How We Feel: An App for Emotional Awareness

In today’s fast‑paced world, emotions can feel complicated and overwhelming. The How We Feel app offers a science‑based way to notice, understand, and respond to those inner experiences. Designed as a free emotional wellbeing tool, it helps people track how they’re feeling over time and build practical emotional awareness — not by diagnosing or treating clinical disorders, but by helping users learn about their own emotional patterns and what affects them.

The app was built through a collaboration of experts across research, design, and technology. Dr Marc Brackett, a psychologist and director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, provided the research foundation. His work on emotional intelligence — especially tools like the Mood Meter and RULER — helped shape the app’s approach. Ben Silbermann, co‑founder of Pinterest, guided the design and user experience to make the app intuitive and engaging. A broader team of designers, engineers, and therapists turned that research into a practical tool anyone can use without background in psychology.

How We Feel invites users to check in with themselves daily by selecting words that describe their feelings and optionally noting what was happening in their day. Over weeks and months, patterns often emerge — connections between sleep, activities, social interactions, and mood. The app also offers regulation strategies: reflective prompts, mindfulness suggestions, and brief exercises that help users respond to feelings more intentionally. It is not a replacement for therapy, but many people find it a helpful complement to their wellbeing practices.

Although How We Feel doesn’t yet have formal clinical trials proving specific health outcomes (for example, reduced anxiety or depression), several indicators suggest positive impact. Analysis of millions of check‑ins during the COVID‑19 pandemic found that users generally reported more pleasant emotions over time, hinting at increased resilience and emotional adaptation. The app has very high user ratings, with people commonly reporting that it helped them name emotions more clearly, notice triggers and patterns, and respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively. It has also been recognised for its cultural impact in making emotional intelligence tools widely available.

To understand why emotional awareness tools like How We Feel can be helpful, it’s useful to look at what neuroscience tells us about how early experiences shape the brain.

Childhood trauma — including neglect, abuse, or chronic stress — can influence the way the developing brain functions and connects across regions involved in attention, emotion, and self‑regulation. Recent research shows that trauma is associated with measurable differences in emotion regulation, attention, and executive function. For example, a systematic review and meta‑analysis found that childhood trauma is linked to significant impairments in attention and working memory, as well as emotion regulation and executive control — cognitive processes crucial for managing emotions and behaviour.

Functional imaging studies further show that children exposed to trauma may have difficulty with automatic regulation of emotional processing. In one neuroimaging task, trauma‑exposed youth showed less engagement of prefrontal control regions and greater reactivity in the amygdala — a brain area involved in processing emotional threats — compared with peers without trauma histories. 

Larger brain network studies also highlight differences in how major systems such as the default mode network (involved in self‑reflection and internal thought) and the central executive network (involved in problem‑solving and cognitive control) function in children with trauma histories. These differences can influence how the brain integrates emotion, attention, and self‑awareness during development.

Structural imaging research supports this too: childhood adversity is associated with reduced volume in brain regions — like the frontal cortex — that play a key role in regulating emotions and complex thought.

Taken together, this research does not mean every person with childhood adversity will have lasting dysfunction, but it shows why emotions and attention can be harder to regulate after early stress and why tools that support tracking, reflection, and regulation may be useful for many people.

Understanding these brain mechanisms helps make sense of the themes many users report in apps like How We Feel: that noticing and naming emotions matters, that patterns can reveal hidden triggers, and that purposeful regulation strategies can influence how we respond to emotions over time.

Emotional awareness isn’t just “being in touch with feelings” — it’s about understanding the mechanisms behind attention, regulation, and reactivity. Tools like How We Feel translate emotional science into everyday practice, helping people build skills that are grounded in research and tailored to their own experiences.

How We Feel is available for free at Google Play and iTunes.