How come it is so easy to pick up a bad habit - like checking Facebook or collecting coins in a 'social' game - and so hard to form a good habit that will make us happy?
We asked ourselves this question when we came off a 5 day Yoga and Meditation retreat in Cambodia. We decided to practice Yoga and Meditation each morning. Forming this new habit proved challenging, even though we knew that it is proven that Yoga and Meditation improves ones happiness and we experienced it first-hand.
So we researched the psychology behind forming a new habit, which proven techniques exist to help oneself, and also which tricks are employed by other mobile apps to have users come back over and over again. Our learnings have been distilled into happyt.
happyt is a Yoga and Meditation timer with a twist. It offers motivational support to form a habit for a happy life.
A Yoga and Meditation timer...
For a daily personal practice of Yoga and Meditation, we need a schedule. We also need a timer which leads us through our practice. With happyt, it's easy to configure and personalize our own schedule. If we need a starting point happyt also provides preset templates. And during the actual practice, happyt flows through the schedule effortlessly.
...offering motivational support to form a habit for a happy life
It is proven that it takes around 30 days to form a new habit. During this time, our users need the most support. Of course, happyt reminds the user to start their personal practice. But motivation is volatile and keeping going, before a habit is formed, is hard.
happyt gives rewards to motivate the user to continue and improve his practice. The user can collect lotus flowers for milestones, such as the first week of personal practice or meditating for 5 hours in total. Another motivational technique are uplifting quotes after the practice. happyt is also counting each day of personal practice in the app icon - it's like beating your own highscore in a game, every day!
Target Group
With happyt, we target people who have already learned some Yoga and/or Meditation and now want to start their own daily personal practice. We don't want to teach Yoga or Meditation in the app, as we believe this is best done in real life, for example in a local class or in a retreat.
We submitted the app to the app store. At the time of entering our submission, it was still waiting for review by Apple. We hope it will be available soon under the following link: happyt on iTunes
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