Caring for your mental health: high-quality self-care with Awarefy app

A Japanese company has released a well-being app, Awarefy, to give people access to high-quality self-care. It is doing so in a country where understanding of mental health issues is still inadequate and many sufferers go untreated. Until the end of June, some of the app’s premium functions for free, as society continues to face anxiety amid the spread of the new coronavirus.

Hakali Inc. partnered with the Hiroaki Kumano Laboratory, in Waseda University’s Faculty of Human Sciences, to investigate and trial the mental health care techniques used in the app. Called Awarefy, the app aims to enable users to visualize their emotions and how they affect their daily lives.

How Awarefy works

Through conversation with a chatbot, Awarefy users enter information about things they have felt and their general condition. This information becomes an ‘emotion memo.’ These are periodically analyzed and presented to the user as an ‘emotion report.’ The reports thus allow users to gain insight into their own thinking and emotional tendencies.

The app also has users input information on their physical and emotional condition each morning and night. Awarefy displays each of these as graphs. By comparing one’s condition with their ‘emotion memos,’ Awarefy can help users work out why, for example, they had been unhappy recently, or if there is a specific reason why they have been feeling good.

The app includes an audio guide to mindfulness meditation for beginners, an approach which has been popular recently as a method for reducing stress and boosting concentration. It also offers other study contents related to how our emotions work, such as anger management and distorted recognition.

Functions of the Premium Plan that Hakali is making available free to all users until the end of June 2020 include being able to access the entire record of one’s ‘emotion report’ and part of the audio guide.

The app also applies counselling techniques

Awarefy’s chatbot applies techniques used in counselling and psychotherapy, such as acceptance and commitment therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy. Research at the Hiroaki Kumano Laboratory includes a method called “next-generation cognitive behavioral therapy,” which aims to produce significant results in a short time by applying clinical psychology to both mental health and physical medical care.

Hakali shares that more and more people around the world are suffering from mental illness each year. The number of those suffering from mood disorders, which include depression, has increased rapidly. The company supports it with a study by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, which revealed that one person in five will experience mental illness sometime throughout their lives, the company says.

In Japan, understanding of mental health issues and steps to tackle them are still inadequate. Hakali says that the number of sufferers who refuse treatment or are unable to receive appropriate treatment is growing, and consequently cause symptoms to worsen in many.

Removing stigma by learning about them

While it’s never a good idea for people who require medical care to seek alternative methods to avoid a doctor, Awarefy recognizes that all of us have trouble sometimes, feeling stressed, overwhelmed or dissatisfied. The app encourages us to learn to control those emotions, rather than be controlled by them. If this can change the way we view mental health and remove the stigma associated with it, it will make it easier for serious sufferers to seek medical assistance.