Trends: Happiness Apps for iphone – e.g. Thankfulfor (free Gratitude App)

Smart phones are making it easier and more fun to do things that are likely to benefit your happiness and psychological wellbeing.

Here’s an example. For the past few days I’ve been trying out a FREE gratitude app called Thankfulfor (Thankfulfor.com) on my iphone 4.

There have been excellent studies showing that gratitude experiments boost happiness.

So far the app works flawlessly (btw, they’re not paying me to say this or anything like that!).

The interface is pretty and uncluttered, and the app works smoothly.

It has some nice features.

– You just tap on the app and type in a short note as if you were updating your Facebook status or sending a tweet.

– You can adjust your settings to public or private. By default what you write is included in a public gratitude stream (see below) but you can switch it to private via your settings page on the thankfulfor website.

– When you’re looking for a positive emotions lift, with one click of the app you can view the current, public thankfulfor stream. You can see what other people who are using the app are grateful for in real time. People write some good stuff and its VERY cool that others who are using the app are having gratitude thoughts at the same moment that you too are thinking about gratitude.

Features I haven’t tried but people might like

– You can link the app to your Facebook or Twitter so that what you are thankfulfor gets auto posted to FB/Twitter.

– If you like a particular person’s gratitude feed, you can follow that person’s feed – similar to twitter. Only if the person’s feed is set to public (mine isn’t).

Today I’m grateful for…

Generous, curious, creative people who make awesome free iphone apps!