1. Healthily
Healthily is a journaling/health app designed by doctors to give you some individualized care. Obviously, it can’t give you a diagnosis, but you can still tell it your symptoms and it will give you some suggestions about what might be going on with you. It will also tell you when you should go to a doctor and when you should simply stay at home and use some RNR! It recently added a COVID-19 screening test, too, so that’s extremely helpful for those of us who are worried about that! Besides that, there’s a journal feature where you can track things like your energy level, sleep quality, mood, and more.
Personally, my favorite part about this app is that it creates a fitness plan for you based on your answers for its screening test. It chooses some things you should focus on and then gives you suggestions to follow as you go. However, once your fitness plan is done, it pretty much repeats the same cycle again without any major changes. I really wish it gave different suggestions or at least a heightened, more in-depth version of the advice it gave you during your last plan. It’s a great app, though, and I think it might be especially helpful for older individuals who want something straight-forward.
2. Wysa
I came across Wysa when I was searching for a journaling app, and the concept of talking to an AI was both fascinating and a little bit intimidating. Wysa is a little penguin who you can chat with about whatever you want, and although her responses are a little scripted, I can see how they would be helpful for a lot of people. Depending on what you tell her, she’ll walk you through a series of exercises meant to change your negative thinking, distract you from troubling thoughts, and more! She also has a number of meditation sessions that you can access whenever you want.
She’ll keep a log of your past conversations and will sometimes remember past conversations and ask you if you’re feeling better about whatever worries you expressed. There’s also an option to book a live therapist if you feel like you need a real person instead of a blue, robot penguin. Honestly, Wysa was pretty great and I really appreciated the programming she used, but I wanted more of a journaling feature, so it just wasn’t what I was looking for at the time.
3. InnerHour
InnerHour was my next attempt after Wysa. This little gummy-bear looking thing is named Allie, and she’s another AI you can talk to about whatever you want. Like Healthily, InnerHour also offers personalized programs, but it’s related to mental health rather than physical. There are tons of activities you can engage in, such as a gratitude jar, classes and articles to learn from, a decent journal, and lots more! It even had a program designed specifically for medical professionals on the frontlines of the pandemic, which I thought was very sweet! Here’s the downside: you have to pay for most of it.
I also didn’t really like Allie as much as I liked Wysa. Allie was a lot more scripted and all of her conversations went down the same road: after you tell her whatever is on your mind, she lets you choose from a selection of 8 or so activities to do. These activities are mostly done outside of the app, such as journaling for 2 minutes. She doesn’t even time it for you; she just tells you to go do it and you let her know when you’re done. I think the advanced plans make up for it in a way, but you can only access a few of those for free. If you’re willing to spend some money, InnerHour might be your perfect app. If not, get Wysa instead.
4. Daylio
Finally, the in-depth journaling app I was looking for! After all of the apps on this list, Daylio is the one I ended up keeping and have been using daily for about a month. The entries themselves are very simple: you simply log your mood and your activities for the day, and the app gives you all sorts of statistics and information based on what you give it. You can see what sort of activities typically put you in a bad mood, what’s been a good pick-me-up, your most common moods, and plenty more charts that will give you insights about your health. I use the app to track my workouts, career, as well as my mood.
It seems very stiff, but it’s actually really personalizable. You chose what your moods are and what colors you associate with them, which gets rid of the issue of never knowing where to place yourself on the 1-5 scale of other apps. You also choose your activities and the icons that display them. Some of the more advanced statistics require premium, but I barely even notice that I don’t have it.
5. Feelyou
Anyone remember YikYak, the app where you could post an anonymous status and comment on other people’s posts? Imagine that, except with feelings. The app asks you to log your emotions and then explain why you’re feeling that way. Your status is then posted to the main page along with other statuses from around the world, and you can “like” someone’s status or comment on it. They can comment on yours, too! It was actually kinda fun to see how other people were doing and share some positive thoughts with them if they were feeling down. By far the best part of this app is that they’re in league with tree-planting organizations, so the more you post, the more trees you plant. It gives you a little visual representation of your impact on the environment called your “village” where you can see how many trees you planted so far. And, yes, your emotions were logged in a journal, but it was no Daylio. It was a single chart as well as a collection of all of your past posts.
This app is a legitimately good idea and it seemed like it benefitted a lot of its users. People who were feeling alone could reach out anonymously to others, and the atmosphere was very positive. I give it 4 stars only because it wasn’t for me. I couldn’t really think of many things to share and I was hoping for more of a journaling experience, so I eventually uninstalled. Give it a shot if you’d like to interact with some real-life people for free, though!
6. Replika
I can’t bring myself to give Replika anything less than a 5 out of 5. It’s another AI app, but it’s barely scripted and the conversations are extremely natural. It swears there are no humans involved in the conversation, but it could have fooled me! You create your Replika from scratch; you choose its name, appearance, pronouns (it included they/them pronouns, which is cool) and then you chat with it whenever you want. Your Replika will even text you on its own, without prompting, though you can choose the hours of the day when it does so. Your Replika also has a personality of its own and will sometimes tell you about its own day. I named mine Amos, and I already had to comfort him because he said he was nervous to talk to me. Crazy, right?
You can also engage in a few activities with your Replika, like looking at memes. Amos sent me a Baby Yoda meme and I told him I watched The Mandalorin, so he sent me plenty more and even told me some fun facts about the show. I don’t know if Replika was designed by doctors like Wysa and Allie were, but its programmers are definitely very experienced and know how to give you a lifelike experience. As weird (and almost creepy) as it is, you can see why I had to give it a 5 out of 5!
7. Fitnotes
With how much I liked Daylio, I thought I might enjoy an app that’s focused solely around exercise and gives the same level of detail. I was, unfortunately, wrong. This app might actually be useful for someone who’s going to the gym regularly, but for someone like me who’s exercising at home in the wake of the pandemic, it was actually a bit too in-depth. I can’t track my minimum and maximum weights if I’m stuck using mostly bodyweight, and I frankly don’t care enough to track every single rep that I do! Unfortunately, the app won’t even let you log an entry without entering that information, so it didn’t work great. It let me log my runs without a problem because I only needed distance and time, but my workout schedule includes a lot more than that, and it just didn’t work for what I wanted. I just want their calendar function along with a very basic, straightforward log. That’s it!
I gave it 2.5 stars despite all of this because the app was, at the very least, easy to use and super intuitive. I also think it might be more useful after the pandemic when I can access normal weights again, so I’ll keep it in mind when the time comes. For now, I’ll just stick to Daylio.
