gr8ful

As I wondered about the concept of happiness, I thought about impoverished people throughout the world who did not have many material possessions but appeared happier than the average New Yorker walking down Times Square. I decided to see what science had to say about it and found a couple of papers that discussed the correlation between gratitude and happiness. _Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life_ from Emmons and McCullough created three experimental studies that found that in the short-term, “there do appear to exist benefits to regularly focusing on one’s blessings.” _Gratitude and Happiness: Development of a Measure of Gratitude, and Relationships with Subjective Well-Being_ from Watkins et al. discovered that “depression showed the strongest and most reliable inverse associations with gratitude” and that “grateful individuals tend to be happy and well adjusted.”

A combination of wanting to be “happier” and seeing those results made me want to create gr8ful. It is an iOS and watchOS application that easily enables a user to mark eight moments of gratitude a day. They do this by tapping the watchOS app interface or the gr8ful button in the iOS app whenever they feel grateful. The application then allows the user to expand on what they are grateful for at that moment. If the moment of gratitude is marked through the watchOS app, then the user will be prompted by the iOS app to expand on the moment of gratitude later.