Can This App Make Me Happier?
“Happiness. It’s winnable.” This is the dubious assertion that greets me on the Happify website, before I click “Start my journey” and sign up for the service.
I begin my journey in January. It seems like as good a time as any to try to become happier. The holidays are over. The long, bleak, shut-in months of winter stretch ahead of me. Few of the variables in my life are likely to change. There is unlikely to be a new job or relationship, or a move that would skew my happiness readings one way or another. Of course you can’t measure your happiness in a vacuum—and you probably wouldn’t be very happy in a vacuum anyway—but if there really is an app that can make you happier, I wanted to try it when my life was relatively stable. I decided to do it for a month.
Happify is a self-improvement program offered in both website and app form. It claims “your emotional well-being can be measured,” measures it for you, and provides little tasks and games to help you increase it. The company was founded by Ofer Leidner and Tomer Ben-Kiki, who previously ran an online gaming company called iPlay. About four years ago, Leidner and Ben-Kiki developed an interest in positive psychology and mindfulness, and wondered if they could pair it with their online gaming expertise. According to Leidner, they thought, “the models for delivering anything around mental health were clearly, in our mind at least, ripe for some disruption.”
Happify is technically free, but to access more advanced options, and detailed statistics, you have to pay—$11.99 a month (or less if you sign up for six months or a year all in one go).
On day one of my experiment, I felt fine. I know because in my notes I wrote, “I feel … fine.” I usually feel fine. There may be people in this world who experience a range of deep and intense emotions on an average day, but I am not one of those people. In the end our hearts are black boxes, known only to ourselves. My heart is usually fine.
After answering some questions about my age, work, relationship, and child-bearing status, as well as things like “Do you have a hard time bouncing back after adversity?” and “Do you ever pause and say ‘Gee my life is pretty darn boring?’” Happify recommends some “tracks” to me. (Surveys like this always make me overthink everything—it’s like taking a pop quiz where you know the material, but there’s still the nagging doubt of “Is this right, though?”) I choose a track called “Nurture Your Body and Soul,” despite the title, because it’s free.
My home screen now had a list of activities available for me, plus a preview of upcoming ones, and then a box called “My Skills,” which contains five Candyland-colored symbols: A purple ice-cream cone labeled “Savor,” an orange handshake (Thank), a blue mountain (Aspire), a green present (Give), and a red heart with a hand on it (Empathize). Each has a corresponding status bar that would fill up like a thermometer the more activities I did. I hadn’t done any yet, so all of mine were empty.
The program includes 60 tracks users can choose from. Each track is themed, divided into parts—there are usually four parts to a track— and then further divided into activities, which include everything from guided meditations to reflective writing assignments to games. You don’t have to complete them all to move on to the next part if you don’t want to.
There are 58 “core activities,” according to Happify’s chief scientist, Acacia Parks, a professor of psychology at Hiram College. Parks designed the activities herself, “based on my reading of the literature,” she says, and they’re customizable. In one track, you may be told to write about something you’re looking forward to generally. In a track that focuses on building relationships, you may be asked to write about something you’re looking forward to doing with a friend. If you include all the variations on the core 58, there are about 1,200 different
