We designed Feel Now to help teens better understand their emotions. We believe that the first step to improving your mental health is understanding what emotions you are experiencing at a given moment.

Most of us probably answer the casual question “How are you feeling?” on a daily basis. We often find ourselves thoughtlessly answering with “good,” “great,” “okay,” or “fine.” However, we all know that our emotions go deeper. But when we’re so used to using a common set of words to describe our emotions, it can be hard to pinpoint the right words for how we are actually feeling. That’s why Feel Now gives users six broader emotional categories containing ten specific emotions for users to select from. Obviously, all emotions aren’t created equal, so we’ve incorporated a feature for users to evaluate how intensely they are feeling a particular emotion. While identifying our emotions is not a silver bullet solution to poor mood, it can provide greater insight into how to process and cope with them.

As teenagers ourselves, we understand that committing to tracking our emotions everyday is difficult without external incentives. That’s why we’ve set randomized notifications alerting users to complete their Feel Now, creating a fun competition between friends as to who completes theirs first. We’ve also created streaks between friends for days that both friends complete their Feel Now before the next day’s notification is released. We hope that these popular features used in social media apps can be used to help teens care for themselves too!