Want to feel happier? Your phone may be able to help

Thanks to a recent spate of highprofile suicides, coupled with newly released data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealing the national suicide rate to be at a 30-year high, many people are contemplating mental well-being.

In 2015, Poppy Jamie was hosting Snapchat’s first talk show, “Pillow Talk with Poppy,” when she began to think there was a particular malaise plaguing millennials. So she began incubating a new “brain health” app called Happy Not Perfect.

“I would get hundreds and hundreds of messages from all these young people around the world,” Jamie said over tea at Soho House in West Hollywood not long ago, “and what I realized was that everybody was saying the same thing: ‘I’m so stressed.’ It didn’t matter what country, gender, age. It was unanimous.”

Jamie, a graduate of the London School of Economics, has spent the past three years working with experts in the fields of psychotherapy, mindfulness and neuroscience in order to better understand the brain, and develop an app — the medium of the moment — that would distill that learning down to a daily fiveminute mental workout.

“We have 40 to 60 thousand thoughts a day; 98 per cent of them are the same as yesterday, and about 80 per cent of them are negative,” Jamie, 27, said she had learned. “We have to change our behaviours to create a mindset shift. But we’re never told that. We’re never taught how to process a breakup, or a death.”

She also thinks people do not understand what it is to be happy.

“There’s been a real confusion over what happiness is, and I think that’s when people start feeling disillusioned,” said Jamie, the youngest board member of the UCLA Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, which has a goal of reducing the health and economic impacts of depression by half by 2050.

“Happiness is not the absence of problems but the ability to deal with them,” she said. “I think ‘balance’ is a great word when it comes to happiness. What we’re waking up to is that happiness is not an achievement, like, ‘Oh, when I get that car, when I get that house,’ but a shift from external validation to internal fulfilment.”

Given that her 2016 TEDx talk, Addicted to Likes, explored a psychologically destructive social media culture, an app may seem an unlikely platform.

“We’ve got to accept that, in our world now, we’re integrated with technology,” Jamie said. “How do we make sure that our technology is helping us feel better rather than worse? How can we wake up in the morning and like ourselves first?”

Below, a look at her newly released happiness app and a few others — all free to begin with.