When a coworker passing you in the office asks, "How are you?" they probably don't really want you to stop and tell them all about how your car has been making a weird noise but you can't get it into the shop until Wednesday.
So you just say, "Fine."
But when the mobile-phone app Feel Now asks how you're doing, just saying "Fine" is not an option.
Feel Now doesn't need you to tell the whole car-repair story, either, but it does request an honest answer describing your mood. If you say "angry," you are then invited to break that down more specifically as "frustrated" or "annoyed" or various other permutations of anger. On a better day, you can say you're feeling "happy," then specify "excited" or "hopeful" or whatever best applies.
Feel Now is a free app designed by two Edina 17-year-olds: Taara Verma, a senior at the Blake School in Minneapolis, and Siena Pradhan, a senior at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. The app, which launched in July, is intended for use mainly by teenagers, as a place where they can analyze and record their moods.
"It's a really easy process to track your emotions just once a day," Verma said.
Users of Feel Now receive a random notification each day, reminding them to log an emotion. In structure, it's similar to Be Real, an app hugely popular among young people that prompts users once a day to take a photo showing what they are doing.
At Feel Now's prompt, the user picks one of six broad categories (happy, peaceful, angry, sad, disgusted, scared), then breaks it down into one of 10 subcategories for each emotion. "Scared," for example, can be more precisely described as "anxious," "confused," "insecure," "overwhelmed," "shocked," "stressed," "threatened," "uneasy," "vulnerable" or "worried." Each subcategory can then be further described as "slightly," "moderately" or "highly." You can record up to five emotions in a day.