Why I built a wellbeing app

I recently built a (super) simple wellbeing app — it’s called ListPerspective and you can see a preview here:

The app is designed to help you gain perspective on a certain time period (you choose) and think about the items in your power which could improve your wellbeing going forward. I’m not a coder (more on this below), but I built it for a few reasons:

1. To codify the things I found helpful in managing my wellbeing
2. To understand the digital health sector in a more practical way
3. To support technical skill development in a fun way

Managing my wellbeing

Over the last year or so, I’ve been thinking a lot more about how best to improve my wellbeing. Partly due to my own experience with burnout and partly due to the work I’ve done around mental health and wellbeing.

I started by trying to better understand what generally improves and maintains wellbeing through talking to friends and co-workers as well as reading books and blogs on the topic*. This gave me lots of helpful insights, including:

• The value of expressing gratitude
• Ways to challenge your perceptions of a situation (e.g. reversing catastrophic thinking through CBT and questioning)
• How to get support from others
• Recognising changes to your wellbeing over time, and why
• The work and non-work benefits of good wellbeing

Over time, I started to figure out what made me feel physically and mentally healthy and lead me toward peak performance. Equally, I started to work out the things which didn’t. And then, at the end of the week I’d generally find (no surprises here) that a good week was linked to doing more of the things that made me happy.

It sounds basic, but it was really very helpful — a mini-diagnostic for my wellbeing. Previously, I might wonder why I was feeling exhausted and vaguely attribute it to ‘a busy week’ (which didn’t really feel within my control). Using these items (or ‘positive list’ and ‘negative list’ as I started to call them), I could really easily see that my exhaustion could be due to a few causes within my control, such as not exercising, and plan the following week in a way that allowed me to hit my wellbeing goals.

ListPerspective works the exact same way. You work out your top 5 items for your positive list, top 5 for your negative list and then rate your day / week / month with these as reminders. It’s definitely made me re-consider my response to a week when I start seeing lots of green ticks and no red crosses. Sometimes we’re happier than we realise.

Understanding the digital health sector

I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about the digital health sector from an outside-in perspective in my job. This has included:

• Mapping the landscape for digital health in the UK
• Thinking through how digital innovation can be adopted by the NHS
• The role of digital health in supporting pharmaceutical companies move to beyond-the-pill offerings

But I like to think that experience trumps theory. So even my limited exposure to building an app has been hugely valuable in terms of teaching me things that are easy to gloss over in theory and harder in practice. Such as how data gets collected in an app and the implications for information governance. Or the challenges around adding new features, even if it’s going to really increase the value of the product (honest note: I’m still trying to figure out how to add a tracking function to the app — it’s not as easy as I thought!).

Supporting technical skills development

If you’ve read my previous blog post, you’ll see that one of my learning aims for the year is to improve my technical skillset and try new projects. This was a really nice first project which didn’t feel overly-stretching due to Bubble, a website which helps you build apps without code. This meant that most of the elements of app-building (visual interface, logic and conditions) were quite similar to activities you might do on Powerpoint and Excel, meaning I could focus on learning more about data collection and structuring.

Would love to know what you think, or any tips you use to maintain good wellbeing.

*If you’re also interested in this, some books I enjoyed were The Happiness Advantage, How Will you Measure your Life, and Drop the Ball. I also highly recommend James Clear’s blog in terms of psychology, motivation and habit-formation