Can you cultivate being grateful? And are you happier if you do?
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Susanna
Smith
Last week, I wrote about the Tech urSelf team’s experiment in self-tracking, using urWell to track everything from mediation to sleep to creative time. It wasn’t enough to just experiment on ourselves, though, so we launched the Tech urSelf Gratitude Challenge.
Why Gratitude?
Happiness research tells us that feelings of gratitude are associated with less frequent negative emotions and more frequent positive emotions such as feeling energized, alert, and enthusiastic (McCullough, Emmons, & Tsang, 2002).
The Tech urSelf Gratitude Challenge is an experiment to see what happens when you focus on just one area of your life (in this case, gratitude) and how incorporating daily acts of gratitude in your life affects the way you feel.
Last week, we launched this challenge with two user tester groups. Each group is using urWell to track their gratitude and wellness daily over a two-week period. Participants are also recording three things they are grateful for every day. Over the next few weeks, we will conduct focus groups to learn more about how intentionally focusing on gratitude and wellness every day affected participants’ overall well-being and feelings of hope and appreciation.
Tune in next week for the outcomes of our gratitude challenge. If you’re interested in participating in a Tech urSelf challenge or starting your own, please email us at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or connect with us on Twitter @Techurself.
We sure are grateful for our awesome users and supporters!
Our First Wellness Lab Experiment: Ourselves
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Susanna
Smith
Since we launched urWell for iPhone last month, we have been busy behind the scenes at Tech urSelf experimenting with our own self-tracking. For more than a month, Arlene, Belinda, and I have tracked between 6 to 12 things with urWell. The clearest conclusion we have from this data so far is that self-tracking data is quite personal.
When we look across the graphs at how the data points describe the patterns in our lives, each of us is quite different. What variables seem to correlate (positively or negatively) with our wellness vary widely from one person to the next.
I can see patterns in my life, though, looking back over a month of data on everything from my sleep to my love life to my mediation practice. For example, my productivity at work is very closely correlated on any given day with my sleep. Belinda saw a similar correlation between her sleep and overall wellness. Arlene found that her sleep wasn't as closely linked with her wellness as much as her connection to nature.
This experiment of manually correlating our team’s tracking data will certainly help to inform how we communicate an individual's wellness trends and patterns in future versions of urWell.
Daily tracking has also forced me to take hard look at certain patterns in my life. For example, although I would like to say that I am committed to a daily mediation practice, when I look at my data over the last month, I really only mediate a few times a week at most. In that way, self-tracking can be an accountability mechanism and a reality check of where you really are and where you could go from there.
We also know that changing anything in your life requires the support of others, so we are also experimenting with how urWell can be more social. We want people to have rich conversations with their close friends and loved ones about their lifestyle discoveries and offer support or encouragement to each other when it’s most needed. We also want to connect users with a larger cmmunity of people with similar goals. In my case, it might mean connecting with people who also have the intention of cultivating a daily mediation practice in their lives.
We look forward to sharing more insights with you in our upcoming blogs and how our experiments change the way we think about and iterate on urWell 1.0! In the meantime, we invite you to share your wellness insights and ideas with us on Facebook and Twitter!
Emotion & Habits: Where’s the Data on How We Feel?
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Susanna
Smith
Recently, GigaOm published “Coffee & Empathy: Why Data Without a Soul is Meaningless,” in which author Om Malik argues that consumer habit tracking tools will find their most meaningful, and presumably successful, application when they can interpret the emotional context behind people’s habits.
Malik illustrates this idea by pointing out that Foursquare can track the number of times he has visited his favorite coffee shop, but the real value in this data is in knowing why he chooses this coffee shop over others. It’s his “happy place, [his] one cup (or dozen) of zen.” He argues that when tracking apps can begin to see the emotional patterns behind our habits, then the information can be used to create more “emotive and empathetic” experiences.
Although the article doesn’t discuss self-tracking or the Quantified Self Movement, much of what Malik writes about is the need to understand the emotional narrative behind our data, which is the impetus for the creation of Tech urSelf’s first product, urWell.
When it comes to self-tracking, there is no shortage of apps and devices to help you collect quantifiable data about yourself. But the real question is: how do the habits you are tracking actually make you feel?
We created urWell as a tool to help people delve into their own emotional narratives and understand how their choices about work, play, relationships, personal growth, and health really make them feel.
On the face of it, it might seem like tool we shouldn’t need. Logically, many of us know we would be happier and healthier if we spent less time in the office and more time outside, if we ate better and exercised more, and if we made time every day to appreciate what we already have in our lives.
Yet, I know in my own life it can be a challenge to make smart choices every day.
Recently, I had an interesting conversation with a group of urWell users about making positive life changes. We wanted to know what they thought about urWell, but we didn’t ask for their thoughts on the product right away. Instead, Belinda Liu, Tech urSelf’s CEO and Founder, asked the group to talk about a time they tried to make a big change in their life, why they made the change, and how they did it.
The stories had several common threads.
Almost everyone talked about feeling unhappy, unfulfilled, or unhealthy as the impetus for lifestyle change. When asked how they made life changes and what made the changes stick, nearly everyone talked about the importance of social support and some form of self-tracking as a way to remember what they had done and to hold themselves accountable.
People valued self-tracking as a way to see patterns in their lives, redirect bad habits before they became damaging, and keep up with good habits even when pressed for time or energy. But what really struck me listening to this group of thoughtful and successful professionals was how much they had all struggled with being able to see the emotional narrative behind their own life choices.
They knew they might be working too much, exercising too little, not spending much time on hobbies that rejuvenated them. But only when they became deeply unhappy, set goals for making changes, and measured themselves against these goals could they see how far off track their lives had gone and how this made them feel.
At Tech urSelf, we see a lot opportunity and promise in Om Malik’s idea that the next wave of data intelligence and interpretation will be driven by emotion and empathy. What better way to apply this new way to collect, interpret, visualize, and act on data than with self-tracking in our own lives.
Susanna Smith is a co-founder, communications strategist, and contributing blogger with Tech urSelf, Inc. She works on social media strategy, corporate communication, and external relations and writes on mobile health and technology, global health and development. Follow her on twitter @SusannaJSmith.
Photo credit: Flickr User Beth Scupham
urWell Launch Party
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Maurice
Lomboy
Photo Credit: Paulo Dumlao
Last week was a busy week for the Tech urSelf team. On Monday, we launched urWell, our first lifestyle app designed to track your personal wellness on iTunes. On Thursday, we celebrated with an app release party at Asiento SF in San Francisco. Belinda, Founder and CEO of Tech urSelf, gave a warm and cheerful toast, and Robby, Co-Founder and Advisor, entertained the audience with his quirky wellness rhymes and rapped like a pro.
We’re really excited to have urWell out on the market, and we hope you’ll download it and try it out. You can also hear more about the vision behind urWell from co-founders Belinda, Arlene, and Susanna in this video.
urWell for iPhone Out Now
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Belinda
Liu
San Francisco, CA—Today, Tech urSelf, Inc. released urWell, a simple lifestyle tracking app that helps users connect their happiness and well-being to their everyday choices about health, work, play, relationships, and personal growth.
“We are really thrilled to unveil urWell for the iPhone,” said Belinda Liu, CEO and Founder of Tech urSelf, Inc. “Unlike other self-tracking apps out there, urWell allows people to reflect on a broad range of areas in their lives to see what is connected to their overall wellness. We help people pinpoint what makes them happy and well.”
With urWell, users can choose from more than 50 different tracking options, such as sleep, diet, love life, productivity, or spirituality; rate how they doing using simple sliding scales; enter personalized notes; and then see their data visualized over time. In the process, urWell users gain valuable insights about their lifestyle choices to help them prioritize the things that matter most for their personal wellness.
“It’s been really fascinating to hear the experiences of our urWell user testers. One user discovered that when she spent more time in nature, she was more engaged and productive at work,” said Robby Ratan, Tech urSelf Founder and Michigan State Assistant Professor. “Another user told us that she realized the act of tracking made her more committed to her meditation practice, which in turn upped her wellness.”
urWell is the first iPhone app developed by Tech urSelf Inc., a San Francisco-based wellness and technology start-up that grew out of Belinda and Robby’s shared vision of simplifying self-tracking for wellness seekers. Tech urSelf’s products are grounded in the core belief that self-reflection is essential for people to discover what makes them happy and well.
Contact:
Susanna Smith, Communications Strategist, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Tech urSelf Inc. is a wellness and technology company that develops simple self-tracking tools to help people discover what makes them happy and well. Follow Tech urSelf on Twitter @TechurSelf. Visit www.techurself.com to learn more about the company and download urWell on iTunes.
What Our User Testers Are Saying
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Belinda
Liu
We are putting the finishing touches on our new lifestyle tracker, urWell 1.0, and are pretty darn excited about getting the final product into the hands of iPhone users near and far. After a month of user testing, we wanted to share some of the insights our urWell users have had after using the app. Also included are our team’s personal discoveries. We look forward to hearing your tracking stories in the future!
“Despite extreme highs and lows in my physical health, my overall wellness is most closely tied to my financial security.”
-Kim, Artist & Freelance Graphic Designer“I realized that the simple act of tracking helps motivate me to meditate regularly.”
-Laura, Mom of three“Before using urWell, I thought I was experiencing a pattern of poor sleep, but after tracking it for a while, I saw that it was only a couple of nights in a row! I realized that the real problem was my energy level and am now tracking other things to find the real cause."
-Emily, Consultant“My connection to nature can have a bigger impact on my wellness and productivity than even a good night's rest.”
-Arlene, Artist & Director of Products at Tech urSelf“I find that I still need to prioritize my alone time especially when all the things I'm juggling need attention."
-Robby, Dad & Co-Founder of Tech urSelf“Spending time with my close friends and loved ones really matters for my wellness.”
-Belinda, CEO & Co-Founder of Tech urSelf
Developing Your Inner Awareness with Self-Tracking
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Tech urSelf
Recently, I read “The Quantified Spouse Movement Has Couples Tracking Weight, Sleep and Even Orgasms to Find Bliss” in the Huffington Post, which resonated with me, although I found the thought of tracking and sharing such intimate details a little horrifying. Luckily, the week before I had been at the Quantified Self Meetup in San Francisco and knew that not all self-trackers were so intense or techy about their tracking. Many of them used simple spreadsheets and lists, which was more in line with my own self-tracking story.
Four years ago, I started my first self-tracking endeavor with a spreadsheet to try to get to the bottom of my digestive problems. I created the tracking system with the help of my boyfriend, who is an avid runner and religiously logs his exercise regimen. He recommended that I track my diet and digestive health to understand what was going on in my gut. Being an overachiever, I tracked not only my diet but also a bunch of other variables that I thought might correlate with my wellness—exercise, stress, work satisfaction, sleep quality, and even poop. To keep me motivated, my boyfriend joined me in the one-month self-tracking experiment.
Can Digital Health Win the Hearts of Self-Tracking Americans?
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Susanna
Smith
Photo Credit: Flickr User juhansonin
This blog was also crossposted on HIT Consultant
Earlier this week, the Pew Internet Research project released its newest report, Tracking for Health.1 I was excited to see what the survey found, given Tech urSelf’s focus on developing tools to help people track, reflect on, and correlate their life habits with their well-being and happiness.
One of the major findings, which had been previously reported,2 is that nearly seven in ten adults track at least one health indicator. Only one in five trackers, though, use some form of technology to facilitate their tracking. So far, the adoption of health apps has been quite slow and the preference for low-tech self-tracking quite persistent.3
Connecting with the Heart: Stress Less and Live Well with Modern Technology
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Maurice
Lomboy
Photo Credit: Flickr User Shawnzrossi
“We are all dealing with our own battlefields, that’s our own overwhelm. Whatever it is, whether for you: it’s changing diapers and answering phones at the same time. We’re all dealing with confronting the chaos of a modern world and Heartmath skills lay that foundation.” – Sheva Carr, founder of HeartMath’s HeartMastery
I recently listened to the webinar, “Overcome Overwhelm - Tap Into Your Own Internal Pharmacy” with Sheva Carr, Deborah Rozman Ph.D and Sara Gottfried from HeartMath. HeartMath is a company that harnesses the power of heart/brain communication to help people manage their stress, regulate their negative emotions, and promote happy, healthy living. I got hooked on HeartMath after attending their teleseminar last week on The Heart of Leadership and leading from a place of authentic intentionality.
Here are a few strategies I learned for living a less stressful, more “heart-based” life.
What Is Happiness? Five Characteristics of Happy People
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Ryan
Howell
Photo Credit: Flickr user Marc Falardeau
My research team and I just completed a study to examine the differences in how happy people live their lives compared to people who are unhappy. Because we were interested in several characteristics of happy people, we examined the predictors of happiness from 30 different surveys. These surveys measured people’s spending habits, consumer choices, values, and personality traits. Results indicated that happy people make five little decisions every day that improve their well-being.
What are five importance differences between happy and unhappy people based on our recent consumer behavior studies?
Mobile Technology Popularizes Self-Tracking & Drives Patient Empowerment
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Susanna
Smith
Photo Credit: Category 5ive, Pinterest.com
Last week, the Wall Street Journal published “Know Thyself—Via Gadgets and Apps,” offering clear examples of how mobile technology is bringing self-tracking into the mainstream consumer market with products like the Nike + Fuelband and Jawbone Up.
Previously, MobiHealth News reported that seven out of ten American adults track their health in some way, but only about one fifth use tech tools to do so.1 With the wearables and device market exploding, I expect self-tracking will become the new rage. We could write it off as a New Age form of self-absorption or praise it as a form of honest examination, as journalist Holly Finn does, but I think it’s more than that. These new self-tracking tools invite, encourage, and support us to engage with and take responsibility for the health decisions we make every day about our diet, exercise, sleep, and stress.
Life Lessons from Yoga
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Maurice
Lomboy
Photo Credit: Dudes Doing Yoga
"How could I recognize myself as uniquely whole when I was always contextualized by my achievement? How could I see myself as complete, when there always was more work to be done? These are the questions that continually gnaw at my esteem and this is precisely where yoga heals. Yoga does not say go out and change you. Yoga says: Be you." - The Root of Acceptance: YOU by Jamie Silverstein, via DoYouYoga
My first experience with yoga was the summer following my 16th birthday. I bought a Gaiam yoga DVD series, which arrived with a red yoga mat. I used it a couple of times, then stashed the DVDs away, and began using my mat for other purposes.
Years later, I revisited yoga at the gym and with a more mature mindset.
In recommitting to a regular yoga practice to improve my wellness, I made two resolutions:
1) Enhance and maintain my own well-being amidst what felt like a dizzying roller-coaster of anxiety and depression. "None of that 'I give up' attitude!" I told myself.
2) Apply what I've learned about myself through yoga in all areas of my life.
2012 has taught me several valuable lessons.
Tech urSelf’s 2012 Reflections & 2013 Intentions
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Tech urSelf
Welcome, 2013! At Tech urSelf, we are really excited about what’s to come in the New Year. The past year has been one of continuous reflection, learning, and adjustments in our thinking on how we:
1) Define and pursue happiness, health, and wellness, and
2) Build a mobile app that can help people better understand themselves and improve their lives
In 2012, we launched our company blog with the goal of exploring the world of happiness, health, and wellness and discovered many new innovations to help us and our readers. We also shared insights from our own wellness experiments along the way.
‘Epic Innovation’ Predicted in Health and Wellness
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Susanna
Smith
Photo Credit: Flickr user Lululemon Athletica
MobiHealth News ran an article quoting StartUp Health co-founder Unity Stoakes as saying:
“ ‘There’s never been a more interesting time to invest in health and wellness…[H]ealthcare is being completely reimagined. We are at the beginning of what we believe will be an epic decade of innovation and progress.’ ”
After the excitement of last week’s Mobile Health Summit, I would have to agree. Much of the conference focused on how mobile technology can operate in the current clinical model, which is heavily focused on treatment and disease management and stuck in a fee-for-service model. But I also heard snatches of more forward-thinking and exciting dialogue around preventive care, wellness, and patient empowerment.
What Can Mobile Health & Wellness Learn From Farmville?
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Susanna
Smith
Photo Credit: Flickr user Tarikgore1
Yesterday, at the opening day of the 2012 Mobile Health Summit, my brain was fixated on how we can build better mobile health and wellness tech tools by targeting the emotional motivators of our health choices.
As evidenced by the Summit Pavillion displays, the market is flooded with a veritable mobile toybox of tools to help you monitor, track, record, and report on all sorts of health indicators. Many of these tools are well-designed with smart, easy-to-use interfaces, and most of them are aimed at helping people, patients and providers, respond to health problems.
The Untapped Potential of Mobile Tech in Personal Health
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Susanna
Smith
Photo Credit: Flickr user Lululemon Athletica
Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center released the Mobile Health 2012 report and the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA) published its review of sub-Saharan Africa’s mobile markets. Mobile phone ownership is growing, and has grown, at a staggering pace worldwide. In five key African markets, the sale of mobile devices grew by 80% in just the last three years. In the United States, the number of phones already exceeds the number of people; and 85% of adults have a phone; over 50% have a smartphone.
So what has such widespread phone ownership meant for the mobile health sphere?
The Pew Research report—which is based on a survey of more than 3,000 people—suggests that most people in the United States are not yet using their phones as tools for managing their health and well-being. But the number of people who report using their phones to access health or medical information has grown to 31%, up from 17% two years ago. Interestingly, some historically marginalized groups—African Americans, Latinos, women, and young people—are among the most likely consumers of mobile health information or users of health apps.
Test Your Priorities & Take Stock of Your Time
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Flickr user svintus2010
When you think about your life, what are the most important things to you? Now think about your typical day. How much time do you actually spend on your priorities?
I started pondering this question after a recent conversation with a close friend. She didn’t feel like she was prioritizing the important things in her life, so she wrote down her top 4 priorities and then did an inventory of her daily use of time. When she looked at the numbers, it was shocking.
By the time she finished adding up the bare essentials (working, sleeping, eating, and commuting), she really only had roughly 3-4 hours to spare each day. On the days when she had a rough commute, a doctor’s appointment or a meeting at her son’s school, she had even less time to spare. That’s not a lot of time to play with, much less use towards your life priorities.
Entrepreneurship Goes Digital, Social, and Global
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Susanna
Smith
Photo Credit: Flickr user tuppus
This blog was also crossposted on the HIT Consultant website
“In Africa, necessity is the mother of invention and social media sites are not just for sharing photographs and gossip,” came the quip in last week’s Guardian about Africa’s digital revolution. The article goes on to discuss how the widespread availability of mobile and digital technology is changing people’s lives in real and practical ways in even the most remote places.
For example, in the slums outside of Nairobi, Kenya, cellphones have become so cheap that more than 70 percent of people living in these struggling neighborhoods have a mobile. Safe and affordable drinking water, however, is a precious commodity. Through Stanford University's Designing Liberation Technologies course, Stanford University students formed a successful partnership with Umande Trust, a Kenyan organization, and were able to realize a social entrepreneurial solution in the community, which employs mobile phones to help people get clean water. The new, texting system called M-Maji, which is Swahili for ‘mobile water,’ allows users to find out the most up-to-date information on the location, price, and quality of water. The texting system saves users time and money and allows smaller water vendors to compete in a market that was previously monopolized by a few big vendors.
But this push towards digital, entrepreneurial solutions to social problems extends well beyond Africa.
In Bangladesh, women social entrepreneurs are packing their internet-equipped laptops onto bikes and riding out to rural villages. Villagers pay an hourly rate—$2.40/hr—to chat over Skype with a husband working in Saudi Arabia, to catch up with their Facebook friends, or to submit their college applications online. It is a business opportunity for these young women, but they are offering more than just a computer to rent by the hour. These young women, who are called the “Info Ladies,’ also provide villagers with other services for a minimal or no cost such as talking to teenage girls about contraception and HIV prevention and discussing best farming practices with local farmers. These young women not only bring computers and the Internet to these remote places, they also provide access to new ideas and information.
The business community is leveraging this social entrepreneurial push to provide real solutions to some of the most pressing and immediate global problems. Last month, Forbes magazine launched its 2012 search for 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30, which aims to identify some of the most talented and young social entrepreneurs, who are in Forbes writer, Erin Carlyle’s words, “creative, do-gooding business people, and they’re getting a lot done.”
Digital and mobile platforms are increasingly the platforms of choice of the business-minded do-gooders. Recently, Paul Miller of Bethnal Green Ventures wrote a piece for GigaOm, “Saving the world with tech? It’s getting easier all the time,” in which he discusses the growing interest of venture capitalists in investing in socially-minded, tech startups. Whereas a year ago, many of the digital tech accelerator programs were generalized in focus, now they are honing in on using technology to solve a specific challenge. Miller mentions Greenstart, for example, which aims to help transform the energy sector with ‘digital cleantech’ solutions, and Imagine K-12, which seeks a technology-based transformation of the American education system. Of course, most relevant to Tech urSelf’s work, are those investors and accelerators such as Rock Health and Healthbox focused on technology-based solutions to optimize people’s health and wellness as well as overhaul the healthcare system.
It’s an exciting time to be working in this field, as a ‘real ecosystem’ develops to support the growth of digital tech solutions. Even as many communities continue to struggle, it is inspiring to read about so many people who see these struggles as opportunities for innovation, for solutions, and for investment. Technology and entrepreneurship are helping to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.
Susanna Smith is a communications strategist and contributing blogger at Tech urSelf, Inc. She advises on social media strategy, corporate communication, and external relations and writes on mobile health and technology, global health and development. Follow her on twitter @SusannaJSmith.
Perks or No Perks: Redefining Work-Life Balance
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Flickr user License praetoriansentry
Last week, I read a New York Times article about Silicon Valley companies offering their employees “life-improving” perks like free house cleaning, childcare, take-home dinners, and care for aging parents. I was envious. Most of my friends in the Bay Area are teachers, nurses, social workers, or non-profit employees. And we all work long hours. Where’s our helping hand to handle all of our life’s stresses and inconveniences?
As much as I’d like to have these perks, I think it’s sending the wrong message. It reinforces the bad habit of working too much and leaving little time for other things in life. It also suggests that working long hours is impossible to sustain without a little help at home. So those of us who don’t have access to these generous employee benefits just have to get good at juggling everything or learn to live with the stress.
Meeting of the Minds: Mobile Health Meets Mental Wellness
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Susanna
Smith
Photo Credit: Flickr user IntelFreePress
Recently, the BBC and All Africa published articles on Grand Challenges Canada’s new investments in mental health care in developing countries. These investments, more than $19 million worth, will support 15 innovative projects aimed at improving mental health diagnosis and care, including several projects that will employ mobile health or telemedicine outreach.
In Afghanistan, for example, where nearly half of all Afghanis older than 15 suffer from depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder, Grand Challenges Canada is funding work that uses text messages, web-based tools, and teleconferencing to enable people in rural areas to get mental health care. In Sri Lanka, Grand Challenges Canada is supporting a project that will expand access to online mental health care. In Nigeria, the funding will go to a project that uses cellphones to offer counseling and support to women struggling with postpartum depression.
In a recent blog, Tech urSelf CEO, Belinda Liu, wrote, “Yes, improving your physical health is important, but what about the quality of your life?” This got me thinking about the intersections of mHealth and mental health and about how our physical and mental health are inextricably linked and both are tied to our overall quality of life.
Insights From Health 2.0: Using Technology to Promote Healthy and Happy Living
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Belinda Liu
Last week, Arlene (the Director of Products and Design at Tech urSelf) and I attended the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. It was an overwhelming and invigorating two days as we learned about the latest technological innovations in healthcare from practitioners, fitness gurus, public health experts, and techies. Each day was jam-packed with live demos on healthcare technologies – like censor-equipped fitness gadgets and mobile/iPad/web-based applications – all aimed at helping people more intimately understand and effectively manage their health.
There were many takeaways from this conference, too many to include in a short blog post, so we'd like to mention our top two:
How Mobile Health Can Revolutionize the Patient-Doctor Relationship
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Susanna
Smith
Last week, New York Times columnist Dr. Pauline Chen wrote an article “Letting Patients Read the Doctor’s Notes” about the OpenNotes study, which found that patients and doctors reported overall positive experiences when patients were invited to review their doctors’ notes.
Giving patients easy access to their physicians’ notes is one step forward in greater transparency. With chronic disease and lifestyle-related illness consuming an ever-greater share of healthcare resources, however, we should aim higher though if we want to radically change the patient-doctor relationship, and health care in general. We need to move towards encouraging a fully participatory and collaborative interaction. Mobile health apps and interfaces offer some of the tools for fostering these interactions.
Finding Something New in the Familiar
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Belinda Liu
Sometimes, I feel like life is one massive juggling act. You’ve got multiple balls in the air, and the goal is to give each ball the right amount of energy and attention so that it moves gracefully without falling.
In a recent blog post, my friend equated the harmony between the various aspects of our lives to “many instruments playing in an orchestra to produce a unified, beautiful sound.” As she further described, there is no single formula for a beautiful song. Rather, instruments seamlessly exit and enter at different intervals and sequences. While timing, precision, technique and practice are critical, so are intuition, passion, boldness and awareness of what is happening in and around you. Her analogy beautifully captures the art of living. It’s quite simple, but difficult to achieve.
App-session with Smartphones: Using Apps to Enhance Personal Wellness
Photo Credit: Viviana de Soy Mama Blog, Pinterest.com
By Susanna Smith
Working with Tech urSelf, Inc. on its mission to develop technologies to help people live happier and healthier lives, I’ve been thinking about the psychology behind mobile apps and why apps can motivate people to make positive changes in their lives.
At last count, there are over 6 billion cell phone subscriptions worldwide, which means nearly everyone (90% of the population) subscribes to a cell phone service. In 2010, mobile apps were downloaded nearly 11 billion times and that number is predicted to rise over 76 billion app downloads by 2014, according to @MobiThinking's 2012 Global Mobile statistics report.
It is safe to say we’re serious about our phones and our apps, and it’s possible that our love affair with mobiles is veering towards a global obsession. But why are mobile phones, and the tools and apps they offer so important to us? Do they have the potential to help change our lives?
How Do You Eat?
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Belinda Liu
Putting Happiness First by Redefining How and Where You Work
Photo Credit: Grey Cusack, Pinterest.com
By Susanna Smith, Freelance Writer and Contributing Blogger for Tech urSelf
Earlier this week, I read Dr. Marcelle Pick’s article, “Is Your Work Ethic Affecting Your Health?” in the Huffington Post. I thought to myself, “We all know that on our deathbed we aren’t going to think, ‘I wish I had worked more.’ Yet, if we all know this, why is it so hard to change our lives?”
As a doctor herself, Dr. Pick admits that even as she counsels patients on the damaging effects of stress hormones on the body, she herself sometimes works too much. Pick points out that, for many of us, there is a hard-to-shake Puritan work ethic that work is inherently good. But just as important is a modern American culture built to value “bigger, better, more,” and many of us associate with achieving those things with grueling work weeks.
Dr. Pick says, “We need to change the culture and say, ‘Good for you for taking care of yourself.’ ” And on this point, I would agree, but changing a culture starts with changing your own choices and taking responsibility for your own stress, happiness, and fulfillment. Sometimes that means getting creative with your time and livelihood and with how you define a ‘work week.’
Apps That Put You in the Driver’s Seat of Your Wellness
Photo Credit: Flora NW, Pinterest.com
Last week, Lim Yung-Hui wrote a review of the new Lift app in Forbes, calling it “a no-frill, commonsensical approach to personal change.”
I promptly downloaded the app myself. I scrolled through the list of habits, which included some amusing ones like “Tell your wife you love her,” “Unclutter,” and “Talk to a stranger.” I selected a few more run-of-the-mill habits that I was already tracking or just intended to do more of such as flossing, exercising, and reading.
I have to agree with Yung-Hui, it is immensely and strangely satisfying to press the ‘check-in’ button when you complete a task and see a big green checkmark appear on the screen. It’s like the app version of a pat on the back. I can see how it could really help people develop and maintain positive habits. It is a well-executed, solidly designed app, but what excited me most is not just the product but also the thinking behind it.
Lately, there has been a lot of hype in the mHealth world about the potential of apps to change health care. There are apps to:
- Measure your stress level such as Stress Check
- Monitor your diabetes care such as DiabetesManager
- Remind you to take your medication such as Pillboxie
- Come up with a self-diagnosis such as iTriage
- Answer your medical questions such as HealthTap
- Help you make doctor’s appointments such as ZocDoc
And of course there is Happtique, a “curated app pharmacy featuring programs it has vetted to meet certain standards.”
Clearly, the medical app and technology world is booming.
But being healthy is more than just about treating illness, taking the right pills, getting the right diagnosis, or finding the right medical professional. Being healthy and staying well has everything to do with the small choices we make every day about what we put into and do with our bodies, our outlook, how to spend our time and energy, our investments in the things that make us motivated and fulfilled.
We are responsible for our own wellness; and wellness or illness are often the product of the small choices we make every day. This is the philosophy behind Techurself and urWell, our soon to be released iPhone app that helps you connect your lifestyle habits with your wellness. Technology is one tool among many that can put us in the driver’s seat and empower, encourage, and affirm the positive choices that will help us be, and stay, well.
You can reach more of Lim Yung-Hui’s technology blogs here or follow him, @zhiQ, or the Forbes Tech column, @ForbesTech on Twitter.
Susanna Smith is a freelance writer, editor, and activist and a marketing consultant and contributing blogger with Tech urself, Inc. She writes on mobile health and technology, global health, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and ethics. Follow her on twitter @SusannaJSmith.
Finding Yourself Through Your Community
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Flickr user Niallkennedy
This past Sunday, my friend and I attended a meditation retreat for women of color at the East Bay Meditation Center. Before the retreat, I felt a mix of excitement and dread knowing that I would leave feeling more grounded, but also knowing that I would struggle with sitting still and attempting to tame my wild and wandering mind.
I can’t say I did a terribly good job meditating that day. In fact, I dozed off a few times and indulged in way too many random thoughts during our 30-minute meditation sessions. But what I gained was a sense of connection and unity with the thirty other women in the room. I didn’t expect to share some deeply personal and painful details of my life with complete strangers, but it was cathartic to unload with other women of color who had experienced similar joys and struggles.
Read more of this article on the Work to Live Blog
Clearing Your Mind, Managing Your Time, and De-stressing Your Life
By Susanna Smith
I’m in the middle of David’s Allen book Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity. The book has gotten me thinking a lot about our perceptions of time and stress and how these contribute or detract from our wellness.
Early in the book, Allen talks about how we produce stress and anxiety in ourselves when we try to keep our to-do lists our heads. The revolving, incessant chatter about the grocery list, meetings, deadlines, phone calls, birthday cards etc.
So I paused for a minute, put down the book, and picked up a small stack of index card. On eachcard, I wrote down one of the many tasks floating around in my head.
“Unload the dishwasher.” “Get a new accountant.” “Call my sister.” “Send August invoices.” And the list went on.
I kept writing until I couldn’t think of anything else. At the end of it, I looked at the stack of cards and thought, “That’s a lot to do.”
And then I took a deep breath and felt a sense of relief that all those words were now captured on paper and out of my head. Finally, I could try to quiet the chatter and focus on doing the most pressing tasks.
Time as Money
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Work to Live Blog
I recently watched In Time, a moderately cheesy Justin Timberlake flick from 2011. The concept of the movie is brilliant (although the acting and plot development was just mediocre). Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia:
By the year 2169, genetic alteration has allowed humanity to stop aging at 25. ‘Living time’, which can be transferred among individuals on body-contact, is displayed on a clock implanted in people’s forearms. When that clock reaches zero, one dies instantly. Society is divided by social class living in specialized towns called ‘Time Zones’. The poor live in the ghettos of Dayton, where youth predominates, and must work each day to earn a few more hours of life, which they must also use to pay for everyday necessities, as time has replaced money as currency. The rich live in the luxurious New Greenwich, where the middle-aged and elderly predominate, though they look young because they have stopped aging at 25 years old.
Read more of this article on the Work to Live Blog
Creative Renewal: An Intentional Practice
Photo Credit: Emma Sadiwskvi-Frewer & Vanessa Hennessy, Pinterest.com
By Susanna Smith
"The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention."
Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way
Several weeks ago, I hit a wall in my creative writing.
In an effort to get to the other side of that wall, I did some free writes: allowing my hands to type stream of consciousness thoughts. I fixed particular images in my mind, images that tied me to the place and time I was trying to write about. I carried those mental pictures with me to yoga practice and on long runs and solitary hikes. Then I would sit down to a blank screen and try to locate the words that could frame these images and the narrative that tied them together and to bring those words down onto a page in a way that fit, satisfied, held. Sometimes, these efforts produced results, and sometimes they produced nothing at all.
I was frustrated and feeling the need to discipline my writing but not knowing how to wrangle my creative energy and direct it into a consistent writing practice.
CH-CH-CH-CHANGES
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Work to Live Blog
This post is dedicated to anyone who is going through a change in their lives, however big or small. After over a month of traveling, I am finally back home. I wish I could say that it feels good to be back. It's been difficult transitioning back into work mode and resuming my daily routines. I find myself missing the spontaneity and thrill of traveling and struggling to resume the steady, balanced rhythm of my pre-travel life.
To add to this, there's a feeling of transition and change around me, which is quite unsettling. Perhaps it's the emotional aftermath of moving my parents out of our childhood home. Or, my work crazily ramping up with the start of another school year. Or, the sudden news of loved ones experiencing major life-changing events (of the joyous and also traumatic variety). Regardless of the source or the magnitude of the change, it's a reminder that change is an inevitable and constant part of life. And, it can happen with or without our consent.
Read more of this article on the Work to Live Blog
One Step Forward, One Step Back
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Belinda Liu
The traveling continues after Europe! This time, it's a journey with a different purpose. I returned to my old house in North Carolina, the place I spent some of the most formative years of my life. The purpose of the trip was to help my parents prepare for their big move midwestward to St. Louis, where my sister and her family live. My big task was to pack up the remnants of my old bedroom.
The process of rummaging through my old things took me back in time. The letters from friends and old flames, photos, books, journals, and dusty trinkets all reflected the me throughout the many different stages of my life. Through them, I was reminded of the middle school, high school, college, and post-college versions of my self. All familiar yet ever changing.
Read more of this article on the Work to Live Blog
The Rules of the Road
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Belinda Liu
My European road trip continues this month in Tuscany, Italy. I feel a beautiful sense of continuity leaving the green pastures of Ireland for Tuscany’s rolling hills, cypress trees and sunflowers.
Driving through the Tuscan countryside has been full of unanticipated “surprises”. I will share the first three, which also happen to be the most memorable. The first one occurred when my friend and I picked up our rental car in Florence and the woman behind the counter told us that they didn’t have a GPS available even though we had reserved one. Instead, she sheepishly offered us a driving map of Italy. So with that, we took a deep breath and set out on our journey. The second happened on our drive when we encountered numerous signs pointing to different, sometimes opposite directions for the same destination. The third was hitting an average of two to three roundabouts in every small town that we passed through.
After some major twists and turns, what we eventually learned was that no, the road signs were not a practical joke on tourists. Indeed, there were multiple, seemingly contradictory paths to get to the same place. We had to trust that those signs were accurate and rely on our intuition to choose the most direct path.
Read more of this article on the Work to Live Blog
Wonderings in Ireland
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Belinda Liu
Ever since I was five, I have always loved to travel. My first, most memorable trip was the big move from Taiwan to the United States. It was then that I developed a real curiosity for exploring new and different places. As an adult, it’s become my tradition to travel abroad at least once a year.Read more of this article on the Work to Live Blog
Unlocking Your Grit, Achieving Your Potential
Photo Credit: Roderick Eguilos
By Susanna Smith
I recently watched a TED talk by Angela Lee Duckworth, PhD, “True Grit: Can Perseverance be Taught?” in which she proposes that the people who are most successful in any given field succeed because they are the most tenacious, dedicated, perhaps stubborn in their pursuit rather than the most talented. She terms this quality ‘grit,’ and suggests it is one of the single best predictors of a person’s ability to achieve.
She talks about her work measuring the ‘grittiness’ of young West Point cadets, and how her ‘grittiness’ measure turned out to be a better predictor of the successful completion of the ‘beast barracks’ training for first-year cadets than any measure West Point had previously come up with. She’s also applied her work to young people participating in the National Spelling Bee and found that the children who place highest in the National Spelling Bee are not necessarily those who are most talented or those who put in the most hours studying. The kids who placed higher in the finals were those who studied differently, who spent most of their time studying words they don’t already know, pushing themselves out of their comfort zones repeatedly and consistently, even doggedly.
Walking the Wellness Walk (Part 1) Spotlight: Joe Davis
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Belinda Liu
Featured Wellness Wedneday Post Originally Posted on the Work to Live Blog
According to traditional Chinese medicine, summer is a great time to make big improvements in your health and wellness. For me, it helps to observe and learn from people who actually walk the wellness walk.
Happiness as Defined by a United Nations Report
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Justin
Rashid
Photo Credit: Technovelgy.com
On April 2nd 2012, the United Nations held its Conference on Happiness and published the first ever World Happiness Report (download PDF). Nearly two months after the report was published I, for one, do not necessarily feel a whole lot happier for it.
The report highlights the trend that the happiest countries are all in Northern Europe and the least happy are in Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s not surprising that income is a major factor, but wealth alone does not guarantee happiness. For instance, in the United States where wealth has increased and technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, it remains steadily at 11th place in the happiness league. Wealth brings its own problems, such as addiction and associated depression, as captured by the notion of affluenza. The other side to the national happiness coin are factors like social connections and health.
My Weekday Wellness Routine
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Belinda Liu
Featured Wellness Wedneday Post Originally Posted on the Work to Live Blog
It’s 4 pm on a Tuesday afternoon at Gold’s Gym in Oakland. Downstairs is half full of sweaty people working out on their exercise machines. Most of them are occupying themselves with something else to make the time go by faster—listening to music, watching TV, or even reading. Their bodies are being put to work, while their minds seem elsewhere.
Wellness Tips on Introversion: How to Re-energize as an "Innie"
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Maurice
Lomboy
I read a lot. Three books, two magazines, and a whole bunch of “industry-related” blog posts per day. Okay, I’m exaggerating just a little, but I just finished Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking and it gave me some real insight into how I derive psychological energy, which is fundamental to the rest of my life and my overall personal wellbeing. As a person who leans more towards the introverted scale, I recharge through solitude or smaller groups, as opposed to my extroverted counterparts, who get energy from being around a lot of people. I realized making time every day to reenergize is crucial part of intentional wellness.
The Cost of a Vacation
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Belinda
Liu
Featured Wellness Wedneday Post Originally Posted on the Work to Live Blog
A few weeks ago, while preparing for a weeklong trip to the Virgin Islands and daydreaming about the sunbathing and piña coladas on the beach, I found myself wondering, “How am I going to make the most out of this vacation?"
I love a good vacation, but often wonder about how much busy professionals have to pay to earn our relaxation time. Prior to working for myself, I worked at an education nonprofit and used to have to work a double load the week before and after my vacation just to stay afloat. The pre and post-vacation stress was so immense that it would almost completely cancel out all the hard earned relaxation. It's almost like the anxiety of going on vacation has become the norm. How many of you know what I mean?
Apps-olutely: Health and Wellness Apps We Love
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Tori
Lewis
Photo Credit: Flickr user stella-mia
I recently read Prevention’s article “A Perfect Day of Apps,” which was devoted to reviewing several smartphone apps designed to boost health. I’m constantly fascinated by the ways that I can turn my phone into a little wellness device.
The five apps they selected dealt with a variety of wellness components: exercise, diet, caffeine, time of the month, and sleep:
Huffington Post Enters the Mobile Wellness Movement
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Belinda
Liu
I was excited to read Arianna Huffington’s column yesterday about GPS for the Soul, a forthcoming mobile app developed by the Huffington Post in collaboration with bLife and HeartMath.
At Tech urSelf, we are also part of the growing movement to utilize mobile apps for the common good: to help people understand how they can be happier, healthier, and more empowered to direct their own well-being.
I’ll be one of the first in line to use GPS for the Soul when it is released this summer, and I am curious about how the app will help me understand the state of my body, mind, and spirit through biological information like my heart rate and guide me towards making meaningful improvements to my life.
Mobile Doctor Visits with Ginger.io
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Maurice
Lomboy
At TechurSelf, we think a constant connection with technology isn’t necessarily bad for your health. A new and exciting start-up, Ginger.io, is developing ways for technology to help you and your health provider improve your health, through their new app, which promises to “turn mobile data into health insights.”
The Ginger.io vision, and one we share at TechurSelf, is of technology helping us to improve our overall wellness. For example, what if your doctor received daily information about your physical health rather than test results at your annual check up? This kind of information would offer doctors the ability to be more informed and insightful about your health and habits and could radically change the way they care for you to prevent future illnesses.
Improving Cognition Through Mind Games
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Maurice
Lomboy
Photo Credit: Flickr user FireFawkes
For the past week, I’ve been testing out a web-based training program called Lumosity, which uses online games to improve your brain function. The company claims playing these challenging, but fun mind games can help you think more clearly and quickly; improve your alertness, awareness, and problem-solving skills; and sharpen your memory for numbers, directions, and names.
As Tech urSelf’s lead blogger, I am constantly looking for ways to improve my own life and review the newest technology solutions to share them with our users. Lumosity offers its customers the chance to “reclaim your brain” and I figured I’d give it a try.
Powered by Sleep
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Maurice
Lomboy
Photo Credit: Lark.com
"There's a substantial education gap between sleep scientists and society. But it does not have to be that way for you personally. You can take charge of your knowledge and be strategic about your sleep health, just like you can be strategic about your nutrition and exercise." - End Your Sleep Deprivation
In a fast paced world, they say “You snooze, you lose." Not so fast. Perhaps, it’s more like “Sleep well and win.”According to Dr. Ellenbogen’s study getting a restful sleep (7-8 hours of undisturbed sleep for adults) can significantly improve cognitive functions such as “neural processing, insight formation, novel-language perception, visual discrimination and other motor skills” (neurology.org).
How we spend that last third of our day is critical to our wellness. Now that’s quite unsurprising, as we are often told at a young age to “get a good night’s rest”. But it’s easier said than done for most adults and, oftentimes, a good night’s rest is a rare luxury for busy professionals. Does this sound like you?
Wellness Counts
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Tori
Lewis
Photo Credit: Flickr user mela.de.gypsie
As we look inward, it’s often productive to remember to look outward. Can we measure our own wellness or the wellness of others? How about the wellness of a nation? For years, researchers have been trying to do just that. Gross National Happiness, GNH, was a term coined in 1972 and has received increasing attention in recent years. In 2006, Med Jones, the President of the International Institute of Management, broke the GNH down into seven factors of national wellness:
1. Economic: What does GDP look like? Is there a lot of economic disparity?
2. Environmental: What are pollution levels like? Traffic levels?
3. Physical: Are people generally sick or are people generally healthy?
4. Mental: Is there a prevalence of mental illness?
5. Workplace: Are people changing jobs a lot? Are there a lot of workplace complaints?
6. Social: What are divorce rates like? How’s the crime rate?
7. Political: Is there a level of individual freedom? Is it wartime?
Spread the Happy
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Tori
Lewis
Photo Credit: Flickr user Donna Cymek
“How are you doing?”
It’s an innocent enough question, one that we ask and answer several times each day without thinking about it.
When we do think about it, we often look at discrete sections of our lives: How has my diet been? Did I make time to exercise? Was I successful at work? We too often ignore the ways in which these areas of our lives function together, amplifying each other or cancelling themselves out. Sleeping more doesn’t automatically improve your life if it means that you don’t get time to exercise. It’s not nearly as simple as self-help books make it out to be.
Don't Just Remember Happiness, Experience It
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Robby
Ratan
Photo Credit: savannchan
This posting builds on some of the thinking from my write-up of the Tech urSelf vision/methodology. I'd like to continue the discussion of why it's more difficult for people to know themselves than they realize, and how urWell can be a useful tool for solving this problem. The inspiration for this reasoning came to me at the Presence Conference I recently attended (wearing my academic researcher/professor hat) in Edinburgh, Scotland. One of the keynote speakers, Giuseppe Riva, who laid some of the important groundwork for my dissertation research, told me to consider the relationship between intuitive and rational thinking when people use avatars as tools. Research on this relationship, for which Daniel Kahneman (heralded as one of the most important social scientists of his generation) won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, suggests that we often use intuitive heuristics in decision-making, which can lead to good outcomes (e.g., responding quickly to danger) as well as bad (e.g., making irrational decisions about money). Intuitive thinking leads to patterns in behavior that are not optimal for our wellness, and thus (I think) by using tools that encourage rational thinking about our behaviors, we can avoid negative patterns and make decisions that are better for our wellness.
Hello world ...of wellness.
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Belinda
Liu
Photo Credit: Kwong Li Portfolio
We've been busy at Tech urSelf. Our website is live, we’re learning a lot about wellness (thanks, most recently, to the Health 2.0 conference), and the app is on its 20th-ish build ...nearly ready for user testing. Details below.
The Website:
This is our face to the world. This is our world to the face. ...well, maybe not so dramatically. But we are thrilled to be able to point people here for the Tech urSelf story. There are descriptions of the app, the company, the team, the vision, and of course, the latest. Networking will abound.
What We’re Learning About Wellness:
Follow us on:
