse, so it takes attention to tell them apart.
How often should you check in on the How We Feel app?
Checking in at least twice a day, morning and evening, is a solid rhythm. A 30-day challenge at that pace took my check-ins from 23 a month to 111. If you miss one, follow a simple rule: never go two days in a row without checking in. Daily reminders in the app help.
What is the difference between nervous excitement and anxiety?
Nervous excitement is a sign of growth, while anxiety is something most of us need to transcend. Both are high-energy states and can feel very similar in the body, especially when doing something new or facing uncertainty. Checking in and naming what you feel helps you notice which one you are actually experiencing.
Does the How We Feel app have any downsides?
Yes, a few. The AI guided journal sometimes asks questions that feel unnecessary or go off track. You still have to remember to use it, even with reminders. Some emotion descriptions may not match how you personally experience them. And it is not a magic fix: you still have to do the work.
