Have you ever opened up the Headspace app in a moment of anger, irritation, elation, frustration, or joy? 

Sometimes we know exactly how we feel, but we don’t quite know what to do with that feeling. This Check-in feature helps with that analysis paralysis by abstracting the Circumplex Model of Emotion to help you identify how you're feeling, acknowledging and reframing that emotion, and providing a mindfulness recommendation for you in that moment.

You start by first choosing a face that feels similar to how you're feeling. These are loosely based on emotions like “Happy” “Content” “Irritated” and “Mad”, but are intentionally unlabelled. Once you choose the general mood you’re in, you can choose from a wider range of emotions in that bucket that are categorized from “Tired” to Energized”.

This step is important because we want to recognize that even though you’re feeling generally “Happy” you could be Happy on the tired side "Glad” or Happy on the energized side, “Excited!” The same goes for "Irritated" – from tired to energized you might be "Dull" or "Down" to "Nervous" or "Restless".

This is designed to feel lightweight and delightful, even if you're feeling real bothered. We hope that tapping through the different emotions to see the faces will help identify how you’re feeling in the moment, even if you can't describe the actual feelings yourself. Once you’ve decided, we take a moment to recognize and reframe that emotion – whether positive or negative there’s always value in doing this before moving on.

Last, we suggest two different types of meditation that might best suit you in that moment. As we get more usage and input from our members, we hope to improve these recommendations to be there for you in more intuitive ways.

This is just the very first step towards building out a more robust feature, which will allow you to specify more details around duration and location so you can start to fit mindfulness into your day, and meditation a natural habit.